Wild Avalanche At Utah’s Cottonwood Canyons Nearly Hits Cars

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snowy highway avalanche area

iStockphoto / phdpsx

Winter weather got the best of Utah’s Little Cottonwood Canyon over the weekend when an avalanche shut down some traffic for hours and left some snowboarders and skiers stranded on the mountain. Officials rushed to the scene for avalanche mitigation while traffic on the roads and ski mountain ground to a halt.

A wild video of the swift-moving avalanche bearing down on a car stuck in traffic was shared by UDOT Cottonwood Canyons and later shared by Al Jazeera English on TikTok. The video ends just as the avalanche appears to engulf the car but there’s a short blip of audio that suggests the vehicle wasn’t severely damaged from the avalanche.

The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) shut roads down at 1 PM on January 4th and with crews working hard they were able to reopen roads by 4:20 though according to Fox 13 Now delays lingered for hours and according to comments on social media traffic was at a standstill for hours after the roads reopened.

The UDOT shared another clip and from this alternate angle it is difficult to discern where that road is the car above was traveling on when it was swallowed by a wall of ice.

This area is southeast of Salt Lake City and due north of Provo, close to the Deer Valley Resort and Park City Mountain. These are some of the most popular ski mountains in America for diehard skiers. Suffice it to say these roads aren’t exactly barren and for them to be completely shut down for an entire afternoon and then some.

All of this happening on the first weekend of January as ‘winter break’ came to a close for many only made matters worse… Beyond that video above, there were no reports of the driver’s safety so we’re to presume they made it out okay.

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