A Fernie man who was buried for a short time beneath a wave of snow near Revelstoke will never forget the dread of trying to outrun the deadly avalanche.

“It just broke the whole mountain loose. It just came down so fast. Nobody could move,” Ben Basaraba, 24, said Sunday.

Basaraba, who is recovering from broken bones in his neck and an injured back in Royal Inland Hospital, was among the 200 snowmobilers who gathered for the annual Big Iron Shoot-Out in the Boulder Mountains near Revelstoke.

He was eating when the wall of snow fell Saturday afternoon. He said he looked up and saw the avalanche overtake a group of 50 riders like a storm. Two people were killed.

“The sound was just terrible,” he said, his voice quiet.

Basaraba started his sled and looked back at the group of friends he came with. All he saw were people on snowmobiles being swept up by the snow.

Everything happened in slow motion. He fled, but the avalanche kept coming. He said it grew bigger and moved faster with each passing second.

There was a moment when Basaraba thought he would escape. He rode left, away from the snow, but it slammed into him anyway.

“It was 30 feet high. It went right over all of us like we weren’t even there,” said Basaraba.

Basaraba isn’t sure how long he was buried for. The top of his head poked out of the snow, so it didn’t take rescuers long to find him. But he couldn’t move and could see. He said the sensation was claustrophobic and terrifying.

His rescuers left him on the snow while they freed others. He waited an hour before helicopters came to fly people out. He said it took half an hour before the aircraft landed and then another 30 minutes before he was airborne.

Basaraba was flown to hospital in Revelstoke before being moved to RIH, where he spent the night in the emergency room. He was moved to a bed on the sixth floor Sunday.

Basaraba said all of his friends survived. Some were buried like him, but soon freed.

He will spend at least a week in hospital, but is expected to make a full recovery. He said the ordeal has turned him off snowmobiling — a sport he’s done off and on for years — for good.

“I’ve got a cheap sled for sale,” he said, and tried to smile despite his swollen face.

He said he was aware of the avalanche danger, but drawn to the event because of the promise of good snow. He hasn’t been able to snowmobile much in Fernie this year.

Organizers of the Big Iron Shoot-Out had camera crews recording the activity. Basaraba believes that’s enough to convince anyone to ride despite the risk, he said.

Basaraba grew up in Creston and loves the outdoors. He is a welder at a mine in Sparwood.

His parents arrived in Kamloops to see him Sunday.