Staff avalanche rescue practice is made as realistic as possible. MARC PICHÉ.
6
The thing about heli-skiing is that things can go from really, really good to really, really bad really, really quickly.
— Roger Atkins, CMH guide
An avalanche is as shocking a transformation as you’ll ever see in the natural world. One second there is an utterly still slope of downy-soft powder and the next, a storm of irresistible movement and lethal violence. Watching an avalanche happen is as shocking as if a calm lake suddenly produced a tsunami or a blue sky gave birth to a tornado.
In the quintessential slab avalanche, the kind most frequently encountered by skiers, the perimeter of the slide is the first thing to appear, with jagged cracks running chaotically around the edge. The avalanche starts in slow motion but quickly gains speed and recruits every flake of snow within its perimeter into the monster. Within five seconds, the beast can be moving at 100 kilometres per hour – faster acceleration than an Audi S4. The delicate snowflakes are quickly demolished by the violence, changing cappuccino fluff into thick concrete in a matter of seconds. The ensuing force is irresistible. Entire villages have been razed, train cars thrown from their tracks and road graders twisted like soda cans.
The destructive power of the avalanche is on par with the world’s greatest natural forces. In the First World War, avalanches caused significant loss of life during the fighting in the Alps. On both sides, soldiers learned the snow was more powerful than their guns, and by bombing snowfields above enemy troops, they started lethal slides that roared down on entire platoons, killing hundreds of people with the efficiency of weapons that didn’t even exist at the time. One report claimed at least 10,000 Austrian and Italian troops were killed by avalanches during a two-day period and quoted one officer as saying, “The mountains in winter are more dangerous than the Italians.”
In 1970 an earthquake released the biggest avalanche in history from the slopes of Huascaran, a 6768-metre peak in the Cordillera Blanca of Peru. In a matter of minutes, the monster was 10 miles long, a mile wide, and contained over 50 million cubic metres of snow – enough snow to fill the 102-storey Empire State Building in New York City ten times over. During its 4000-metre descent, the slide picked up mud, rocks and water as it demolished the moraine dams of two alpine lakes, hit a top speed of 280 kilometres per hour and travelled 25 kilometres – including a rapid climb over a 280-metre ridge – before dropping with the violence of a nuclear warhead onto the unsuspecting town of Yungay. Later, a pilot surveying the damage from the air commented, “Yungay no longer exists.”
So complete was the destruction of Yungay, and the chance of survival non-existent for the 20,000 people buried under the snow and rubble, that the Peruvian government prohibited any digging into the debris and declared the former town a national cemetery. In an eerie twist to the story, the only people in town who survived the tragedy were three little girls playing, against their parent’s wishes, in a cemetery on a small hill. A new town with the same name has been built in a slightly different location, but to this day the old town of Yungay is buried entirely under the rubble left behind when the snows of Huascaran melted, the victims entombed for eternity in the very spot where they drew their last breath.
Granted, an earthquake is an unusual trigger, but even the dry slab avalanches most common in ski environments can travel at speeds around 100 kilometres per hour. Just air moving at a similar speed is considered a gale force wind on the sailor’s Beaufort scale and is enough to knock a man off his feet. To imagine the force of getting hit with an avalanche moving at full speed, think about what it would feel like to stand in front of a snowplow travelling at highway velocity. A skier caught when the snow begins to slide might survive the ride, but anyone standing far enough below the avalanche to allow the moving snow to reach top speed before impact would likely be killed instantly.
Staff avalanche rescue practice is made as realistic as possible. MARC PICHÉ.
In modern day North America, avalanches are a threat mostly encountered by backcountry users, but roads and railways also cross avalanche paths and inevitably are hit by large slides, sometimes resulting in mangled automobiles and derailed trains. The population most at risk of getting caught has slowly changed in the past 50 years. Mountaineers topped the list of fatalities during the sixties and seventies. Backcountry skiers took it hardest through the eighties, and snowmobilers were snuffed most often during the nineties. Since 1950, most avalanche incidents involved people engaged in some sort of voluntary recreation, but ever since man first devised infrastructure to live in mountain areas during the winter, avalanches have been a killer.
Each year, about 150 people die in avalanches in countries where such statistics are tracked, but many of the poorest regions of the world are in rugged alpine country where many farmers, nomads, herdsmen and traders meet their makers in a cloud of white death without being reported. Without the soaring popularity of mountain recreation, avalanches would be just another force of nature that claims lives with seemingly chaotic abandon.
When people are killed by an avalanche while driving across a mountain range during a blizzard, no one says “What were they thinking?!” and the media don’t swarm like flies on a fresh one to find out who made mistakes and who is to blame – it is simply a tragedy. Dying while going about our normal routine, regardless of how mundane and unhealthy the routine may be, is viewed by our culture as somehow acceptable, but dying while recreating is often viewed as irresponsible.
Thanks to mountaineering, then skiing and now snowmobiling, the avalanche is part of our recreation culture, a risk perceived as being more akin to a trampling by a bull in Pamplona than getting hit by lightning while building a house. When something goes wrong in everyday life, people say “What a tragedy!” or “I can’t believe it!” or “They were in the wrong place at the wrong time!” But when something goes wrong in recreation, the reaction can be “They were asking for it!” or “It’s not really surprising!” or “They shouldn’t have been there in the first place!”
