Never Gonna Be The Same

December 13, 2007-- Last week we finally got the big, Sierra-style storm we had been waiting for since opening day a month earlier. By the weekend, the sun was partially out, and three feet of fresh snow coated the upper part of the mountain. We skied some lower runs in the morning, while the ski patrol prepared the upper sections. Shortly before noon it was game-on, and not long after we were already on our second powder run off the top. We were in an open but fairly remote area on the hill where we knew we could count on getting steep, fresh tracks. It had been so good the first time in that we went straight back to the same spot.

Bah-BOOM!

"Sounds like patrol is still doing control work, they must be somewhere on the backside," I thought to myself as I began to get my camera out. Staying focused on the task at hand, my next thought was, "This would be a good angle to have Tim ski right to me this time." I turned my head uphill to tell him this, but never got a word out. Instead, my jaw dropped open in shock and awe. It was a sight I will never forget as long as I will live: a wall of snow 10 feet high and some 100 feet wide rushing and rumbling down the wide gully known as "P3," heading straight for *Rob, a good friend and ski partner of ours who had just taken a fall at the top of the wide apron below. He was still cleaning out his goggles and gathering himself up as I shouted over to him, "ROB, AVALANCHE!!"

Rob looked back over his shoulder, saw what was happening and tried to get up and out of the way, but the slide was moving much too fast and it was already nearly upon him. In my last view of him, again, another sight that is now burned permanently into my brain, Rob was about 50 feet down and to my right, he was almost half way up on his skis, kind of in a crouch, when that now 12 foot+ wall of snow hit him full force. Instantly, Rob was swept away. I strained to catch a glimpse of him in the maelstrom, hoping to have some idea where to look for him once the slide stopped. It was useless, I saw nothing but rushing snow below a kind of fog from the stirred up powder floating in the air.

Then, as the slide spread out over the apron and began to slow, about 1,000 feet down slope, I saw a lone figure rising up out of the snow. The fog around him cleared a bit and, miraculously it seemed, the figure was now skiing on top of the still moving slide. "Wow, look at that, Rob made it out on top, and he is even on his feet," I thought. "Everything is going to be okay, thank God." I was so relieved.

Then I turned back up the hill to check in with Tim, waiting above. There was just one problem: Big Tim wasn't there.

"Oh my God, where's Tim?" I shouted down to *John, a fourth member of our party who was not far below me, also out of the slide path. No answer. Extreme panic began to set in. "Where's Tim? Anybody know?" I shouted again, this time at the top of my lungs, voice becoming shrill. Confusion had set in as John seemed to point over toward P4, and I thought maybe he was indicating that Tim had gone around and down the next shot over. I moved over to my left for a better view, hoping against hope to see Tim skiing down. Nothing.

Turning back toward the deposition zone I thought, "I need to organize a search right now," my heart sank as I considered for a moment just how I was going to do this without transceivers, shovels or probes. It was the worst feeling in the world. I can't even begin to describe the awful feeling of helplessness, and the utter and complete despair which was washing over me at that moment. Hoping for another miracle, which was exactly what I thought it was going to take, I shouted down to the two below, "Do you guys see any sign of Tim?"

"I'm right here," shouted Tim with a wave. The fog had cleared enough for me to tell now that the figure I had seen standing up out of the snow was indeed Big Tim. Of course my relief was short lived, "So where's Rob? Any idea?" Tim signaled that he had Rob in sight, another hundred feet or so below his position. Skiing down to him, Tim found Rob fully buried, except for most of his head and part of one shoulder. As I skied down the chunky deposition zone, Tim signaled that Rob was okay before returning to helping Rob dig himself out.

The entire time, from the moment I first saw the figure I thought was Rob and I turned to check on Tim and saw that he wasn't there, to this point where I now knew everyone was accounted for, probably wasn't more than one minute. It seemed then like an eternity though, and it still does, actually. As shocked and awed as I was by the avalanche itself, and in seeing it sweep Rob away just yards from my position, the truly horrific part of the experience was the immediate aftermath. The confusion, and the nightmarish thought that my best friend was buried in the snow, and that I had no realistic way to even begin to find him, well, words fail me right now, except to say that it was a feeling I wouldn't ever wish on even my worst enemy. It was absolutely horrible.

Rob had lost one ski and both of his poles, so we looked around for his missing equipment as he sat there on the snow, dazed and in stunned silence. Suddenly we heard a shout from above and looked up to see yet another wall of snow coming down from above. A skier shot out to looker's right, letting out a yell that sounded much more like a howl of fear than a whoop of excitement. Some others who had gathered around us down low scattered, but this second avy lost steam quickly, most of the loose snow having already come down in the first slide. We decided at that point to cut the gear search short, it was time to get the hell out of Dodge.

After getting the badly shaken Rob up onto his one remaining ski, we gave him a couple of our poles and began the long, slow slog back to the main lodge. I found myself shivering at every stop as we waited for Rob to pick himself up from his latest one-ski spin out, but it wasn't really all that cold.

Aftermath

When an account of an avalanche incident is made public, the natural reaction from those who weren't there is to look for mistakes, errors in judgment and signs missed. We want to believe that our level of safety while skiing fresh powder on the steeps can be significantly enhanced to the point that it becomes manageable within our own individual tolerance for risk, so it's comforting to consider what could or should have been done differently in the hope of avoiding a similar situation ourselves.

