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Feb. 25 (UPI) -- A French teen and a British man died in separate incidents after getting lost while skiing in the French Alps Saturday. Both the 13-year-old boy and the man died after falling several hundred feet from cliffs in the mountain range when they traveled outside of the marked slopes.
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The French boy went up a ski lift with his father, 10-year-old brother and 6-year-old sister near the ski resort of Avoriaz Saturday afternoon.
Later the father allowed the two boys to return on their own as he took their sister down a slope.
The teen and his 10-year-old brother removed their skis and entered a forest after straying off course for an unknown reason.
They later fell off a 500-foot cliff and were discovered by rescuers overnight. The oldest boy died of multiple injuries and his brother is being treated for shock and a broken pelvis.
In a similar incident an unnamed British man fell about 650 feet off a cliff and died after he and two friends traveled off the marked slopes while skiing at the resort of Oz-en-Oisans Saturday.
"They were following ski tracks but they got lost when the tracks came to an end," a spokesman for the gendarme mountain rescue unit said. "They saw a marked slope in the distance and were trying to get to that. But the area they had to go through was very unstable, made up of ridges and a mixture of snow and rocks."
Police said all three men were experienced skiers in their 20s.
All three men fell from the cliff at different times, one was unscathed, another suffered minor injuries and it the third appeared to have died instantly.
"His body rolled down the ridge, bashing off rocks several times before it came to a halt," the spokesman said.
A father and daughter were killed during an avalanche while skiing in the French Alps last Sunday.