For those who find recreation an essential part of their lives, their sport shapes their personas and replaces something lacking in our temperate and risk-controlled modern lives. Some ride waves knowing that a curious shark might eviscerate them; some climb cliffs knowing that an errant boulder might flatten them; some hike in the high country knowing that a lightning bolt might barbecue them; some float rivers knowing that a whitewater hole might drown them; some sail the oceans knowing that a rogue wave might smash them; and some ski powder knowing that an avalanche might crush them.
In microcosm, powder skiing itself is riding an avalanche. Every snow crystal in contact with a skier moving downhill bashes into other crystals creating small tremors that spread out like a bow wave around the skier. The weight of the skier and the moving snow compresses deeper crystals in the snowpack and the snowpack changes subtly with each passing skier far to either side of the visible track. The sensation of skiing in control through a medium that is moving down the hill makes deep powder skiing a thrill on par with any experience human beings have ever invented. When enough snow gets moving to carry its own momentum, it is called a sluff. The powder clouds created by sluffs are impressive, and they can carry a skier over a cliff or into a tree well. For ski guides, the smaller avalanches can be more of a concern than the big ones. It is easy enough to avoid the big slide paths during dangerous avalanche cycles, but the smaller slides can be equally deadly and harder to manage. Even a sluff can push a skier into a tree well, riverbed or other terrain trap where the snow can pile up and quickly asphyxiate the strongest person if the rest of the skiers are not paying attention and continue skiing rather than help their buried friend.
While the avalanches lurking on ski slopes are relatively small on the scale of the world’s biggest slides, they are powerful enough that many avalanche fatalities in North America are not from asphyxiation under the snow, but rather from trauma caused by the forces within the avalanche and collisions with rocks and trees before the snow stops moving. The sensational element of avalanches makes off-piste skiers seem like daredevils compared to the seemingly benign resort skier, but even skiing in-bounds at a ski area has some exposure to avalanche risk. On a warm spring day in 2005, a steep mogul run named Pallavicini in Colorado’s Arapahoe Basin ski area lost adhesion to the mountainside beneath it as the snow melted, and the entire slab cut loose under the weight of a skier who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The ensuing slab avalanche crushed him to death in an open ski resort. Thanks to the work of ski patrols and snow professionals, less than 0.1 per cent of avalanche fatalities in North American happen in-bounds in a ski area. Now, avalanche forecasting services are giving backcountry skiers, mountaineers and snowmobilers information that, if they adjust their plans accordingly, makes travel in avalanche country a reasonably safe form of recreation.
For humans, avalanches are a purely destructive force, but even avalanches are part of the life cycle. Every spring, the grizzlies of the Columbia mountains awake from hibernation with a mighty hunger only to find the valley bottoms still full of snow, preventing access to the grubs, roots, herbs, berries and insects that make up most of their diet, so they climb into the high country looking for edibles. Springtime heli-skiers see tracks of the bears high on the mountainsides tracing the animals’ movements between avalanche debris fields where they can find uprooted trees and bushes with exposed and nourishing root systems – or carcasses of goats and caribou that have succumbed to a slide and are nicely refrigerated until the spring thaw.
The trouble is that the terrain where skiers find the most fun, and where caribou and goats find wintering grounds, is the same terrain where avalanches happen with the most frequency. Many of the veteran CMH guides and guests have stories that make the blood of any skier run cold. Veteran heli-skier Ken Ferrin was caught in a slide and remembers, “The hiss of the snow crystals moving against each other was followed by sudden silence as everything came to a stop. I was thinking about my family and that this might be it.” Ferrin was uncovered quickly and was unhurt.
Cariboos guide Bob Sawyer once watched a massive avalanche roar over him during a run with a group of guides. “I looked up as a huge lens of snow started moving above me. I ducked under a fallen tree, and as it roared over me, it sounded like two freight trains passing at the same time, and I could hear trees snapping around me.”
The early days of CMH heli-skiing in the Bugaboos were a race between the guides’ learning and a potential avalanche disaster that would have ended the heli-ski industry almost before it began. The guides’ ignorance about snow stability was indeed bliss, and luckily the first few seasons were blessed with consistent snowfall and relatively stable conditions. Lloyd “Kiwi” Gallagher remembers the avalanche knowledge during the mid-sixties and shakes his head, saying, “If we’d had poor stability during those first few winters, we’d all be dead.”
The sixth sense of a ski guide is still a potent and respected weapon against the white monster, but in those days it was the only weapon. Heli-skiing spit in the face of avalanche wisdom of the time. In 1970 the European guiding standard for avoiding avalanches was never to ski during a storm nor for a couple of days after a storm ended. During a big winter in the Columbias, this could mean waiting until April. In the Bugaboos, from the beginning, heli-skiing happened any day the helicopter could fly, and the sport introduced the greater ski world to the idea that it is during and just after a storm when the magic of deep powder skiing really happens – along with the majority of avalanches.