Conversely, it's unsettling to consider the role luck plays in all of this, especially after a serious slide with actual or potentially awful consequences. And make no mistake, this was a serious avalanche. One of our regular crew, mountain guide and avalanche course instructor Lee Frees, went out to the scene the next day and reported that the crown was approximately 40 inches high and that the initial slab which triggered the slide was about 80 X 80 feet in size. The avalanche covered about 1,500 vertical feet and ran about 2,500 feet across the underlying snow. Rob says that he immediately began cart-wheeling, twisting and turning within the slide, and that his throat soon filled up with snow. He added that as things began to slow down, he tried to get a hand up to his mouth to create an air pocket, but that he could not raise his arms up against the force of the snow. Rob was convinced that he was going to die. Big Tim reports that the avalanche broke 5 to 10 feet above where he was standing, and that he briefly tried to ski out of it before being pulled down onto his back. He says that at its deepest part, before the snow spread out onto the apron, the sensation was that of swimming on his back down a river of rapids.

A = Big Tim, B = the author, C = "Rob," D = "John." After the slide, A2 = Big Tim, C2 = "Rob."

Tim fought to keep his skis out in front of him, paddling with his arms, but at one point, indicating the depth of this river of snow, he says his body was pretty much vertical, with the snow up to his chin, and he was floating, with nothing under his skis (which stayed on). Struggling to stay focused on remaing afloat, Tim was very much worried that he was going to get sucked down into the maw of the slide and suffocate. As the snow spread out, Tim felt the "ground" (or base snow) come back up under his skis, and it was at this point that he was able to start to get back up and ride out the remaining slide atop his boards.

With the size and unexpected nature of this avalanche in mind, it comes as no surprise that even those of us who were there are second-guessing ourselves. I've asked myself time and again if I missed something, some important stability clue that went unnoticed. Once I get past the basic fact that we were skiing at all on 3 feet of new snow over a frozen rock and dirt base (far, far from the first time and likely not to be the last), the answer always comes up no. I don't think I did. Despite the intermittent sunshine, the temperature had remained cold and the snow had not changed much from earlier in the morning, something that is often a concern when the sun comes out after a big storm in our part of the world. We found out later that the head patroller in charge that day had also skied P3 in between our first and second runs, because, as he put it, "I knew that's where the best snow would be."

Rob has been particularly hard on himself, stating repeatedly in a private written account he put together, and in subsequent email exchanges, that "the bottom line is, knowing better, I stopped in an avalanche path." I had to remind him that he didn't choose to stop where he did, he fell. And unfortunately, the spot in which he fell happened to be directly below Big Tim, who had skied out of the gully and onto a low ridge that ran from top to bottom. This ridge was a relatively safe spot for Tim to wait quietly, in that if a slab did happen to rip out, Tim would be at the top of the slide (which is exactly what happened), but it was not a good spot for anyone who, for whatever reason, might find themselves sitting below.

In retrospect, Rob should have gotten up as quickly as possible after his fall and moved to the side, out of the mouth of the gully. And the rest of us should have encouraged him to do so, but we were being considerably less than fully backcountry-like vigilant. It was our second time through the same shot, inbounds, on an open run, and on an avy controlled slope (I noted at least two bomb holes). This brings up an important point, and the reason we have decided to go public with this account, despite knowing full well that we will likely fall under the withering criticism of the internet kind: as a result of this experience, we have decided to modify our approach to inbounds powder days. In the future we will carry our full complement of avy gear in our Avalung equipped backpacks, and we will pay far more attention to our own stability assessments, as well as adhere closely to the basic protocols of safe travel in avalanche country. In short, we are going to ski inbounds powder as prepared and with the same attention to avoidance as we currently do in the backcountry.

I'm sure there will be many who will read this last statement and their first thought will be, "well, duh." Especially those based in Europe and other areas outside of North America. But here in the U.S. and Canada, skiing and riding in an avalanche aware manner is generally not the way things are done at the resorts, and for a very good reason: the risk of being killed in an inbounds avalanche on controlled, open terrain here has been, at best, statistically miniscule.

In 2005, a skier was killed in such a situation at A-Basin in Colorado, and yet it was the first time in 30 years that this had occurred in the state where more than one third of all U.S. avalanches take place. Even more worth noting is the recent study, "Risk Trends at U.S. and British Columbia Ski Areas," by Paul Baugher of the Northwest Avalanche Institute. According to Baugher, there were just 4 inbounds avalanche fatalities on slopes designated open at North American resorts in the 16 years covered by the study, ending with the 2005/2006 season. Three of these took place in the U.S., and one in Canada. For U.S. skiers, that works out to somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 inbounds avalanche fatality per 300 million skier days.

Is it any wonder that North American resort skiers have come to take inbounds avalanche awareness and safety for granted? Still, at the same time that we and others elsewhere have noticed an apparent increase in post-control inbounds avalanches, more and more skiers and snowboarders are pushing out to the edges of the resorts in search of untracked powder, especially when conditions in the backcountry are sketchy.

For us, the takeaway here is that the supposedly homogenized and pacified North American resort powder day experience is anything but, and those that would try to convince us otherwise, from the marketers to the backcountry elitists, aren't doing anyone any favors. Things are never gonna be the same. Our days of romping around, feeling nearly carefree in steep powder at the area are over for good. And yet we can't help but feel that for those of us who crossover from backcountry to area skiing, knowing this is not necessarily a bad thing, it's simply an opportunity and a challenge to stay sharp, and to be prepared on each and every powder day, no matter the venue.

*Out of consideration for the personal privacy of our friends, their names have been changed in this account.