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Avalanches: Becoming Avy Savvy

By Bob Berwyn, 2-19-07

	The ultimate price. Former Copper Mountain ski patroller Kevin Kelble uncovers one of the dead victims of the 1987 Peak 7 slide in the backcountry near Breckenridge. Photo courtesy Bob Winsett.

I spent the better part of three days last week putting together a two-part story for the Summit Daily News on a 1987 avalanche that killed four young skiers on Peak 7, at the time a backcountry powder stash just outside the Breckenridge Ski Area boundary. Marking the 20-year anniversary of the accident exactly to the day, two forecasters with Colorado Avalanche Information Center put together a historic presentation on the slide. The idea was use the event as a catalyst for further awareness — “a teachable moment,” in the parlance of educators.

Part 1 of the story describes the conditions leading up the avalanche. Part 2 details the recovery operation and the ramifications of the accident for the search and rescue community and for the way resorts and the Forest Service manage backcountry access. This link leads to a community discussion thread on the avalanche, including several first-person accounts by local residents who were on the mountain or nearby that day.

Although modern resort communities are often and pejoratively described as transient, it was heartening to see how many of the people involved with the 1987 response are still here and remain committed to public safety and avalanche education. Dan Burnett, for example, a mainstay with the local search and rescue group, showed me one of the organization’s trucks, which has a plaque dedicated to the memory of the four victims affixed to the dashboard.

Breckenridge ski patrollers explained to me how the families of some of the victims (two were from New York, two from New Zealand) first wanted to sue the ski area and the Forest Service after the deadly slide. But after visiting Breckenridge and seeing how the community put its heart and soul into the search effort, they changed their tune, instead paying for the vehicle, which remains in use today.

After interviewing more than a half-dozen ski patrollers, avalanche forecasters and other locals who were involved in the search and rescue operation (which quickly became a body recovery mission), I was left with one overwhelming question: What does it take to prevent people from putting themselves — and others — into harm’s way? Almost as if to underscore the urgency of this question, I got an email from a friend while writing this paragraph, with the news that five people had been killed by slides across the Rockies during the President’s Day weekend.

The situation in 1987 was crystal-clear from the standpoint of ski patrollers and avalanche experts. The snowpack was typical for mid-winter in Colorado; layers of granular sugar snow totally without cohesion, sandwiched between brittle and tender windslabs, and loaded in the weeks preceding the slide by fresh snow. Patrollers discussed the consequences of a Peak 7 slide in terms of “when,” not “if.” In an intense one-on-one outreach effort, they stood near the backcountry access point and explained to skiers how unstable the snowpack was. Ultimately, they even put up a huge skull-and-crossbones sign at the ski area boundary, describing how several people had already been caught by smaller slides in the area. In short, they did pretty much everything humanly possible to prevent what they felt was the inevitable deadly avalanche. It was as if a lifeguard on a beach was telling people there was a hungry great white shark clearly visible, lurking in the shallows.

Still, drawn by the siren call of fresh snow and steep terrain, local and visiting skiers tempted fate day after day and headed out to Peak 7 all through January and early February, 1987.

The only way I can answer the question in a meaningful way is to examine my own experiences with the white death. Ultimately, we all make our own decisions in these kinds of situations, based on very personal, subjective terms.

I call the first stage of my avalanche education pure, dumb luck. I was about 12 or 13, growing up as an Army brat in Germany. Every year at Christmas we skied for two weeks in Saalbach, Austria. One fine, sunny day, skiing on the Schattberg with an Austrian friend, whose name coincidentally was also Robert, I decided to strike out beyond the groomed, lift-served trails. I convinced my friend to hike up a little sub-peak, to the east of the main summit. In our hubris, we decided that, once we had left our tracks, we would call it Mount Robertus.

The snow looked good — well, untouched anyway — so we shouldered our skis and booted up the ridge, staying just to the windward side where the terrain was scoured to the ground. On the leeward side were big, smooth pillows of packed snow that I would now recognize as hard windslabs. At some point, we clicked into our Salomon 505s and traversed out into the face, trying to find soft snow. Almost immediately, we heard hollow ringing beneath our boards, the classic whoomphing sound that can be a clear indication of an unstable snowpack. In the next second, cracks shot out across the surface from our ski tips with an audible sound, almost like ripping paper. I turned to look at my friend and before I could utter a word, the whole slope crumpled beneath our skis and slumped downhill a few feet before once again coming to rest.

Fast forward a few years, to about 1974, still living in Germany and with a now abiding interest in skiing and the mountains, I decided to join the junior section of the National Ski Patrol chapter as junior in High School. Along with the nifty rust-colored parka and gold cross, I got a blue first-aid fanny pack and the opportunity to take an introductory avalanche and mountaineering class, the “Circle A, Circle M.” The classroom portion of the training was in an army office building in Heidelberg. Over the course of a weekend, I had my first lesson in snow science, learning about temperature-gradients, sublimation and the grim avalanche statistics that haven’t changed all that much since then. The take-home message was to avoid getting buried at all costs by learning how to recognize avalanche terrain and evaluate snowpack stability.

The second part of the Circle A, Circle M course was a field expedition, based at a hut high in the Bernese Oberland region of the Swiss Alps, on a glacier above the town of Lauterbrunnen. I call this the “little bit of knowledge can be dangerous” phase.