There were days when the mountains were just falling down and the ski groups avoided disaster by the narrowest of margins. Guide Thierry Cardon remembers a day in the Bugaboos when he was guiding behind a group led by Ernst Buehler. Thierry skied onto a slope and the warning bells started ringing in his ears. He stopped his group on a little knoll and traversed across the slope to test it while his group waited in a safe place. From right in front of his skis, a fracture shot ahead of him through three big gullies, effectively putting the entire valley into motion and creating a slab avalanche two metres thick and a kilometre wide. As the snow under Thierry’s skis began to drag him inexorably towards the ride of his life, a little tree popped out of the snow where it had been hiding, bent under the weight of the snowpack until the slab’s release uncovered it. Thierry grabbed the sprig with one hand with the conviction of a man whose life depended on it, and pushed the talk button on his radio with the other hand to tell Ernst, “Get out of the way, the whole mountain is coming down!”
“I don’t know how I held on to the tree – it was a massive force,” Thierry recalls with a distant gaze in his typically focused countenance. Somehow, he clung to the tree as car-sized blocks of snow accelerated past him. As far as Thierry knew, both his and Ernst’s groups were being devoured. When the force had passed, Thierry stood up and turned around to see his group standing wide-eyed on the knoll, safely perched on the one patch of snow on the entire mountainside that did not succumb to the massive slide. Ernst’s voice came over the radio asking if everyone was okay. His group had cut into the trees earlier than usual and was well out of harm’s way when the avalanche thundered past.
It was a lucky day. Ernst’s group would have been buried if he hadn’t decided to ski a slightly different line, and Thierry’s group was only saved by the behaviour of the slab that day. In some conditions, just being on a knoll or ridge doesn’t mean you’re safe. Slabs of snow can have enough tensile strength to pull snow from the opposite side of a ridge like a massive blanket being pulled over the top. On another day with particularly nasty slab formation, Thierry and fellow guide Pierre Lemire were checking snow conditions atop the Black Forest above the Bugaboo lodge. The two guides knew conditions were unstable, but they decided to poke around a little to see if they could find something safe enough to ski with the groups. As they stood on the ridge, they debated what should be done. Coming to no particular consensus, Pierre decided to ski. Just before he started, Thierry asked, “Do you have your Skadi turned on?”
The original Bugaboo Lodge. BRUNO ENGLER.
Pierre checked, and his Skadi was not transmitting. He turned it on and jumped in. Within a few turns, a fracture line ran 270 degrees around the cirque and the ensuing slide ran to the valley bottom. The slab had enough cohesion to pull Thierry into the beast as if he was standing on a table when someone pulled off the tablecloth. He remembers being sucked helplessly into the slide and as it picked up speed: “It was that uncomfortable, ‘clothes dryer spinning a rag doll’ feeling.”
When everything came to a stop hundreds of metres lower, with mountains of debris everywhere, Thierry found himself lying unhurt on the surface. Using his transceiver, he quickly found Pierre, who was blue and unconscious but still alive. The helicopter responded immediately, and soon they were on the way to the hospital. After a few minutes in the air, Pierre regained consciousness and seemed unhurt. With a house full of guests, and skiing to be done, they turned the machine around and went back to the lodge. Pierre guided the next day. With no precedent or policy for handling accidents, they accepted near misses stoically. Thierry explains, “After these close calls we’d just go back out and keep skiing. The show must go on.”
Had Pierre not checked his Skadi on top of Black Forest that day, he would have almost certainly been killed. The little devices have saved many lives over the last three decades, and have increased the chance of surviving an avalanche by a significant margin.
Long-time heli-ski guide Brian Keefer has been on the lucky end of a few mind-bending rides and managed to come out unscathed. Once while tumbling along in a slide he was knocked out briefly, and when he regained consciousness, the first thing that came into focus was his avalanche transceiver lying on the snow in front of him. He had placed it in a zipped pocket rather than strapping it to his torso, and only the random motion of the moving snow that left him on top rather than underneath saved his life. It’s not surprising that during his holidays, Brian is now more likely to be found working a point break in Baja than ski touring near home.
Helicopters are sometimes used for avalanche control, either as a vehicle from which to throw bombs onto an unstable feature or, on occasion, to release a nearby slide by landing. The helicopter has occasionally released slides unintentionally as well. Once, as a guide was loading skis into the basket, a large fracture appeared under his feet. The helicopter was on stable ground, but the guide slipped over the vertical wall of snow, or crown, left where the slab pulled away. He clambered back onto flat ground unhurt.
Another time, an avalanche released from above during a pickup and roared towards the helicopter and the waiting group. The helicopter lifted off, leaving the group on the ground, but the guide managed to climb into the ski basket. The slide lost its momentum before reaching the group, and the guide sheepishly climbed out of the basket.
One of the serendipitous developments that happened alongside the fledgling heli-ski industry was a focused study on snow science and avalanche mitigation for ski areas and highways. While the Swiss had the most advanced understanding of snow stability – almost their entire country is in avalanche-prone mountains – it was an American, Ed LaChapelle, who brought the study of snow science to North America.
LaChapelle studied at the Swiss Avalanche Institute in the fifties and brought his learning to Alta, Utah. With its unusually deep and frequent snow, Alta was a proving ground for both avalanche work and powder skiing technique at the same time Hans and Leo were learning the hard way in the Rockies and Columbias. In the early sixties, LaChapelle wrote the first comprehensive avalanche handbook for the US Forest Service and then rewrote it in simpler terms to produce The ABC of Avalanche Safety. The latter was the first publicly available avalanche handbook and is a resource still sold today after a number of revisions and reprints.
