MILLCREEK, Utah (KSTU)— Travis Haussener is thankful to be alive.

Last week, he was backcountry skiing in Utah on what he thought was stable snow when he suddenly realized he was in danger.

“I heard the big 'wumpf,' felt like the ground shake, and then all of a sudden there's this wall of snow coming down on me that envelops me," said Haussener. "And then I thought, that was it. I thought, you know, my life was over.”

Using his one free arm, Haussener desperately tried digging himself out.

“In between digs, I started yelling for help," he said. "In, you know, the hopes of some miracle.”

Miraculously, an off-duty Unified Fire EMT heard his cries and called in search and rescue teams.

“I was [like], you know, 'Guys, you gotta get me down or I'm gonna die up here,'" said Haussener.

It took eight hours to get Haussener off the mountain.

Nursing a hole in his lung, broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder, Haussener wishes he had paid more attention to the snow.

“I want to keep being in the mountains, keep doing what I love," he said. "I'll be maybe a little bit more careful next time."

This story was originally reported by Jenna Bree on fox13now.com.

Lindsey Jacobellis has won her second gold medal of the Olympics, teaming with 40-year-old Nick Baumgartner for the title in the new event of mixed snowboardcross.

The Italian team of Omar Visintin and Michela Moioli came in second and the Canadian duo of Eliot Grondin and Meryeta O’Dine finished third.

The 36-year-old Jacobellis took gold earlier this week in the women’s event; it came 16 years after a late showboat move as she was cruising in for an apparent win cost her the title at the Turin Games.

After a slow start, the U.S. now has five gold medals and 11 overall at the Games. Jacobellis accounts for two, while snowboarder Chloe Kim has another. Figure skater Nathan Chen also won a gold medal this week. The U.S. also won a gold medal in mixed team aerials event.

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Not even "The Great Wall” could stave off a piercing, bone-chilling wind.

The snow replica of China’s iconic monument lined the top of the Olympic slopestyle course to cut down on the blustery conditions. All it really did Saturday was provide an eye-catching backdrop.

In gusty conditions that led to arctic-feeling wind chills, two-time defending Olympic champion Jamie Anderson and the rest of the women's snowboarders glided through the rails and jumps — albeit a little chilled — during the qualifying round in the mountains above Beijing.

Some riders wore hand and feet warmers to protect against the elements. Others donned facemasks or neck sleeves to keep the whipping wind at bay.

Nothing fully worked. Not even the protection of “The Great Wall.”

“I like the Great Wall. I do think it's helping a little bit, for sure,” said Anderson, who finished fifth in qualifying to make Sunday's 12-woman final.

Then, she jokingly added: "They need a bigger wall.”

The temperature hovered around 5 degrees F and felt like minus-12 F during the competition. The wind was listed at 13 mph, but the more telling sight may have been a wind sleeve next to the final jump: It was blowing straight out, then sideways, then straight out again.

“It's cold,” Anderson said. “It’s hard to, like, keep your core temperature warm and then doing tricks feels a little bit more intimidating.”

Zoi Sadowski Synnott of New Zealand navigated the extreme conditions to turn in qualifying's top score of 86.75. Synnott might just be the biggest challenger to Anderson. She beat Anderson last month at the Winter X Games.

Then again, the wind could play a big role, too. It did four years ago at the Pyeongchang Olympics, when Anderson won her second straight title. It was held in windy, subpar conditions while across the mountain the Alpine race was called off.

Of the elements Saturday, Synnott said: "The wind is a bit tricky. You can feel it sometimes when you’re on the course, but not enough to throw you off your game. You just have to really adapt.”

That's what Hailey Langland did after wiping out on her first run. With hand warmers stuffed in her gloves and feet warmers in her boots, Langland blocked the wind out of her mind and just went for it.

“It's gnarly because the wind gusts, they’re no longer coming straight downhill. They’re now starting to swirl in between the jumps and in the rails and starting to come uphill,” said Langland, who finished ninth in qualifying. “That can really deter your gauge of what speed you should be taking into these features, which can cause, obviously, some really bad consequences.”

Another challenge were some of the jumps with approaches that were angled into the kickers instead of straight-on. They’re unlike most jumps riders spring off in other contests, but this style was featured four years ago in South Korea.

“I’m starting to get used to it more," said Julia Marino, who was sixth to advance.

Not so much the snow under their snowboards, though. The machine-made snow had a different feel, especially on a fall. Anderson said she had a bruise to show for the snow that felt — as Marino described — like concrete.

“I’m impressed that they did it,” Anderson said of the manmade snow. “But, damn, it’s like not that enjoyable to ride on.”

To keep warm before her run, Langland also bundled up in a giant parka. As for those warmers she just started to use, she had a description for them: “Life-changing,” she joked.

Tess Coady of Australia wore a dark facemask under her helmet, along with dark lenses in her goggles.

“Intimidation,” cracked Coady, who finished eighth. “It’s so cold. My nose is like dying.”

For Enni Rukajarvi, this felt almost balmy compared to what it's like back home in Finland.

