UK motorists have had a tough run of weather this winter, but few will have had to use their bare hands to dig themselves out from beneath metres of snow.
But this is exactly what a female driver found herself doing, after an avalanche buried her - along with her car and three passengers - following a skiing holiday.
The party - which had allegedly pressed on in the face of warnings from locals - was buried under as much as 18ft of snow close to the mountain village of Villard-d'Abbas in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence region. Their Volkswagen Golf had been headed along a road which was reportedly closed due to the high risk of avalanches.
In an escape billed by French media as a "miracle beneath the snow", the 38-year-old woman smashed a window before clawing her way out from underneath the blanket of the white stuff.
After a Herculean two-and-a-half hour dig, the brave driver - named only as 'Anne' by French police - hiked 4km (2.5 miles) to a hamlet to sound the alarm.
She then returned to the scene with emergency services, who used her makeshift tunnel to pull the three male passengers - one of whom is English - to the surface. Amazingly, the only injuries they suffered were from small cuts caused by the shattered glass.
"She was absolutely determined to make sure everybody was OK, and nothing was going to stop her," said a police spokesperson, quoted in The Telegraph.
"The woman was a real heroine. What she did was incredible."
The incident comes during a skiing season that has been blighted by avalanche deaths across the whole of the Alps.