In the late sixties, LaChapelle began a project that had little to do with snow science or avalanche forecasting but everything to do with increasing one’s chances of surviving a burial. He built a radio transmitter about the size of a deck of cards that could be carried in a jacket pocket and, in case of burial, could be found with a small transistor radio. While experimenting with his invention, he talked to another skier, John Lawton, who happened to be an electrical engineer. Lawton suggested using an audio-frequency induction field because the strength of the signal diminishes more quickly than a radio signal, making the signal more sensitive to the location of the transmitter. Lawton ran with the concept and eventually took the Skadi avalanche transceiver, named for the Viking goddess of winter, to market in 1971. That very season, the first life was saved with a Skadi after an avalanche in the Bugaboos by the quick work of one Leo Grillmair. LaChapelle’s work helped make backcountry skiing a safer and more popular pursuit. He skied right up until his last breath, dying of a heart attack at 80 years old while carving powder at Monarch ski area in Colorado in 2007.
For good reason, many mountain professionals in the seventies were skeptical of avalanche transceivers or beacons. If people could be recovered after a complete burial, would they be more willing to step onto a hazardous slope? For ski guides, there was no question as to the usefulness of the devices, and heli-ski operations jumped on the technology the moment it became available. Today, with directional sensitivity and digital displays, beacons are easier to operate by less-practised users – although Leo Grillmair claims to be faster with a Skadi than anyone with any modern unit. Ken France, the manager of Kootenay, remembers when the current model, the Barryvox, came into use. “It was kind of a rude wake-up call when we got the new digital beacons,” he remembers. “People who had been skiing with us for years came up after our practice search and said ‘Cool! That was the first time I’ve found one of those things!’ We were all like . . . whoa.”
In 1976 Hans gave a presentation on heli-skiing and avalanches at an avalanche workshop sponsored by the Associate Committee on Geotechnical Research, Fisheries and Environment Canada, the British Columbia Department of Highways and the University of Calgary. It was the beginning of a symbiotic relationship between snow scientists and ski guides whereby the scientists shared their breakthroughs with the guides and the guides put them into practice in the field and returned with recommendations, results and new information. Hans’s presentation at the 1976 workshop forever established heli-ski guides as some of the foremost practical experts on avalanche issues. It began: “After having guided and conducted high mountain alpine ski tours for 12 consecutive seasons, I recognized one overriding difference when I seriously got involved in helicopter skiing in 1965: the exposure to avalanches is considerably greater in heli-skiing than in ski touring.”
Hans went on to explain the differences between the two disciplines and summarize the systems CMH used to deal with the hazard:
The groups were small, their expectations were very reasonable, and hence they were easy to control if conditions did get marginal. Further, on the climb or approach, you had sufficient time for observation. The climbs up the mountain took anywhere from two to five hours. With each push of the ski forward into the unbroken snow, with each plant of the pole, you got a message, and you had time to digest it. You could look around in all directions, you could listen, you could feel the temperature and the wind.
On almost every count the opposite holds true in skiing by helicopter. Because of the rapid uphill transportation, one or two runs a day is not enough. So even though you can find one or two runs you feel comfortable about, you are called upon to produce more. The expectations of these skiers are very high, and tend to be more so if your operations have been restricted by bad weather for a few days. When the weather clears you have 40 eager skiers making demands. They want to ski some new slopes. Now that there is a lot of fresh snow they want to ski where the snow is deepest, and on the steepest slopes! Most of these people are very eager downhill skiers, and seldom impressed with the inherent dangers of the surrounding mountain country.
In addition, there is very little time for observation. The flight up takes only minutes and although, with experience, you can draw some conclusions as to the nature of the snow by inspecting it by air, this kind of observation could not possibly compare with feeling the snow every inch of the way up a slope. So, with a minimum of observations, the heli-ski guide has to make some very difficult decisions. Often, he is called upon to make these decisions many times a day.
Hans and the CMH guides took every opportunity to attend avalanche education seminars and to talk with experts like LaChapelle. The popularity of heli-skiing was skyrocketing, and with the greater numbers of skiers, the exposure to avalanches increased accordingly. Between 1965 and 1976, CMH hosted a total of 58,000 skier-days. During the 1978/79 season, there were 25,000 skier days – almost half of the total of CMH’s first decade in a single winter. Several accidents involving various heli-ski operators and multiple victims brought pressure on the industry to scrutinize their practices thoroughly. In the 1980 avalanche workshop in Vancouver, Hans explained the recent changes in the industry:
Prior to the 1977 accident (resulting in three fatalities in the Bugaboos), the problem of minimizing the avalanche hazard while still providing exciting skiing had already received our attention. In retrospect, the procedures developed, while useful, were not adequate. The normal, intuitive field experience of the guides and the on-the-spot decision-making, while certainly very valuable, were no longer enough.
By this point, CMH was thirsty for avalanche education even as it was leading the industry in practical experience. Each year, CMH brought LaChapelle or snow science expert Peter Schaerer to guide training to introduce the guides to the most recent breakthroughs and practices, and enrolled guides in courses offered by the British Columbia Institute of Technology and Canada’s National Research Council. Hans noticed a shift in guiding due to the inevitable close calls – and worse – that had happened. While in the past, guides had been operating almost entirely as individuals making decisions based on their own vast experience, the accidents were a call for the industry to combine the individuals into a single, much more powerful decision-making entity. For CMH, it was the beginning of the modern era of avalanche hazard mitigation. Hans put it simply: “The emphasis is that scientific observation is indeed a very important part of avalanche hazard evaluation, even for a qualified and practising mountain guide.”
