King Charles has spent most of his life keeping the worst day of it to himself. Almost 40 years later, he finally put it into words in front of a small group of strangers, and it took him only five of them: “It was a close thing.”
The 77-year-old monarch was talking about the 1988 avalanche that nearly buried him alive in the Swiss Alps and killed one of his closest friends. He brought it up on his own, without being asked, during a quiet reception in the far north of Scotland. And the people he told it to were not palace insiders or reporters. They were volunteers who climb mountains for free.
How the story came out
Charles was hosting members of the Assynt Mountain Rescue Team at the Castle of Mey, the old home of the Queen Mother near John O’Groats. The team is marking 50 years of service this year, and 11 of its 40 members were invited for tea. According to their team leader Ben Dyson, the King was “in very good form” and even poured them local whisky along with the tea and coffee.
The talk turned to the risks these volunteers take every time their phones ring. That is when Charles opened up. “He spoke of the near miss he had in that avalanche in the context of the dangers that mountains pose,” Dyson told The Times. “He said it was a close thing. Obviously, after all these years, it is still fresh in his memory, but it has given him an insight into the valuable work we do and the dangers we face.”
Thirty-eight years on, the memory clearly hasn’t faded. If anything, it shaped how he sees the men and women who dig people out of the snow for nothing.
What actually happened on the mountain
It was March 10, 1988. Charles, then Prince of Wales, was skiing off-piste high above the Swiss resort of Klosters with a small group of friends. They were on the Gotschnagrat, near the Wang run, which is known as one of the hardest and most unforgiving in the area. This was not a gentle groomed slope. It was steep, wild terrain, exactly the kind of place mountains turn deadly without warning.
Then the snow let go. An avalanche swept through the group with no warning at all. Charles, several companions, and their guide managed to get clear of the moving snow. Two people did not. One of them, his friend Major Hugh Lindsay, was carried roughly 400 meters down the mountainside. That is more than four football fields, straight down a slope, under tons of snow.
The King was skiing that day with local guide Bruno Sprecher, who was widely credited with keeping the survivors alive. Charles was considered a strong, experienced skier at the time. Even that wasn’t enough to make an off-piste slope safe.
The friend he lost
Major Hugh Lindsay wasn’t a random member of the party. He was a former equerry to Queen Elizabeth II, meaning he had worked closely with the royal family, and he was one of the people Charles trusted most. He was flown by helicopter to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The part that still stings all these years later: Lindsay’s wife, Sarah, was six months pregnant at the time and worked in the Buckingham Palace press office. She got the news that her husband was gone while carrying their child. Another member of the group, Patti Palmer-Tomkinson, a longtime friend of Charles, was seriously injured in the same slide.
Charles and Princess Diana later flew home with Lindsay’s coffin. A guard of honor from his regiment received him in Britain, and his funeral was held at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst on March 17, 1988, one week after the avalanche. Members of the royal family attended. For a man who lost a friend on a ski trip he organized, that week must have felt endless.
He dug through the snow with his bare hands
Here is the detail that stays with you. In the chaos right after the snow stopped moving, Charles did not stand back and wait for help. He rushed toward the avalanche site alongside the guide and a Swiss police officer who had been with the group. Together they clawed through the snow with their bare hands, trying to reach the people buried beneath it.
Think about that for a second. This was the future King of England, on his knees in freezing snow, digging as fast as he could because his friends were underneath it. No cameras were rolling. No press release went out about it. It was just a man doing whatever his hands could do in a situation with no good outcome.
The skiing holiday ended right there. Charles made his way back to the chalet, and the whole party flew home to Britain without delay. There was no reason to stay.
Where Diana and Sarah Ferguson were
Two names people always ask about with this trip: Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson. Both were on the holiday. Both, thankfully, were nowhere near the slope when it happened. They had stayed behind at the chalet that afternoon while the others went off-piste.
Charles returned to that chalet to find them after the avalanche. You can only imagine the mood when the group walked back in without Hugh Lindsay. Within hours, the trip was over and everyone was headed home.
The Crown put it on TV, and the widow objected
Millions of Americans first learned about this avalanche not from a history book but from Netflix. The tragedy was recreated in an episode of “The Crown,” the streaming drama that turned the royal family’s private moments into binge material for a global audience.
Here is the part that doesn’t sit right. The episode was made against the wishes of Sarah Lindsay, the widow who got the phone call while pregnant. A real death, a real widow, a real orphaned child, all dramatized for entertainment despite the family saying no. It is a reminder that the people inside these stories are not characters. They lived it.
Why he told a room full of volunteers
Charles didn’t dredge up the worst day of his life for no reason. He said it while talking about what the Assynt Mountain Rescue Team goes through. These are ordinary people with day jobs. Nobody pays them. The King made a point of asking about their work outside the team, because every single one of the 40 members is a volunteer.
The numbers are worth knowing. The team has carried out 22 rescues so far this year, closing in on their single-year record of 28. It costs about £40,000 a year to keep the whole operation running, all of it staffed by unpaid volunteers. Last weekend they also opened a new base at the Ormilie Industrial Estate in Thurso and submitted plans for another in Sutherland. Charles even talked up new technology for them, especially using drones in rescues.
When someone who has actually been trapped in a killer avalanche tells you he respects your work, that lands differently. He knows exactly what happens when a mountain decides to move.
His skiing days are over
Charles kept a connection to the mountains after 1988, though. He returned to Klosters in 2022, decades after the accident, and he remains patron of the Braemar Mountain Rescue Team, a role his late father Prince Philip once held.
The skis, though, are packed away for good. During a visit to Teesside in February 2025, he told a Swiss man he met, “I think my skiing days are behind me.” Coming from a former accomplished skier, that is a quiet way of closing a chapter.
The reception itself was part of his usual first week of August at the Castle and Gardens of Mey, which lines up with the Queen Mother’s birthday. Over the same weekend he wore a kilt, sipped a dram at the Mey Highland Games, and planted a rose named in his honor, the King’s Rose, in the castle’s Diamond Jubilee Rose Garden. A calm Scottish summer, in other words. But sitting across from a room full of mountain rescuers, the calm cracked open just long enough for him to say the thing he almost never says out loud.
