Didn’t read this whole thread, but I know what DBos is concerned about. I experienced the deepest fresh snow skiing of my life during a week in late Jan 2017 at Snowbird when they received 81”. Day after day of 12-18” snowfalls. One day during a heavy, low-viz squall I went out on the mtn with another friend. We were doing middle or lower cirque where the accumulated new snow was about three to four feet deep. He was a better/more aggressive skier than me and he fell in a pocket of snow that was even deeper. After a few seconds only his head popped up out of the snow. I was about 50 yrds downhill and I was really glad to see him. In the deep conditions it would have been very hard/impossible for me to climb back up in time if his breathing had been obstructed. I took a fairly high speed fall that day or the next that left most of my body under the snow, but I had one arm free and used it to clear snow away from my face, which was sort of sideways to the snow. I struggled, but couldn’t get the rest of my body out. Fortunately, this happened under Gad 2 chair at the bottom of STH and after a minute a friendly stranger came by and offered me the end of his ski pole and yanked me out. I spent about five more minutes there looking for one ski that came off and was buried under the snow. That night as the snow kept falling I had a fearful thought in bed that if I’d been alone in a remote part of the mtn and stuck face down it could have been ugly. My fears were associated with falling, not if you stay up and keep moving. My son has skied in the latter conditions, where you are submerged even while moving forward. That’s like what Grump described, keep moving until you come out it and don’t fall. Definitely want to try to ski with a buddy on super deep snow days. I’ll post some pictures here tonight from Snowbird, late Jan 2017. Maybe westerners who experience these conditions once or twice a season are more comfortable, but as a fellow Virginian who has only seen this kind of snow once or twice a lifetime it was pretty intense. Fun, but intense