Le Figaro Nice
The little family trip to the mountains could have ended badly without the intervention Monday morning of the gendarmes of the Alpes-Maritimes high mountain platoon (PGHM 06).
A father and his three children, aged 12 to 18, spent nearly two days locked in their converted truck, thanks to the snowy episode which covered the Maralpine peaks with a thick white coat in record time .
Initially, for the clan, it was a question of bivouacking in the open air, wild camping style but aboard their van, above the Granges de la Braque, in the Tinée valley.
Very well equipped to face the snow and the cold, the troop did not, however, take into account the predicted snowfall.
In a few dozen hours, nearly 80 centimeters of powder fell at an altitude of 2000 meters.
In the storm, with almost zero visibility, any attempt to get back on the road in these conditions would have been doomed to failure.
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Helicopter rescue
Constrained and forced, the family was forced not to leave their house on wheels.
As Saturday night passed, Sunday's day was no more lenient.
So rebel, new night in the heart of Tinée.
Monday morning, while the immaculate snow was this time sprinkled with the rays of the sun finally returning, the father understood that he and his children were not out of the woods yet.
Soon running out of food, he first thought of calling a tow truck.
Project quickly aborted.
“His van had snow up to the hood, no tow truck could have accessed the site
,” comments the commander of the PGHM, Jérôme Bourrières.
For great ills there are great remedies, so it was the mountain gendarmes who were mobilized to get the family out of trouble.
The latter was evacuated by helicopter and taken to safety.
“They will go get their truck when the weather permits
,” continues the officer.
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Call for vigilance
This family isn't the only one to have been trapped by snow over the weekend.
In the neighboring upper Var valley, a group of thirty-year-old Russian and Italians were in turn rescued by the police helicopter on Monday morning.
At the end of a snowshoe hike on Saturday, they found themselves stuck in a refuge in Saint-Martin-d'Entraunes, where nearly five feet of snow fell in two days.
If the snow episode is over and the avalanche risk has gone from strong to moderate, emergency services are calling for extreme caution in the mountains in the coming days.
“You have to keep a very close eye on the weather and practice the mountains rigorously.
You should not play with risks.
Moreover, it is when the risks of avalanches are moderate that we have the most accidents because people think that the worst is over and that they can get away with anything.
But this is not the case
,” warns Commander Bourrières.