For Minnesota snowmobiler John Menssen the term “pretty exciting” has taken on a new meaning after he rode through an avalanche down a narrow gully on the southern end of the Madison Range.

“I wouldn’t want to do it again,” he said from his home in Sherburn.

Menssen, 35, was riding with a buddy on March 7 up Red Canyon, just north of Hebgen Lake, in Montana, looking for untracked patches of fresh snow.

Menssen throttled up an untracked narrow gully on the southern side of Kirkwood Ridge, elevation, about 9,700 feet.

As he rode up the draw it got too steep, and Menssen turned around, picking up speed on the descent. To slow down he weaved from side to side, eventually stopping perpendicular to the slope so he could see where his buddy was below. While stopped, he also looked uphill.

“I looked up to my left, and as far as I could see the mountain was coming down,” he said.

Thinking fast, he activated his avalanche air bag as his Arctic Cat M 8000 Limited snowmobile began sliding downhill with him still on it.

“It completely buried my snowmobile and me from the waist or chest down,” he said.

Using new two-way radios they’d just purchased, Menssen called out to his buddy to warn him that the slide was breaking and to get out of the way.

“I’ve had this experience before; the adrenaline shoots so high everything seems like it’s in slow motion,” Menssen said. “It’s weird how your body reacts.”

As the gully narrowed, the avalanche began to slow. Menssen thought to himself, “I really don’t want to be sitting here” when the rest of the snow piles in.

“So I grabbed as much throttle as I could get.”

That shot him off the toe of the avalanche and over a small drop-off that ended in a grove of pine trees.

“He flew off a rollover and was able to somehow maneuver through those trees,” said Eric Knoff of the Gallatin National Forest Avalanche Center.

Knoff accompanied the riders to the area two days later to conduct an accident report.

“That guy got very lucky,” Knoff said.

It’s unusual for a rider to have time to activate an air bag. A few snowmobilers in Montana have been killed in avalanches while wearing air bags that were never engaged. Second, it’s odd to activate an air bag, stay on the snowmobile and ride out of an avalanche.

Had Menssen not snowmobiled out of the avalanche, Knoff said he could have been pushed into the trees below. Trees are a common cause of trauma to avalanche victims.

“These guys were super good snowmobilers, so they had that going for them,” Knoff said.

Both riders were equipped with air bags, avalanche beacons, probes and shovels but had no formal avalanche safety education, Knoff said.