Guide Ernst Buehler examines snow crystals, looking for a tiny surface hoar layer that could cause instability in the snowpack. TOPHER DONAHUE.
To determine what went wrong when skiers were involved in avalanches, Hans enlisted LaChapelle, with his scientific approach to avalanche analysis, and had him review close calls and accidents to uncover any commonalities among incidents. What LaChapelle found was that the lust for the fresh track pushed the groups into the danger zone. Summarized Hans, “In each case, the accident happened when a guide, in trying to find untracked snow for his group, was pushed way out to the side of one run.”
He concluded, “This study showed that the guides were perhaps too eager to always provide unbroken snow for their groups; that each guide, apart from skiing in the same general area as the other groups, operated pretty well on his own; and that there was no formal decision-making process in outlining the day’s skiing program.”
To better manage groups in the complicated and vast terrain of CMH tenures, the guides began to build the system in use today. Thierry Cardon was instrumental in developing the daily “run list.” Thierry explained his vision for the run list: “Avalanches would happen when we would get out there and ski something we wouldn’t have skied if we had made the decision before leaving the lodge.” Thierry knew that the difference between a safe slope and a dangerous one is subtle, and that it is easy to get caught up in the pressure from the skiers and the pursuit of the fresh track. By giving every guide veto power before leaving the lodge, the guides had a tool for utilizing the collective experience and intuition of the team.
The list is a catalogue of all or most of the commonly skied runs in an area, and each morning before leaving the lodge the guides review the conditions and the estimated change overnight and collectively decide which runs are green, yellow or red. Green means the guide can choose to ski if he still feels good about it after seeing and touching it. Yellow means the run can be skied if a certain hazard is not present – like a cornice that needs to fall off before the run is safe. Red means the run cannot be skied that particular day under any circumstance. Most days, the run list looks like a Christmas tree with red and green scattered across the page.
Photographs of each ski run accompany the run list to create a tool for reviewing the day’s plan visually before leaving the lodge. The photos were placed in a loose-leaf binder with transparent overlays on each photo showing the ski lines, as well as hazards such as cornices and hidden cliffs, and the potential avalanche activity on the run. Today the entire system is digitized. According to Hans the run list and photo collection “largely eliminates a problem of the earlier days where often a guide would find himself on a run where, in retrospect, under the conditions, he would have preferred not to be, but he had no other choice than to try to get his group down safely.”
Recording weather and snowpack observations became a bigger part of the ever-changing effort to monitor hazard. Starting in the late seventies, each area was equipped with two weather stations, one at the base and one on a suitable summit, as well as snow stakes in various places, to keep track of each storm and the winter’s snow totals. Each area keeps a study plot fenced off to prevent skiers from affecting the snowpack, and every two weeks, guides dig deep pits and record the layering profile of the snowpack as the winter progresses. This system is still in place today. While snow scientists are still adamant about the value of study plots, empirical observations have shown that they often have little bearing on the actual stability of the slopes where the skiing happens. Mountains create extraordinarily complicated weather, and two valleys, sometimes just a few hundred metres apart, can have dramatically different wind and snow in any given storm. Even on the same run, snow profiles can show entirely different results.
A complete snow profile is a time-intensive project. Even with a couple of guides to dig and take observations, a thorough snow profile takes over an hour. First, the guide digs a pit as deep as the lowest layers of concern, then the cross-section of the snow is examined for differences in density, temperature and bonding by using probing, thermometers and various shear tests. The results are diligently recorded using acronyms, symbols and the language of snow science that is indecipherable to the average skier.
The whole process is not practical or even possible with a herd of powder pigs frothing at the bit behind the guide, so guides sometimes do abbreviated snow profiles, just digging far enough to evaluate layers of greatest concern. But by no means does this imply guides only evaluate the snow when they have a shovel in their hands. The way snow skis, the way the wind has rippled its surface, the reaction within a snow mushroom when they ski through it, the sound snow makes when they walk away from the landing pad to take a leak, the changes from morning to evening and every aspect of the guide’s own personal radar are all recorded and considered.
At the 1980 workshop, Hans also reported collaboration with Environment Canada’s Pacific Weather Centre to obtain conditions from three different elevations measured at four different locations around British Columbia in 12-hour intervals. At the time, getting the weather report required a phone call from each lodge to one of several regional weather offices. The system was rudimentary compared with today’s real-time Internet information exchange among highway departments, ski patrols, backcountry ski huts, heli- and cat-ski outfits and weather computers, but any access to up-to-date weather forecasting was a huge step for the remote heli-ski lodges, where for 15 years a weather report meant looking out the window – a technique still frequently used for its reliability and relevance.
Hans was a fan of science, but at the same time he saw its limitations in the real world of ski guiding. He observed, “Among our group of 42 guides we have, on one hand, highly experienced people who view all this paperwork with great suspicion, feel very uncomfortable with it and thus get very little or anything out of it. On the other hand, we have people who chart and record snow and weather observations with admirable diligence, do the most detailed snow profiles, but have little sense of and feel for the terrain.”
