Michael Rowell, 34, from Farnborough, Hampshire, who has been skiing since he was five, is believed to have slipped and fallen 24m (80ft) from a cliff edge. Rowell, a chartered accountant, enjoyed his first full day of skiing in the Chamonix region with friend Niall Jones in March. The pair decided to ski off-piste between a black run and a red run, but realized it wasn’t safe and stopped, intending to retrace their route and find a better approach. Jones told the inquest in Winchester that they had spent part of the day before finding their feet on marked ski slopes. On the day of the tragedy they were skiing in warm and sunny conditions. “We decided to ski between a red and black run,” Jones said. “There were a lot of previous ski tracks, so we knew they had been crossed by others. “We skied with only 10-20 meters between us. At about 10.50 we reached a point without ski slopes. Mike went ahead to see if there was a route to ski down. “He shouted back that there was no route, so I took off my skis and started walking back up the hill to where we had last seen runs. “There was no direct line of sight between us because of the terrain, so I called out to him to see where he was. There was no answer, so I called him, but there was no answer. My initial thought was that he had skied down.” When Jones carefully walked back up the hill, he could see a single ski stuck in the snow, the inquest heard. “I had to carefully dig into each leg to get down. I called him and called him again, but there was no answer.” Jones called mountain rescue at 11.05am. and they sent a helicopter. A French mountain rescue team reached Rowell but had suffered multiple fatal injuries. They found his cracked helmet 50 meters (164 ft) below where his body was discovered. Rowell’s wife, Ellen, said her husband was not a risk taker. “Mike was a very calm, kind, generous, intelligent man. We had spent a lot of time together skiing,” he said. It was his first ski trip for four years, but he added: “They would have got their map out the night before, they would have worked out where they were going, he was perfectly capable of off-piste skiing.” Recording a verdict of accidental death, Coroner Jason Pegg said: “It appears that Mike needed to take off his skis to get up the mountain … and unfortunately he slipped in this area over an edge and fell onto the snowy crags below . “It seems to me that this was a desperately tragic accident, he just misjudged the area he was in and slipped leading to the fall. These injuries were such that he died instantly.”