“Somehow it feels warmer here than in Finland,” Rukajarvi said after taking third in qualifying. “When it's minus-20 in Finland, it’s way colder.”

Marino didn't even feel the cold on her final run, she said, simply because she was so focused after a mistake on her first attempt.

“I just wanted to make it to the end of the course,” said Marino, who hung out in the athletes' lounge at the top to stay warm before her run. “I did not look at the flags at all. I was just like, ‘I’m going to go for my run no matter what. I don’t care about the wind. I’m going throw down what I came here to throw down.’”

Adrenaline fueled that second run. Then, a blast of reality hit in the finish area.

“I’m starting to feel (the cold)," Marino said.

It was the kind of jaw-dropping performance the crowd had never seen.

Zeb Powell stole the show at the 2020 X Games in Aspen, Colorado, jumping and flipping his way right into fans' hearts and a first-place win.

But here's the thing, the rookie clutching the gold medal didn't even like snowboarding the first time he tried it.

"My teacher was mean, and she set me up backward. None of it was appealing to me," Powell tells Newsy. 

For a while, he turned to skateboard, but his raw talent on the snow could not be ignored.

"He's always been flipping and turning, and he's always been on a board or something that will let him fly through the air," Valerie Powell, Zeb's mother, said. 

His parents, who adopted him at five weeks old, started sending him from his North Carolina home to a snowboarding camp in Colorado. Powell stood out in a sport that traditionally is as white as snow.

Newsy's Clayton Sandell: How many people were there doing this that looks like you?

Powell: There might have been one other black person on the mountain.

Sandell: You ever feel unwelcome in this sport?

Powell: Luckily, like, no. I don't really have anything bad to say about anyone.

But it isn't just that Zeb Powell is one of the few black faces on the slopes. Sports commentator Selema Masekela has watched generations of snowboarders over three decades. He says the 22-year-old has game-changing skills he's never seen before.

"He's a jazz musician on a snowboard. He improvises.  It's like, oh, this is a type of snowboarding, an ability and an interpretation of the thing that is crazy, and so artistic and spontaneous, but highly athletic. And also, in the body of a young black kid who grew up in North Carolina?" sports commentator Selema Masekela tells Newsy. 

Powell's first appearance at the X Games changed everything. He gained a ton of new followers and support on social media. Fans who maybe, for the first time, saw themselves.

"I heard a lot of them say they didn't even know that black people snowboarded, which is crazy. I mean, just coming from me, like I never even thought about it like that," Powell explained.  

Powell is still getting used to all the attention and all the selfies.

Sandell: What's it like being recognized like that? 

Powel: That's always crazy. I just kind of fully embrace it try to talk to everyone.

But one thing he's sure of, he's using his new visibility to help make snowboarding much more diverse.

"I think the culture is just it's so fun to be around. I love it. I think a lot of people will love it," Powell says. 

Inviting as many as he can to a sport that historically hasn't been very inviting.

"Recreating and luxuriating in the outdoors was sort of one of the last safe spaces that were built mostly specifically for white people on the back end of segregation in this country.  And so, it's going to take a very long time for those things to change," Masekela explains further. 

Powell didn't place at this year's X Games, but his mom says what's important is that her son knows he has a gift.

"And you got to use it right and stay humble and give back, and so far, that's what he's done, which makes me extremely proud. Prouder than any medal he could ever win," Valerie Powell says of her son. 

"It's exciting because he really does have an opportunity to be so much bigger than then snowboarding and to be like an icon for the sport in opening up accessibility and possibility to what the slopes can look like. It's like, you know, growing up watching Jordan or Kobe or Serena, and then to see it come along, in in a young Black man in America is just it just wildly powerful," Masekela says. 

For now, Powell says he'll be spreading the word through the type of videos he makes with his friends, hot-dogging down the slopes and dropping into concrete canyons, making sure that even though he's one of the few Black pro snowboarders, Zeb Powell is not going to be the last.

Clayton Sandell at Newsy first reported this story.

COPPER MOUNTAIN, Colo. —

One of Shaun White's greatest fears is finding himself upside down above a halfpipe with no idea where he's going to land.

Time and again over two decades, he has decided the risk is worth it.

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As he embarked this month on the quest to make his fifth Olympics, the world's most famous halfpipe rider says living a life full of calculated risks is still part of his DNA — a mindset that, these days, is less taken for granted in all-or-nothing sports such as his than it was a mere 12 months ago.

"I've been lost in the air before, and it's terrifying," White said in an interview with The Associated Press. "You're flying around and you don't know where you are and you're hoping for the best. The sky color matches the color of the snow. We never really had a name for that. I was intrigued when I heard they call it the 'twisties' in gymnastics."

Simone Biles' decision to pull out of the women's team final at the Tokyo Games earlier this year resonated with athletes throughout the elite world, including White, and also advanced the conversation about many of the mental-health challenges Olympians face.

