A Colorado motorist’s dashboard camera has captured the terrifying moment he and his family were struck by a fast-moving avalanche as it barreled down a mountain and ploughed straight into his truck.
The Goleman family were heading to Copper Mountain to go skiing on Sunday afternoon when the enormous cloud of snow engulfed their vehicle on Interstate 70 near Ten Mile Canyon.
‘As soon as it hit the truck everything changed,’ Shaune Goleman told Denver7. ‘You just felt the power of it and the force.’
He added to 9News.com: ‘So much was going through my head at the time. I was checking the rearview to see if I had room to stop, you know.’
‘I was trying to gauge can I outrun it and eventually, I told her, I said, ‘there’s nothing we can do. Just hold onto something.’
‘As soon as it hit and we felt the force and we felt our truck, you know, literally sliding off the road, that’s when it became really real,’ Golemon said.
‘It was loud. It was complete whiteout. We couldn’t see anything.’
Incredible footage from Goleman’s dashcam shows cars driving along the highway when a billowing mass of snow from the mountains to their right suddenly consumes his truck, as well as the one ahead.
The Goleman family were driving on the Interstate 70 in Colorado to Copper Mountain on Sunday afternoon when the avalanche hit
The Goleman family were heading to Copper Mountain to go skiing on Sunday afternoon when the enormous cloud of snow engulfed their vehicle on Interstate 70 near Ten Mile Canyon. They are seen above stuck in the snow
‘It literally shifted the truck sideways off the road and at the same time we were blind,’ Goleman recalled.
Remarkably, the family was unhurt and able to get out of the truck, which was partially buried in the snow.
‘I see snow everywhere,’ he said. ‘Snow piled up to their doors, emergency lights. We were pretty lucky.’
The Goleman vehicle was fitted with a dashcam which showed the moment the enormous mass of snow came crashing into the car from the right hand side of the highway
The family were lucky that nobody was hurt and they were able to vacate their truck which had snow piled up to the doors
‘I see snow everywhere,’ Shaune Goleman said. ‘Snow piled up to their doors, emergency lights. We were pretty lucky.’ Above rescuers dig vehicles out of the snow
Goleman wrote on Facebook that he had spent some time digging the car out of the snow.
‘Okay, in all seriousness it was a pretty traumatic experience, especially with my family in the car. Fortunately everyone is okay and no major damage,’ he wrote.
According to the Denver Channel, the the Colorado Avalanche Information Center said the slide was likely a category 3 avalanche which could have been capable of destroying a home.
Nobody was seriously hurt in the avalanche that CAIC was the first one to impact the roadway since 1983, and the first of two in that same area on Sunday.
Shaune Goleman and his partner are pictured above. Nobody was seriously hurt in the avalanche that CAIC was the first one to impact the roadway since 1983, and the first of two in that same area on Sunday
Jacob Easton and his father were also driving along that stretch of the highway between Frisco and Copper Mountain when they suddenly spotted a ‘big white cloud’ of snow up ahead of them, Easton told KDVR.
Easton said he started recording a video of the avalanche about two miles before Copper Mountain.
In the video posted on Instagram, the avalanche can clearly be seen gaining speed on the left as they’re driving.
Jacob Easton and his father were driving along a Colorado highway when they spotted a plume of snow heading towards them
The rapidly approaching avalanche came off the mountain and hit the highway ahead of them
‘Holy s**!’ one of the two men exclaims. ‘That’s not going to come down here is it?’
‘No, it is’ the other says.
When the avalanche is almost at the road, the pair pull the car over to the shoulder. As the cloud of snow appears to completely cover the car ahead of them, they slowly reverse their own car to get to safety.
‘Oh my god,’ one of the men says. ‘That was freakin’ nuts!’
The video ends with snow dusting the car’s entire windshield.
Despite what it may have seemed like in the video, Easton told KDVR that their car was not trapped and that the experience was ‘exciting, but pretty nerve wracking, because you don’t know when it’s going to stop.’
Easton’s video showed the moment when the natural avalanche hit the highway
The cloud of avalanche snow completely blotted out Easton’s view and covered their car
Although the pair speculated that the avalanche, which rolled through Ten Mile Canyon, was set in motion on purpose, a spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Transportation said that it was a natural avalanche, not a ‘controlled slide.’
The transportation agency said that the avalanche’s snow did not end up impacting or burying any of the drivers on the highway.
The highway was closed in both directions for about an hour, 9 News reported.
Later in the day, another natural avalanche hit Interstate 70 between Silverthorne and Copper Mountain.
Heavy snow over the weekend resulted in avalanche warnings being issued in Colorado, with crews doing avalanche control work near mountain highways during the day.