A skier triggers a small avalanche in the early days of heli-skiing. This size avalanche poses little danger in this terrain, but if there were a cliff below… HANS GMOSER.
While the number of guides has grown since then to over a hundred, and all of them see value in recording snow observations, there is an eternal debate over how much snow science can really predict something as chaotic as an avalanche. Hans concluded his 1980 presentation with a prediction that raised the hackles of the individualist guides of the day:
We may, however, be headed in the direction of today’s commercial airline pilot who no longer controls the machine, but rather becomes an extension of the machine with programmed actions. While heli-skiing will be some time in reaching this point, the direction is already very clear. More and more the emphasis is shifting to the scientific observation, the gathering of records, and the ensuing programmed responses. The day will come when, each morning, the heli-skiing guide will add the latest computer printouts to the stack of papers and manuals in his rucksack and then proceed with his group to the predetermined run, follow the predetermined lines to the predetermined pickup place and repeat this until, upon receiving a certain signal from skiing control centre, he knows it is time to head home.
While prophetic, this was not Hans’s personal way of handling the mountain world. Nancy DaDalt, from the marketing department of the CMH office in Banff, remembers a meeting where a group was debating the intricacies of snow science and data collection. Hans was looking steadily more irritated as the debate continued. Eventually he banged his fist on the table and yelled, “Damn it! You have to go out and smell it and taste it and see it and touch it!”
While some of Hans’s predictions have come to pass – for instance, the predetermined, computer-generated run list for the day – the concept of a skiing control centre calling the shots is as far-fetched today as it was 25 years ago. In fact, recent trends in snow safety are tipping back towards individuals in the field rather than towards an Orwellian skiing control centre. If such a centre were to dictate that skiing was only allowed on slopes of 25 degrees or less with no danger from above, the risk of avalanches could almost be eliminated entirely, but so would the heli-ski industry. People who can afford heli-skiing live in an ultra-safe world, and the taste of danger is invigorating and makes many of them feel more alive than they ever have before.
Jan Burks, a switchboard operator for CMH, was always surprised how many people wanted to go skiing after a high-profile accident somewhere in the industry. “Did the danger make it more exciting or what?” she wondered.
A number of magazine articles attempted to explain the intrigue with risk. Roberta Walker wrote in Maclean’s magazine that the risk “adds a taste of that most exotic of all spices.”
Tom Briggs wrote in Business World: “Gmoser is forthright about the risks: he says flatly, ‘We are probing a new frontier of skiing and there are bound to be hazards.’ He acknowledges that it is up to him and his skilled guides to cut those risks to a minimum. Nevertheless, without those risks, there wouldn’t be the same sense of adventure in this, the greatest skiing the world has to offer.”
The unrivalled fun of powder skiing in the big mountains, and the inseparable risk of a catastrophic avalanche is the yin and yang of the experience. There have been a number of fatal accidents in the heli-ski industry, but the defining incident for CMH happened on March 12, 1991, when a spectacular day of heli-skiing was drawing to a close in the Bugaboos. The snow was fantastic and conditions were the sort that allow the biggest features to be skied: good visibility and deep powder on top of a relatively stable snowpack. A couple of seemingly well-bonded layers hid deep in the snowpack, but all observations from earlier in the season had concluded that the layers were of no concern. After half the group had returned to the lodge, due to tired legs from three days of non-stop powder skiing, the rest flew to the top of a steep north-facing avalanche path to finish their day on an exciting 2,500-foot run called Baystreet.
Like many big runs, Baystreet begins with smaller bowls that converge into one chute about halfway down the slope. Guide Dean Walton led the first group into the run and, following advice from lead guide Leo Grillmair, stayed along the right edge of the rightmost bowl. The skiers found the light powder and spectacular terrain that makes heli-skiing in British Columbia an experience to live for. At the bottom, Walton radioed back to Jocelyn Lang, the guide of the last group and the assistant manager of the Bugaboos area, to expect excellent conditions along the right side of the run. Lang led her group slowly through a rocky shoulder to access the run and gave them specific directions on how to ski the pitch.
To minimize danger, even when conditions are good, most guides give concise instructions on how to ski each run – especially big, steep, exposed runs like Baystreet. Lang instructed her guests to ski to the right of the tracks left by the first group and to stop before an island of trees in order to keep everyone in sight for the main part of the run. Lang skied to the trees and stopped to watch the rest of the group. After about half the group made their way down, a German skier cut wide to the left of the other tracks and a second skier followed. Five years later, in a Vancouver courtroom, Lang recalled realizing the skier must not have understood her instructions, which were in English, and she yelled at them to ski back towards the group.
It’s impossible to know if it was the language barrier or the burning desire to ski a fresh line, but when the skiers cut wide of the group’s tracks, an imperceptible tremor ran through the slope as an old layer of crystals lost their tenuous adhesion to one another and set the slope in motion. According to court hearings, Lang remembers hearing no sound, but only sensing the sudden movement of the ground beneath her feet. Far above, the slope released, building into a large avalanche before slamming into the hapless skiers. The skiers were only ten metres from the relative safety of the trees, and they struggled to escape. One of the two skiers left standing on solid ground 15 or 20 metres from the maelstrom described the mass of the avalanche that bore down on the rest of the group as an “enormous tidal wave of snow.”
