Authorities urge caution on slopes as teenage boy swept away near Claviere and two Italians buried in snow near Pila
Avalanches in the Alps continued to prove deadly for skiers and snowboarders over the weekend, claiming the lives of at least three people within 24 hours.
The latest in a string of fatalities across the mountain range in France, Switzerland and Italy occurred on Sunday when a teenage boy who reportedly had been skiing off-piste with friends near the resort of Claviere, in Piedmont, was found dead after being swept away by an avalanche.
The incident, said to have occurred on French territory, came less than a day after two Italian snowboarders were killed by an avalanche that sent them tumbling about 100 metres down a mountain near the ski resort of Pila, in the Aosta Valley.
The bodies of Paolo Pendola, 30, and Fabio Oneto, 33, were found buried in the snow after being hit by the avalanche while reportedly descending off-piste on Saturday.
An unnamed friend who raised the alarm told the Ansa news agency: "We got to the summit together on the Couis 1 chairlift. Then they decided to go down off-piste while I followed the path. When I got to the bottom I turned around and I saw that there had been an avalanche and that they had not made it down."
The two dead men were friends from Rapallo, in north-western Italy, on holiday in the Italian resort with their girlfriends.
A 33-year-old man who was carried away by an avalanche while riding off-piste on a snowmobile was rescued by emergency services in the Valtelline valley near the Swiss border on Saturday.
Authorities across the Italian Alps have been urging skiers, snowboarders and others to exercise caution on the slopes and to keep to the marked paths despite the temptation, amid plentiful snow and mild temperatures, to go off-piste. On Sunday the avalanche risk varied in the region between 3 (significant) and 4 (high).
The weekend fatalities were not the season's first. On Friday a series of avalanches in the French and Swiss Alps left five people dead, including a young Irishman, and several other skiers seriously injured. Two days earlier a Spanish skier died in an avalanche in Andorra.
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