She and her friends felt the ground shifting beneath them, and then over the course of 45 terrifying seconds, Elyse was flung 700 metres down the mountain, coming to rest with almost her entire body entombed in snow as solid as concrete.
Responsible for over 150 deaths worldwide every year – including two or three in the UK – avalanches are as hard to predict as they are awe inspiring.
The natural disasters are triggered when weak layers of frozen snow are disturbed, sending solid sheets of snow, rock and ice skidding down the mountainside – often completely out of the blue.
Elyse, then 33, was on a peak near Seattle when she almost became a victim to one of these unpredictable terrors, which are the subject of an upcoming BBC documentary, Avalanche – Making a Deadly Snowstorm.
"It's a lot like being on a roller coaster," Elyse tells the show. "The only difference is with an avalanche you never know how or when it's going to end."
'My three friends died just metres away from me'
After noticing a smoky-looking plume of snow coming down the mountain, Elyse barely had time to act.
"My ski partner yelled at me and then I just flipped over and over and over," the American says. "That's when it struck me: this is how I'm going to die."
When the slide of snow finally came to rest, Elyse was mostly buried, but her face was just exposed enough that she could still breathe.
She was only alive because she was wearing an avalanche airbag – a backpack which inflates during a snowslide, making the wearer more likely to rise to the surface and avoid suffocation.
"The snow had solidified around me like cement," she says. "I was so stuck I couldn't even free my head and lift it."
Trapped in a white tomb, Elyse faced the risk of freezing. However, after ten minutes, nearby rescuers spotted her on the surface of the snow and dug her out.
None of her three friends, however, were wearing the life-saving airbags. All three died, buried between four and six feet of snow, with one of the corpses found just steps away from where Elyse ended up.
Today, Elyse is still skiing, and has become the face of the airbag company which she says saved her life.
'Snow was jammed down my throat and in my eyes'
Three quarters of avalanche deaths are caused by suffocation, something Johno Verity knows all too well.
In 2013, the British snowboarder almost died after being buried under an avalanche in New Zealand, caused by a weak layer of snow fracturing as he skidded over it.
"All of the slope was breaking up," says Johno, whose friends were able to film the horrifying scenes as a whole mountain churned beneath them.
"It started undulating and became a river of snow," he adds. "Then there was a blood-curdling feeling of having snow jammed down my throat, in my eyes, up my nose."
John's own footage shows him tumbling down the hillside in a cloud of snow, before thankfully coming to a stop on the surface – breathing heavily but alive.
If he had ended up face down beneath a drift, then he would probably never have lived to tell the tale.
'I knew my son was dead'
Changes in the Earth's climate are making avalanches more likely to strike in unusual places, and more deadly as a result.
In 2014, this resulted in a freak avalanche surging into the town of Missoula, Montana – an area which had never previously been affected.
The disaster was caused by a snowboarder on nearby Mount Jumbo, a peak which had become so loaded with snow over the winter that all snow sports there had been deemed too dangerous and banned.
Down in the town, Casey Greene had just let his children out to play in the falling snow when an earthquake-like tremor shook the ground.
"I heard a noise coming round the corner and it sounded like a truck ploughing snow," he says, describing the moment snow descended on his home by the tonne.
The next thing he knew, his 10-year-old daughter, Coral, and his eight-year-old son, Phoenix, were buried in a drift and his wife was screaming.
While neighbours managed to dig out his daughter within a few minutes, over three quarters of an hour passed without any sign of his son.
"I know the statistics," Casey says. "People don't live for long under snow. I was sitting there trying to tell my wife that he's still alive when really you know that he's dead."
However, when Phoenix was dug out – after being buried for an hour – he was alive, having been miraculously protected by an air pocket beneath the cascade.
He didn't even have enough room to move his hands, but Phoenix bit and licked at the snow until he had some breathing space. Then he passed out from the cold, before being rescued by neighbours with only minor injuries.
'I was lying there, waiting to freeze to death'
Michel Colville, who lived next door, was not so lucky.
She was in her home with her husband, Fred Allendorf, when the snow came crashing down, sweeping her over 20 metres in the space of seconds.
"I went from sitting on the couch to being covered by my house," Fred says. "It was like a bomb went off.
"The house was completely demolished. It was smeared all over the landscape.
"And I was lying there, waiting to either freeze to death, suffocate or be rescued."
Fred was pulled from the wreckage within minutes, but it took longer to find his wife. Although she was alive when she was dug out, Michel died of her injuries two days later.
Hers was just another tragic death which can be chalked up to the unpredictable nature of these natural disasters.
How long could you survive?
If we knew when and where avalanches were most likely to hit, we'd stand a better chance of being able to prepare for them.
That's why Professor Danielle George, an engineer and physicist from Newcastle, chose to investigate avalanches for the BBC show.
But when she is tasked with enduring a simulated avalanche, to test some potentially life-saving equipment, she realises the true horror of being trapped in one.
Lying on the cold snow, she is given a piece of breathing equipment called an Avalung, which works like a scuba diver's oxygen tank to keep her alive in the suffocating snow for up to an hour.
Then, half a tonne of snow is heaped over her body, piling a metre high above her and effectively burying her alive.
"It's like being set in concrete," Danielle says after the ordeal. "I felt completely helpless. I couldn't move, hear or see anything. "
Within seconds, her heart rate soars to 135 beats per minute and her oxygen levels plummet, although she is still able to breathe thanks to her Avalung.
But it takes less than five minutes for a panicking Danielle to lose it completely, and rescuers monitoring her vital signs leap to her aid.
The short ordeal moved her to tears, and the scientist was still hyperventilating as her colleagues brushed the last of the snow off her.
"It's a truly frightening experience," she sobs. "It's the sheer panic of claustrophobia"
But with the advances in avalanche-proof kit, and scientists attempting to better understand how and why avalanches strike, it's hopefully an experience fewer people will have to endure.
Avalanche – Making a Deadly Snowstorm airs at 9pm on 18 October on BBC Two.
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