A minute later, nine skiers were buried at the bottom of the slope. Jocelyn Lang was the sole survivor of the hideous ride, left relatively unhurt on the surface of the snow facing up the mountain that had just devoured her group, killing everyone caught in the slide except Lang, who was left with minor injuries to her body but massive injuries to her heart and soul. Even the typically objective court report of the incident called her survival a “miracle.”
The pain that ended when the snow stopped moving shifted quickly to the victims’ families, and the entire heli-ski industry shuddered with the worst accident in the sport’s 25-year history. The media bore down on the Bugaboos like angry wasps to sensationalize the tragedy. By the following day, the helicopter traffic was thick in the air surrounding the Bugaboo lodge, forcing the authorities to close the area to all aircraft except rescue helicopters. While the media scoured the area for controversy and gore, the families of the victims entered the limbo of mourning.
A couple of years passed while the heli-ski industry and the victims’ families processed the tragedy. Eventually, the wife of one of the victims decided CMH had been negligent, and a year-long lawsuit ensued, a case that crossed the boundary of the particular tragedy and became an inquest into the entire sport of heli-skiing. In each stage of the case, the judge followed a similar chain of reasoning: first the CMH guides and systems were judged against the industry standards, with expert witnesses brought in to examine the complex decision-making involved in ski guiding. In every aspect, it was determined that the guides’ standards that day, and the CMH standards in general, were equal to the best in the industry. So then the industry standards were brought into consideration. The judge wrote in the case summary: “The next question is – is there a basis for finding the industry standard negligent? One might be – does the standard affront the court’s general experience, sense of logic and common sense? Or, is there some broader standard against which this industry standard can be found wanting?”
It was determined that the industry standard was acceptable, the signed waiver stood up in court and the backcountry ski guiding industry breathed a collective sigh of relief. Bugaboo guides no longer ski Baystreet, not in a retroactive attempt to avoid a repeat incident, but in honour of those who died there.
It is a testament to CMH and other large-scale heli-ski businesses that skiing with the big operations is statistically the safest way to ski backcountry powder. Individual backcountry users and smaller helicopter and cat-skiing teams have traditionally not had the same number of experienced guides collectively making decisions and gathering information. Now, with InfoEx and Internet access to observations and forecasts, all professional backcountry users have similar information available, but every evening a conference call among CMH areas gives them the widest range of observations of any guide service.
At CMH, a custom database is the backbone of the system. It is the brainchild of Roger Atkins, a heli-ski guide, physicist and expat American, and one of the most respected guides in the world of avalanche studies. He began a quest for accurate avalanche forecasting while working in Utah for the Alta ski patrol. Atkins built a database called Snowbase, a name still used today for the system used by CMH to track animal sightings and changes in the snowpack, and to catalog runs, hikes and other information useful for making sound decisions. In the beginning, Atkins’s program used analytical layer modelling and statistical comparisons over time to predict avalanches on a particular slope. For a single ski run or an area like Alta, which is both blessed and plagued by big snows and big avalanches, it was an extremely useful tool. Walter Bruns and Colani Bezzola, always looking for the next step in snow safety, caught wind of Atkins’s Snowbase and invited him to a guide training in the Adamants to share his findings. At the time, Atkins was searching for the Holy Grail for avalanche professionals: a way to model avalanche activity and in effect be able to forecast avalanches. “The ultimate goal was to bring avalanche forecasting into the guiding world,” says Atkins.
Almost inevitably, CMH hired Atkins to develop such a program, but it was nearly impossible to help heli-ski guides operating in huge areas from extremely inaccessible locations with no Internet and only patchy phone and fax contact. To begin with, the CMH headquarters in Banff distributed a weekly fax of pertinent weather and avalanche information. In a serendipitous development akin to the helicopter improvements in the late sixties, computer technology in the eighties reached a point where real-time exchange of information was possible for the guiding profession. Atkins remembers, “I was public enemy number one at first, when guides started to have to use computers as part of their job.”
In its current incarnation, also managed by Atkins and Bezzola, Snowbase helps the guides collect and use the massive data sets of daily temperature, snowfall, wind, snowpack evaluation, skier impact on the snow layers, and expert opinion. For the vast heli-ski tenures, run photos connected to the run list were added to the program and are now the most useful part of the system, according to Atkins. Guides are able to review the terrain they will be skiing in just minutes or hours before committing to the runs, rather than rely on old memories and other guides’ verbal descriptions.
As for Atkins’s original vision for using a computer to forecast avalanches, it has proven unrealistic for the vast backcountry of the Columbia Mountains. Atkins quickly realized the program was far better as an information gathering tool.
A snow scientist from Vancouver, Pascal Hägeli, came to the same conclusion after attempting to create a forecasting tool for the backcountry that would “create a model telling people where avalanches will be.” To conduct the project, Hägeli used datasets from Atkins’s Snowbase and evaluated the potential to create a modelling program. In a phone conversation with the author, Hägeli explained, “Avalanches are a complex phenomenon. Because of spatial and time variables we are far from being able to model them over a large area. From my perspective, guides have a much better ability to extrapolate based on their experience than we (scientists) can with modelling. We are far from the point of a guide as far as modelling where avalanches will occur over the next 24 hours.”
