A man who died in an accident near the Western Alaska village of Holy Cross on Monday appears to have been struck and killed by his own snowmachine, according to Alaska State Troopers.

There are no indications 40-year-old Glenn Edwards hit anything, a trooper said Thursday. An investigation into Edwards' death is continuing, but it appears that he was somehow bounced of the machine and that it then struck him, causing fatal injuries. "He did not have a helmet on,'' a trooper in Aniak added.

Unlike much of central Alaska, which is deep in snow this year, the western part of the state has a relatively thin cover of only about 18 inches. In that part of the state, snowmachine trails -- the winter roads of rural Alaska --- are well compacted, hard and sometimes icy. On such trails, it is possible for the skeg beneath the ski of a speeding snowmobile to grab, jerking the machine sideways and throwing the rider.

Troopers reported Edwards, a lifelong resident of the area, was only about five miles east of Holy Cross, population 176, on the trail to Reindeer Lake when the crash that killed him occurred at about 5 p.m. His death was the second snowmachine-related fatality in sparsely populated Western Alaska in a week. Alaska State Troopers say 20-year-old Jed Alexie of Nunapitchuk, population 518, apparently died of hypothermia after getting lost in a storm on a trip to Nelson Island only days earlier. The island about 520 miles northwest of Anchorage is part of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta that looks on a map at first to be part of the Alaska mainland, but is a chunk of land surrounded by water.

Troopers said Alexie was traveling across the island with 21-year-old Merlin Fox on the way to Toksook Bay, a village of 598 people, on the western shore. The two men became separated along the trail at night. Fox made it into Toksook Bay about 3:30 a.m. A search was organized for Alexie the next morning, but searchers were driven back by bad weather. By the time the weather eased on Thursday, Alexie was dead.

His body was found about six miles east of Toksook Bay. Authorities caution that although modern technology has made the snowmachine almost as easy to use as the automobile, extreme care must still be exercised when traveling in the Alaska wilderness. If someone gets lost or even runs out of gas, the weather can prove extremely dangerous, and in the event of any sort of crash, help is usually a long way off. Largely because of these things, snowmachines annually kill more than a dozen people in Alaska.

Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com.