by Jeff Colbourne
Northern News Services

NNSL (Mar 16/98) - Funeral services were held last Thursday for Arctic Bay's Peter Barnabas, who died in an avalanche March 7 several kilometres from the community.

Barnabas, 24, was hunting with a friend for ptarmigan when he was reported missing around 8:30 p.m. on March 7.

RCMP and a local rescue team of about 40 people searched the area where Barnabas was last seen.

"We used copper pipes to probe through the snow and one of the searchers located him," said Const. Harvey Seddon with the Nanisivik RCMP detachment. "One of the searcher's pipes indicated there was something there so we dug the snow away and that's where he was. He was underneath about eight or nine feet of snow."

Barnabas, a hamlet employee and brother of High Arctic MLA Levi Barnabas, had been caught in the avalanche of snow near a hill approximately 100 metres high.

"It's hard to make an exact determination of the cause of his death, it was probably the result of being buried in the snow. I'm not sure if it was the actual impact or suffocation," said Seddon.

Avalanche deaths are not common in the North, but nearly three years ago a Clyde River man was killed while snowmobiling near a snow-covered hill.

And 35-year-old Jeffrey Churchill died Nov. 11 at the base of Sawtooth Mountain, approximately 20 kilometres west of Clyde River.

A rescue party found Churchill and his snowmobile under two metres of snow.

Churchill had been snowmobiling with two other men who drove to the top of the mountain. They were not hurt.