By Keith Liggett
A friend spent three days last week flying around the surrounding valleys making a mid-winter wildlife count. As the helicopter followed two mule deer on a ridge high in the upper Elk Valley, the deer kicked off two large rocks. The rocks dropped off the cliff below the ridge, plopped into the snow and the whole bowl let loose. The avalanche dropped several thousand feet before stopping. In almost 30 years of flying making winter wildlife counts, my friend has never seen as many avalanches as over those three days. At several points they saw natural slides drop. Sometimes in the immediate valley. Sometimes in the next one over. Everything was sliding that had not slid. It was all hot.
A snowboarder on a ridge outside of Missoula released a slide that dropped down a gully, through a catch basin and into a long established neighborhood. The slide took out a house, damaged several others and an apartment building across the street. Neighbors immediately ran to the site with shovels and chainsaws to find anyone who might be buried. Three people were pulled out alive, one later died, one has been released from hospital. The last remains in serious condition.
They were simply hanging out in the ‘hood on a sunny day and they got smoked by an avalanche.
People are both casual and serious about avalanches—often at the same time.
Most of the folks I ski with wear transceivers when skiing at FAR. That’s a start, but very few carry a shovel and probe (myself included). What are we going to do when a member of the party gets buried? Find the transceiver signal, then take out a can of spray paint and paint an X with the notation,” Here lies Benny. RIP.” That way the helicopter knows where to land.
The transceiver is a start, but you need to act on information. You need a shovel to dig down to the signal. Knowledge is nothing without the ability to take effective action.
Statistics vary from region to region due to snow differences, but loosely here the stats I learned in my training.
90% of the parties trigger the avalanche causing their incident.
Half the people fully buried are dead when the avalanche stops. Dead. Finished. Tumbling down a hill, over cliffs, through trees in rock hard snow without air is not a way to live a long life.
If you are not pulled out in the first four or five minutes, your chance drops by another fifty percent. (You now lie at a 25% chance of being alive). It drops another 25% each of the following five minutes. After 20 minutes you have a one in a hundred chance of coming out alive.
Yesterday I drove a friend to the Calgary airport.
On the way home, I noticed the road cuts on highway 22 had spontaneously slid. The highway department designs road cuts at the “angle of repose. They are not usually susceptive to sliding.
Every one is saying the conditions outside the controlled boundaries of the ski area are dangerous–the Canadian Avalanche Center, various new outlets and virtually all ski patrols. They are not saying this to “save” the powder for themselves. They are saying it is dangerous because it’s a mess out there. Unstable, nasty dangerous snow covers the Rockies from Colorado north into Canada. We are routinely seeing climax slides taking out two to three hundred year old trees.
It’s pretty simple. If you go into the backcountry now, you are playing avi roulette with five cylinders loaded. Loaded with dum dums.
Your choice.
And remember, carry a shovel and probe, And the spray paint, so the helicopter can find the body.
