Two skiers died while a companion lived Sunday afternoon in an avalanche that hit the Rock Springs area just outside the south boundary of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort.

Though officials weren’t releasing names of the three Sunday night, resort spokeswoman Anna Cole said they were “not local people — they were visitors from out of town.”

It’s upsetting because these folks, because we don’t think they we’re properly prepared for the backcountry,” Cole said. “They didn’t have transceivers and they apparently didn’t know the terrain very well.”

Patrollers using probes found one skier and extricated the person by 3:20, Cole said. Patrollers were joined by Teton County Search and Rescue and Jackson Hole Backcountry Guides, and they probed until they found the second skier at 3:32. One was found under 3 feet of snow, the other only a foot deep, both apparently killed by trauma.

The survivor “grabbed a tree and was not carried over the cliff or buried,” Rheam said.

In Colorado, skier visits for the first part of winter (October 29-December 31) are up 10 percent compared to the same time last year. And according to Colorado Ski Country USA, this year’s skier visits are better than the first period five-year average by 13 percent. The hype of El Niño snow increased bookings just in time for a successful holiday period.

Even in the Pacific Northwest, a region that doesn’t usually do quite as well during El Niño years, hype over powder has produced record-breaking skier visits. From December 19 through January 3, Stevens Pass logged its best visitation numbers during a holiday period since skier visits started being electronically recorded in the 2006-07 winter season. Visitation to the resort is up 119% season-to-date over last year’s awful winter.

Periscope just took its first steps away from the smartphone. The Twitter-owned live-streaming app announced an integration with GoPro that will let users broadcast to their followers from an action camera for the first time. The integration, which currently works on iOS with the GoPro Hero 4 Black and Hero 4 Silver, allows Periscope to recognize a GoPro whenever one is connected to an iPhone. Once connected, the app gives users the option of broadcasting from the camera.

The integration raises interesting possibilities for surfers, skiers, snowboarders, and other athletes, as well as anyone who enjoys filming with a GoPro mounted on a drone. Indeed, the company teased some upcoming broadcasts from the X Games, which begin this week in Aspen, CO. “We’ll have a lot of other really cool content being generated by some athletes there that will really show off the integration.”

According to the LA Times, Shaun “The Flying Tomato” White, 29, has bought a minority stake in the company who runs Mammoth Mountain ski resort in California. That company is called Mammoth Resorts and they recently acquired Snow Summit and Bear M