A missing hiker buried under snow was filmed in a dramatic rescue where he was able to wave to a helicopter with only his head and one arm free.
The footage, filmed by paramedic Mathieu Lambert, shows the man desperately waving with his only free limb as the helicopter shined a light on the mountain on February 8.
Only a faint image was visible but thankfully the eagle-eyed rescue team honed in on something moving in the snow which turned out to be the hiker's arm.
The young man, who has not been named, had been ski touring in the Lidairdes region of Switzerland when an avalanche hit.
His family alerted rescue services when he didn't return on time.
Air Glaciers, a rescue and transport company, received the alert at 5:41 pm and dispatched a helicopter with a paramedic and two rescue guides.
The team first checked the car-park where the man had started his journey to ensure that he had not returned to his car.
They then began flying over the route he had provided his family.
The team eventually located visible tracks and dropped one of the guides to trace them.
Miraculously, only using the search light on the helicopter, the team was able to spot the man's arm waving at them and extract him from a large pile of snow blocks.
He was then hoisted 30 meters up to safety.
According to local media, the man recovered from the incident without any life-threatening injuries.
It comes after a mountaineer survived more than 20 hours buried in an avalanche with temperatures dropping to a freezing -15C, last January.
Carluccio Sartori, 54, left rescuers and police officers astonished when he was pulled out of the snow alive - and was even able to have a conversation.
He told rescuers that an air chamber that formed the surface of the avalanche not only provided him with oxygen to breathe but also insulated him from the freezing temperatures of the night.
The incredible rescue of the man from Villanova Marchesana in Rovigo, northeast Italy, happened at the famous resort in Val Badia Valley in the South Tyrol region on January 27.
When he was pulled out of the ground he had a body temperature of around 24 degrees Celsius after spending the whole night buried by snow.
