Still #1 in my heart:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjTmE4nMjJ4. Warning: Some profanity is used.
I have been in that exact spot for the "Snowboarder falls and slides through the line of climbers" event. I mean the exact spot where the cameraman was standing.
This was about 5 years ago. Conditions were much worse than in that vid; the surface was hard and icy, just barely edgeable. No one was climbing any higher than the little flat spot under the rock, right above where that vid was taken. There were a couple lines of shallow boot tracks for climbing. Outside the boot tracks, you would need crampons to stay on the hill (I probably should have been wearing crampons!).
So I'm most of the way up the booter, in a line with a few other people. Ahead of me was a young lady. Her boyfriend was well ahead (we were all carrying skis). Ahead of them was a snowboarder. The snowboarder gets to the ledge and puts on his gear; and the boyfriend gets to the ledge. Now, as icy as this was, everyone coming off the ledge was doing a mandatory traverse about 50 feet to skier's left before starting down, so that they would not be directly above the line of climbers.
So the snowboarder stands up to start, and he freezes. (Big guy, too, not a little kid.) He can't make himself do the traverse. And then he falls, and rockets down the hill right at me and the young lady.
So I look around, and I see another line of (inferior) boot tracks that I can get to. So I jump sideways, and luckily, I land in the other line of tracks, and I manage to get out of this guy's path, and stay on the hill.
The young lady doesn't have time to plan. Here comes the snowboarder at warp 9. And then adrenaline kicks in. And incredibly, she jumps straight up in the air; WAY up; and this guy rockets through underneath, and she comes back down in the same tracks, and stays on the hill. I wish I had a vid of that!
The snowboarder was unhurt; he slid another 300' and stopped in those scattered bushes you can see at the bottom of the hill. The young lady and I get to the ledge. And I say to them "You're first, so I can wait until you go." And the young lady is shaking like a leaf from the adrenaline, and they say, "No, I think we're just going to sit here for a while; she can't even put on her skis at this point."
We all ski down safely in the end. But that's a scary place when there's a crowd!
