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Heather Gross' latest online update exudes the energy her family says she put into everything she did.
"Heather is skiing freshness for the next mannny [sic] days," she wrote on her Facebook page Thursday.
Gross' powder weekend at Snowbird ski resort ended tragically Sunday afternoon when an in-bounds avalanche left the 27-year-old buried for nearly an hour. She died early Sunday evening.
"She did a life's worth of living in 27 years," said her father, Dennis Gross.
His daughter was a graduate student in linguistics at the University of Utah. She recently completed a language study program in China and had "traveled the world" before that, Dennis Gross said.
First and foremost, he said, his daughter loved to ski. Gross was a season passholder at Snowbird, and had frequented the slopes since she was 5 years old.
"It was a freak avalanche, in-bounds" he said of the Sunday's slide. He said she was trying to retrieve her ski when the snow overwhelmed her.
Gross was skiing with a group of friends on Mount Baldy about 12:30 p.m. when the avalanche swept down the Eye of the Needle area, midway down the mountain, said Snowbird spokesman Dave Fields.
She was found alive but unconscious by rescuers with a probe, said Salt Lake County sheriff's spokesman Levi Hughes. She was in extremely critical condition when she was flown to University Hospital, where she died.
It is the first in-bounds avalanche death at Snowbird since 1977, Fields said. Sunday was the first day Snowbird opened that part of the resort -- the easternmost area -- and crews had performed avalanche control that morning, Fields said.
"It's a very trafficked area," he said.
The avalanche is particularly noteworthy because Little Cottonwood Canyon resorts are renowned for their avalanche control techniques, noted Bruce Tremper, director of the Utah Avalanche Center.
"People come form all over the country to study how [Snowbird and Alta] do avalanche control ... because they're considered to be the best," Tremper said.
Throughout the state, in-bounds avalanches are extremely rare, Tremper said.
Statistically, he said, a person is "100 times more likely to be killed by lightning in Utah than by an in-bounds avalanche at a ski area."
However, there was an in-bounds avalanche fatality at another Utah ski resort about a year ago: Jesse R. Williams, 30, of Grand Junction, Colo. died after he was buried in an avalanche Dec. 23 on the Red Pine Chutes at The Canyons Resort. The slide also left 11-year-old Max Zilvitis in critical condition.
Despite the incident, Salt Lake County Sheriff James Winder said people should not abandon their plans to ski.
"Every effort has been made to make sure tragedy like this [is] averted. This event was unusual but it is one of the inherent risks of the wonderful sport so many of us enjoy. "
A man was injured in a separate avalanche about 3:05 p.m. near Red Pine Lake in Summit County, sheriff's deputies reported. The skier, who was rescued by other skiers in his group, was near The Canyons resort but not in bounds when he was swept away by the avalanche, said Summit County sheriff's Detective Josh Wall. His companions located him, and staff from The Canyons assisted. He was flown to University Hospital with minor injuries, Wall said.
Winder said Sunday's slides indicate how "volatile conditions are" and that people should be skiing in-bounds at the resorts where avalanche control is done on a daily basis.
Early winter brings some of the most dangerous conditions for avalanches in the backcountry, Tremper said. First, people are not used to paying attention to risks until they experience a "wake-up call" each year.
Second, he said, heavy early snows fall on a weak underlying layer.
"We have windblown snow and new snow on top of it," Tremper said. "Kind of like putting a brick on potato chips."
The Utah Avalanche Center identifies moderate avalanche danger along the Wasatch front, with considerable danger in the western Uintas and around Logan.
Tribune reporters Lindsay Whitehurst and Brett Prettyman contributed to this report.