Just as twisting and somersaulting over a vault can be a life-threatening endeavor, doing the same over an icy, rock-hard halfpipe is among the most dangerous of Olympic pursuits. White was famously helicoptered off the halfpipe in New Zealand after a grizzly wreck in the run-up to the 2018 Olympics. When he overcame the 62-stitch injury to his face and won the gold medal in Pyeongchang, it marked a stunning crescendo to a comeback that even he wasn't sure was possible.

White believes the key to an athlete putting him or herself at risk over and over again is knowing you're doing it for the right reasons — a key component missing from Biles' mindset when she stepped away.

"It's scary to be out there alone," White said. "And when you go out and do that, you want it to be your choice. You don't want to feel like you have to do this because of some reason other than, 'Hey, I want to do this.'"

The stakes will be every bit as high, if not higher, this year. A triple cork jump — involving 1620 degrees of spin above the halfpipe — could very well be the trick needed to win the Olympics. It involves another half revolution of spin than the back-to-back 1440s that White used to win in Korea. White used to practice the triple cork into an air bag, but nobody has yet pulled it off in a high-stakes contest.

Meanwhile, at the season's first Olympic qualifying event this week, everyone saw the risks involved. In Saturday's final of the U.S. Grand Prix, Japanese rider Raibu Katayama had to be taken by sled off the course after hitting his head and neck on the lip of the halfpipe. Earlier in the week, freeskier Connor Ladd was taken to a hospital in Denver after suffering a traumatic head injury. His family said Ladd has made progress but has a long journey ahead.

Another freeskier, Gus Kenworthy, pulled out of the contest. He said it's not uncommon for action-sports athletes to get lost in the air.

"I didn't have a sense of where the sky and the ground and everything was, and that's why I pulled out," said Kenworthy, who won the silver medal in slopestyle in 2014.

White withdrew from snowboarding's Olympic slopestyle contest in 2014 — part of a Russian adventure that turned out nothing as he'd hoped.

"It was hard and it was harsh," White said. "I got a bunch of backlash from other competitors saying I chickened out. But I had to be confident with myself and say, 'You know, look, this is the comfort level, and it's not there.'"

White also finished fourth in the halfpipe that year. The setbacks forced him to step back and rethink what made him love snowboarding, and all the risk that comes with it, in the first place.

Part of the mission between 2014-18 was to get back to the top and do it without so much noise from the outside — sponsors, business projects and the like.

It's like that again this time around, but with an even tighter-knit feel.

He's working with his brother, Jesse, again, and is in a relationship with actress Nina Dobrev, who he met at a motivational seminar, Now 35 and with the end of his career much closer than the beginning, White says he's entering this Olympic journey with a refined perspective on what's really important.

In his teens and 20s, he battled against cynics who wondered why he was devoting his life — putting his life on the line, in fact — for a sport that was not accepted in the mainstream. He coupled that with a desire to show that not only was he in a legit sport, but that he was the best at it, and that, yes, you could become rich and famous doing it.

"After a while, drawing from that same fuel of motivation isn't sustainable," he said. "So then, you go, 'OK, cool, what else is there? And then I look and see things that are important to me: Being a good friend. Being someone who others can count on. I had to take this hard look at what I was doing, and now, this understanding of who I am in the greater picture has really helped me with everything. With feeling content."

Don't get him wrong. He'd still like to win on Feb. 11, the day the gold medal is awarded on the mountains outside of Beijing.

If he does, it will add to an already legendary trophy case. If he doesn't — well, it won't be the first time he's come up short.

Perhaps the biggest triumph, he says, has already been secured. He's still doing this at age 35, and he's ready to give everything in a quest for a fifth Olympics because he's doing it for the right reasons.

"I'm feeling motivated and I'm feeling like I can," White said. "It's a different feeling but the drive and the motivation is there."

COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa —

It's the "welcome home" 17-year-old Owen Hansen's been waiting for for 98 days.

"This is so much people," he said. "I didn't expect this at all."

A motorcade of Owen's friends and family escorted the teen's vehicle to the Emanuel Lutheran Church in Council Bluffs, Iowa, for a "welcome back" celebratory party Thursday evening.

Owen hadn't been home to Council Bluffs since February when a snowboarding accident paralyzed him from the shoulders down.

Dozens of his classmates, teammates, friends and family filled the room to show their support.

Owen spent the past three months in the hospital and at Madonna Rehabilitation.

"It's been tough. Therapies, waking up in the morning, half the day full of therapy," he said.

"The COVID rules were hard. It could only be me and my husband there the whole time and what 17-year-old boy wants to hang out with his mom and dad for 98 days?" said Owen's mom, Jolene Hansen.

Doctors said he is well enough to be back, but he still faces a lot of therapy.

"So we'll have PT and an OT come to the house for the first four weeks," said Hansen. "Then we'll be taking him to Madonna in Omaha for [outpatient] rehab."

His family is also trying to raise money to build a home that's accessible for him.

"We have to have a lot of special equipment to move him and for him to be able to do things on his own," Hansen said.

The family is thankful for the community's support.

"It's pretty overwhelming. It just makes my heart very happy," Hansen said.

"It's amazing and unbelievable, really. Just how many people care," Owen said.