Man Survives Being Buried in Snow for 90 Minutes After Avalanche — and He Caught It All on Camera Himself

Aidan Croft, 22, tell us he was trying to turn around to get back to his group when he triggered the avalanche

• Aidan Croft, 22, was snowmobiling near Colorado’s Hahns Peak when he triggered an avalanche that buried him under four feet of snow
• “I saw a little bit of daylight when I was buried,” Croft tells PEOPLE. “So I was able to push the snow away to clear an opening for me to see and breathe
• Finally, 90 minutes later, Croft was rescued by a group of snowmobilers

A man is lucky to be alive after he got buried in snow following an avalanche that he triggered while snowmobiling — all of which he captured on camera.

Aidan Croft, 22, of New Rome, Wisc., was at Hahns Peak in Colorado, where he and his family usually visit every year. On Thursday, Feb. 20, he was out snowmobiling with a group that included his father, his brother and two of his father’s friends when “a few guys got stuck” while going up a series of hills to get up to the actual peak.

Wanting to figure out a solution, Croft, who considers himself the most experienced snowmobiler in the group, tells PEOPLE that he decided to “go find the easiest path” for them to take to still reach the summit.

Croft was riding his snowmobile at an elevation of nearly 10,000 feet when he says a thought occurred to him: “I probably shouldn’t climb this on my own.”

He decided to scrape the bottom of the hill and turn around to return to the group and make sure everyone was okay — but he says, “that’s what triggered the avalanche, [which] started about 400 feet above me.”

Suddenly, he found his whole body under about four feet of snow. That’s when the footage from his GoPro, which was attached to his chest, went dark.

“I saw a little bit of daylight when I was buried,” Croft tells PEOPLE. “So I was able to push the snow away to clear an opening for me to see and breathe. The first thing I see is the mountain that just slid off, and I’m looking at the six-foot snow shelf that could potentially fall at any minute and make matters 10 times worse, and that would probably kill me.”

Croft’s first priority was to find his ham radio, which took him 10 minutes. Fortunately, he was able to get a signal to call the group.

“I’m like, ‘Hey guys, I need emergency help right now. I am literally buried in an avalanche. You guys have to bring a shovel,’ ” Croft remembers. “And then the last thing I said was, ‘Just keep it a hundred foot distance from my body because that snow can shift more.’ “

After reaching out for help, Croft says he spent the next 80 minutes buried in the snow doing whatever he could to make himself comfortable, which included taking off his GoPro and his backpack.

“I dug out as much as I could to get my legs to move,” he says. “At that point though, the snow was starting to melt where my body was, and then it created this ice around me, so it wasn’t easy to dig.”

“I tried to pull myself out, but I was actually stuck,” he adds, noting that he couldn’t even slide his feet out of his boots because they were tied too tightly.

Admittedly, he panicked a little.

“While I was in the slide, I did try to keep my cool, because panicking is one of the worst things that you can have when you’re in an avalanche,” he says, but while he was stuck his “brain went a thousand miles a minute.”

Finally after a total of 90 minutes, a trio of snowmobilers who were flagged by Croft’s group arrived and had shovels with them. “There was a lot of digging involved,” Croft says, “just because my legs were about three to four feet deep.”

Once Croft was free, the first thing he did was hug his rescuers, telling them, “‘You guys literally saved my life. I owe you so much. Let me know where you’re at so I can get you a pack of beer.’ “

Luckily, he didn’t suffer any injuries and didn’t even need to go to the hospital. Still, as he also emphasized in his video, what happened to him is a reminder to be cautious.

“Take nature more seriously,” he tells PEOPLE. “Take the safety more seriously, follow precautions. There’s plenty of public information available. There’s forecasts for avalanches in Colorado. Pay attention to those kinds of things. And if you’re ever in doubt that you need that avalanche gear, you should probably have it.”