The Headwall avalanche that raked the Bridger Restaurant building at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort on Monday trapped or hit seven ski patrollers, resort and U.S. Forest Service officials said Tuesday.

Five patrollers were slightly injured in the incident, which tore the railing and glass shields off the restaurant deck, burst through doors and windows and piled snow 8 feet deep inside. The avalanche roared down the Headwall slope at 9:26 a.m. after being provoked by a ski patrol bomb, resort officials said.

It piled snow about 30 feet deep around the mid-mountain restaurant building and sent patrollers and other workers scrambling to free colleagues. Airborne snow that eddied around the corner of the building pinned or partially pinned four patrollers among scattered furniture on a patio.

The blast knocked down two other patrollers who were hiking up to the building. Debris shuttered a seventh, and his search dog, inside the ski patrol room in the restaurant building until workers cut through an interior wall to set them free.

The slide ran two days after an in-bounds avalanche below the Paintbrush trail buried and killed 31-year-old David Nodine, of Wilson. Nodine skied off the trail into an area unofficially known as Toilet Bowl with a friend when the slide ran; patrollers found him within six minutes using a transceiver and uncovered him within another four minutes.

Bridger-Teton National Forest avalanche forecaster Jim Springer and resort President Jerry Blann on Tuesday fleshed out details of the Headwall slide, including how Blann dug out veteran ski patroller Larry Detrick, who was buried up to his neck.

During a season with a suspect snowpack, two days after Nodine’s death and with rapidly warming temperatures, “We knew we had a chance to go after things,” Springer said. “We were getting huge results elsewhere on the mountain,” he said of the patrol’s bomb-throwing that morning.

The old Bivouac run, “that had been skied a lot,” cut loose from a 4-foot-deep crown, Springer said. Laramie Bowl below Laramie Traverse, a slope typically stabilized by the cat track above it, also went big. Above Laramie, another fracture was 11 feet deep.

“It definitely got our attention,” Springer said. “Those things never move. At that point, we all said we need to figure out what we need to do.”

Patrol announced it would have another go at the mountain and delay the normal opening time.

Crews typically rig and carry enough explosives – up to perhaps four or five bombs inside their jackets – according to predicted instability. When slopes turn out to be less stable than thought, they return to the patrol room for more ammo and another cycle up the lifts.

So it went Monday.

“We went back with more and bigger explosives,” Springer said.

Meanwhile, one team that had hiked the Headwall provoked a slide there that brushed the south side of the Bridger Restaurant building. Blann said he heard about the incident and rushed to the Bridger Gondola, which whisked him to the restaurant.

As Blann was riding up, patroller Kirk Speckhals was waiting at the nearby Raymer Plot with a colleague as the fuse to their special Headwall “boo-bomb” was slowly burning. The pair had rigged 4 pounds of explosives to a bamboo pole protruding out of the snow.

The intent was to create an air blast to rock the snow slope with vigor. Most patrol explosives are 1 pound and are thrown onto the slope, where their effect is cushioned by the snow.

Blann said patroller Detrick had rounded up restaurant employees to the center of the building. The patrollers hiking up to the restaurant knew or were told to stay in its Headwall “shadow,” Springer said. Longtime patroller and dog handler Jerry Balint and Hooter were headed to the patrol room on the avalanche, or south side of the building. Detrick and his three colleagues were on the downhill, or east side of the restaurant, with Detrick just starting to peek around the corner and up the hill.

The air blast went off. Springer said Detrick saw debris flowing through trees above.

“He saw a big tree start to bend,” Springer said. “He yelled, ‘Run! run! run!’ ”

“There were a bunch of tables and chairs and things,” Springer said of the patio downhill of the restaurant across which the patrollers charged. “Before they could get through, it overwhelmed them.”

When the slide stopped, “Detrick cleared snow away from his mouth and put his hand in the air,” Springer said. Another patroller, Doug Workman, did the same thing. Two others, including Brian Jillson, were less tangled.

A worker inside the restaurant, who declined to be identified, reported feeling the building shake and hearing scraping, grating and breaking glass.

Blann was getting off the gondola.

“I heard it,” he said. “I grabbed a shovel and started digging.

“The three guys [Springer reported four] were all heads up but pretty wound around tables,” he said of the patrollers on the patio. “Larry was shaking his head loose. I dug Larry out.”

Blann said he’s heard since that Detrick told friends he looked up to see his boss and didn’t know whether he was in heaven or hell.

“He was just coaching me ‘go here, go there’ ” Blann said. “He still was in charge, though he could hardly move.”

Soon enough, workers cleared the patio and the two patrollers below the building brushed themselves off and arrived. That left Balint and Hooter. Detrick didn’t know if the two had made it into the patrol room.

It has one door – to the outside – that the mammoth debris pile sealed like a tomb. The slide poured snow through a window, covered a radio and broke a radio antenna, cutting off communication.

Colleagues reached Balint on his cell phone. Nicknamed “Cool Breeze,” he remained unruffled.

“He had the hot water going, the popcorn was popped, that’s what he said,” Blann said.

When carpenters were portioning off the patrol room during construction, ski patrollers made a mental note of the location of wall studs, figuring they could cut into the space from the inside if a slide ever blocked the outside door, Springer said. That’s what they did Monday, first freeing Hooter so she could be put to work in an ongoing search for potential victims. Balint emerged through the wall shortly after.

Speckhals rushed down the headwall after the avalanche to see what his blast had wrought. His eyes, “they were pretty wide,” Blann said.

Patrollers continued to search debris until just after 10 p.m. when all the workers were accounted for. The resort shut down the entire mountain.

Blann said one tram load of visitors had started up the hill by mistake before the mountain opened. Passengers on it were immediately turned around.

“We weren’t about to open the mountain in the conditions that caught those patrollers,” Springer said.

The forecaster said the Headwall now is stabilized mostly with hand charges, unlike the historic practice of using a howitzer at the base of the mountain.

“There just aren’t that many bullets for that thing,” he said. “We do it mostly by hand.”

Blann disagreed that a lack of ammo figures in safety decisions.

“I don’t think that’s the case at all,” he said.

The patrol shot more than 30 rounds out of the base-area gun the day following the Headwall slide, and the resort has ordered more shells, Blann said. A hand-placed air blast can be more effective than an 8-pound howitzer shell, depending on how each is placed, he added.

Blann also rejected notions that the resort management might have pressured ski patrol to open runs Saturday, when Nodine was killed. Much of the mountain had been closed because of heavy snow on Christmas and Boxing Day.

“There was no pressure,” he said. “There’s never a question when someone says, ‘We’re going to take another lap on the tram.’ ”

The public, however, did want to get up the mountain, Blann said.

“There was a lot of dialog in front of the ticket office,” he said.

Blann said he ran a ski patrol route the day Nodine died and even changed the signs above Alta Chutes to open that area. He said he talked to the patrol the day after the death.

“I said these are the things we never imagined we’d get into in this business,” Blann said.

“If someone has something to say, I want to hear it,” he said he told the crew.

“You could see in their eyes this is something they take seriously.”