A British skier who “died” for twenty minutes after being trapped in an avalanche revealed today how she “saw a peaceful forest” while experiencing the “afterlife”.

The 29-year-old, Rhianna Shaw, had been skiing with friends at the St Anton ski resort in Austria when she collided into another skier in February 2012.

As both of her ski’s flew off her feet and she tumbled down the slope, she felt what she thought was a “wash of snow” shower her. It turned out to be a massive avalanche.

“Our crash was so powerful, it created a massive fracture in the mountain and forcing a ledge to break off, setting off an avalanche which pushed me 200 meters down.”

She had realized that no one could hear her screaming for help.

“Suddenly I stopped moving and all I could feel was this weight. Heavy snow just stopping me from moving, seeing and thinking. I could feel everything, but within seconds I couldn’t breathe. I was just focusing on breathing.”

Shaw said “everything became so peaceful” after she made the hard decision to stop breathing due to being encased in snow.

Initially the skier thought she was having a vivid dream. She had died, but her brain was still working.

“I started walking along a pathway in this peaceful, pale forest. It had big tall evergreens on either side. Everything was as bright as day. Weirdly it was so calming, and it looked like there was some kind of snow on the ground but not like snow as we know it.”

Rhianna believes she was conscious for at least five minutes before she decided to “let herself die”.

Her friends had tried to call her phone for nine minutes after she collided with the other boarder.

“It’s actually only by chance that I was found. My friends told me they had just been sticking their hands in random parts of the snow. At first they found one of my ski poles. But then they found my leg.”

She says her doctor told her there was a six per cent chance I would have survived from the suffocation she endured.