And it is the next 24 hours that mountain guides and other avalanche terrain professionals obsess over. Every day, no fewer than 50 different areas in the interior ranges of western Canada report on an information exchange called InfoEx, a system for sharing snowpack and weather observations among professionals operating in avalanche country, including highway departments, backcountry ski lodges, ski resorts, cat-ski operators and heli-ski companies.
As of 2007, Thierry Cardon was spearheading an effort to make historical observations of ski runs an easy and useful part of the system. When a first-year guide clicks on a photo of a run, observations from 30-year veterans will pop up on the screen. Atkins’s Snowbase already has the capability of cataloguing the information, but collecting the information from the memories of the guides is no small task. The future breakthroughs in avalanche avoidance will likely be built around the utilization of historical observations of particular slopes.
Anyone with avalanche forecasting as part of their profession takes things seriously. Ski guides, however, are the only avalanche professionals who bet their lives on their decisions every single time. Ski patrols, road crews and avalanche/snowpack consultants know people’s lives hinge on their judgment, but it’s a whole different kind of commitment when a ski guide drops onto a huge mountain face with a group of skiers hammering the hill behind him.
Like a school-bus driver who takes off her seatbelt on an unusually dangerous drive with a busload of kids, more than one guide has turned off his or her own beacon on extremely unstable days when any slope that could slide would slide, when cracks are shooting out from under the skis on every rollover, when only a few of the hundreds of runs in the tenure are safe enough to ski, in order to sharpen the edge of self-preservation in the name of the group’s safety. This is a counterintuitive concept for those of us who would want every chance at survival if we were buried. However, for the guides, who become accustomed to the routine of making life or death decisions, turning off the transmission from the personal beacon turns off the routine and raises the guide’s instincts and assessment to a fever pitch. One guide explained the reasoning this way: “It makes it like skiing alone, where there is no chance of help if you make the wrong decision.”
Based on the growing popularity of off-piste skiing with and without helicopters, many skiers are willing to take the risk, provided the risk is small. Here is where the guide’s job gets tricky. It is possible to avoid avalanche risk altogether, but doing so limits the skiing to such low-angled terrain that on deep powder days heli-skiing would feel like crosscountry skiing in heavy gear. The pressure to find exciting skiing while minimizing the risk squeezes the guides like a vise.
Roko Koell laments, “I see a tendency now to try to turn the mountains into a big amusement park, but a hyper-controlled environment is not possible.”
Thierry Cardon agrees: “There is one thing business-based management will never get: you cannot have two forces like ‘steeper and deeper’ and ‘increased safety’ at the same time. There is a fine line between having it safe and having it exciting – the line I’ve been balancing on for 30 years. I’m constantly fighting between people who want to have it more safe, and people who want to ski more aggressive.”
The common goal of avoiding fatal incidents forces cooperation among the guides, and the balancing act of collective decisions made by a group of strong individuals works incredibly well – most of the time. On a good day, guiding for CMH is like playing in an all-star game. On a bad day, nerves are strung to the breaking point and it’s an all-too-real exercise in survival where every hair on the guide team’s collective neck is standing on end. The entire industry rides the waves of ski conditions versus avalanche hazard. High hazard cycles put the guides in a predicament. Says Thierry, “The only way you can increase the satisfaction when conditions are poor is to increase hazard.”
The innovators of the ski world are working on the next system to predict more accurately where and when avalanches are likely to happen, as well as the next tool to increase the chances of survival when someone predicts wrong. The next generation of beacons promises features that no one really wants to ever have to use. Vital signs sensors will identify a beacon on a corpse so searchers can move in to save victims still alive under the snow. A controversial feature is being tested that will give each beacon a code. This way, it will be clear how many people are buried, but it will also invite playing favourites in the triage of a multi-burial incident. Who wouldn’t recover wife or brother before a stranger they met only yesterday?
Recent technological innovations offer tools that may one day improve the chances of surviving a slide. Avalungs are a simple tube-and-filter system that skiers can wear on their chest or integrated into a backpack. In case of burial, if the skier manages to survive the ride and keeps the mouthpiece from getting ripped out of his mouth and has enough space to breathe when the snow stops moving, the device will filter fresh air out of the snow and a valve expels stale carbon-dioxide-rich exhalations away from the intake filter and prevents a seal forming around the mouth as warm air melts the nearby snow before refreezing in a small bubble of ice. In tests, the Avalung allows people to stay alive for hours under the snow, and at least one survivor of an avalanche in Europe credits the device with saving his life. In North America, where most avalanche fatalities occur from trauma during the slide, Avalungs have yet to be fully embraced by the ski guiding community.
Airbags that inflate like a parachute if a skier pulls the cord work well to keep the victim floating on the surface, and new designs protect a skier’s head from impact. Filling a helicopter with people wearing inflatable airbags presents another hazard – the accidental inflation of the airbag, which would interfere with the pilot’s vision and controls. For this reason, airbags are not allowed inside a helicopter but can be carried in the ski basket. While not required, some heli-skiers bring along either Avalungs or airbags in the hope that the technology will increase their chances of surviving an avalanche.
But no amount of technology will completely remove the danger from avalanche. Beacons, airbags, Avalungs and technology are not nearly as effective as staying out of an avalanche in the first place. Bob Geber summed it up when a guest asked him, “In case of an avalanche, what position would you take?”
Geber responded, “There’s only one position you can take: bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.”