Along with two classmates, Tom Hardman and Mike Rosen, and about a dozen adult ski patrollers, we flew by helicopter to a ridge above the hut, then skied down, roped behind a guide, Peter, who spent the entire week with a cigar clamped in his teeth, Peter had done some work as a stunt double for one of the bad guys in the James Bond flick “On her Majesty’s Secret Service.” On the first night, our guide/instructors woke us up at 2 a.m. for a mock avalanche search and rescue drill involving beacons and probes, only they didn’t tell us it was just an exercise. So for the first hour we thought we were searching for real, until word filtered through the ranks that it only practice. It was sobering, though, and definitely gave me some insight from the rescue worker side of things. In the following days we practiced crevasse rescue, route-finding and even took turns being buried inside a tiny snow cave while our companions practiced their beacon skills.

The next chapter, circa 1980, really boils down to pure cockiness, fueled by testosterone. During a college ski club trip to the Kitzsteinhorn, an Austrian glacier ski area, my friend Jan and I decided we wanted to impress a couple of girls. So we told them to watch from the lodge, as we would carve some turns into a pitch of untracked snow visible from the window of the slopeside bar. We traversed into the face a couple of ski lengths before I called out to my buddy that the snow seemed kind of sketchy. I eyed the slope, which was only about 100 vertical feet, feeling sure it was going to go. Jan just shrugged his shoulders and pointed his Rossi ST Comps down the hill. Not to be outdone, I forgot all about my misgivings and started my first turn with a little downhill heel thrust to wind up for a jump turn in the wet, heavy powder. That was enough to trigger the entire face. It slid slowly downward, holding pretty much together. I tried to ski out but the snow felt like glue and even though I stayed on my feet, I ended up stuck in wet concrete up to my knees. Jan, a little lower on the slope, was buried up to his waist, but also still upright. Very conscious that our friends were all watching us from the lodge, we dug ourselves out of the gloppy mess, using hands and ski poles. It took the better part of 30 minutes to get free and my friend actually lost one of his skis under the snow. I’m sure those girls were impressed, but I was too embarrassed to go back to the lodge and find out exactly what our status was.

The next stage is denial, as in, “It can’t happen to ME!” By this time, about 1991, I fancied myself a backcountry veteran of sorts. I was managing a youth hostel in the Eastern Sierra, near Mammoth Lakes, had done a Level 1 avy class and even taught an intro to ski touring course. I had probably more than 200 backcountry skiing days under my belt and felt fairly confident, especially given the relatively safe nature of the maritime snowpack in the California mountain range.

So when I set out for a July 4 ski tour in the high country just outside Yosemite National Park, avalanches were not exactly at the top of the list of worries. I was thinking about how crowded Vons might be when we stopped there to get beer and chips for the evening cookout at the hostel. Dave and I toured in around the shore of frozen Saddlebag Lake and headed up through the spectacular 20 Lakes Basin, aiming for some of the steeper bowls around Mount Conness. We found some great corn snow and skinned up and down a favorite line a few times before kicking back on some rocks to have lunch. As we ate, we watched a party of hikers ascending the same terrain. Under the hot summer sun, the crust of corn had suddenly melted, and I noticed how the hikers were post-holing as they climbed.

Dave was ready to head home, but I really wanted one more run. I thought it might be the last ski day of the season, and wanted to milk it for all it was worth, ignoring the fact that it was too late in the day for good, safe skiing. So we hiked up one more time. I chose the steepest line near the cliffs lining the edge of the bowl and decided that I would ski it non-stop to build up a little speed for the skate across the flats at the bottom. After making a few turns, I suddenly felt that things were not quite right and looked up the hill, noticing that the whole bowl was in motion. A wet slab had broken away and was sweeping toward me, not too fast, but I clearly was not going to be able to ski away from it, hemmed in my the rocks to my left. The Sierra had been blasted about a month before by an early June snowstorm that dropped about a foot of snow, and later figured that it was probably that layer that knocked me off my feet and dragged me down the hill. The ride was slow enough that I had time to look up and see where Dave was standing. He was watching closely and that was reassuring. Then I looked down and saw that the path of the slide was carrying me toward a granite outcrop. I didn’t think the impact in itself would be too dangerous. It just didn’t feel like I was moving very fast. But there was enough snow in play that I knew it could pin me and cover me completely, so I fought to try and avoid the rocks. The snow was so wet I felt like I was in a whitewater rapid rather than in the middle of a snowslide. Had I been using skis with releasable bindings, I might have been able to click out and maneuver a bit more. But as it was, my tele skis were like anchors on my feet. The rocks were coming up fast, and I made one big lunging motion to get my skis down in front of me to absorb what I new was the inevitable impact.

CRACK! The tail of my red Karhu Extremes smacked into the solid rock and I felt the ski strain, bend and break with a loud snap, along with the tib and fib of my left leg. I knew it was broken at the instant of impact, but I had an even greater concern. I was indeed now pinned against the rock in an awkward, twisting position. My legs were immobile and the force of the snow pushed my upper body farther downhill. As I had feared, the wet snow was pouring over me and covering me up, to the waist, chest and right up to my neck when mercifully, the last wave receded and all was still. My arms were still free, so I started to try and shovel the wet snow away from my torso and legs while waiting for Dave to cautiously approach from above.

We had no shovels, so Dave used his ski and hands to dig me out. We splinted my leg with the broken-off tail of my ski and used the other half and the second ski as a makeshift sled to get down the steeper face. Breathing hard, sweaty, and looking at a ankle and foot that were clearly not in the right position, we tried to decide what to do, We were at least three or four miles from the trailhead and my progress was painstakingly slow. We decided that Dave would go for help and we agreed that I would try and make my way toward a prominent landmark on the shore of the uppermost lake. By the time the search and rescue crew arrived, pulled away from their own Independence Day celebrations, I was shivering and near hypothermia in the chilly dusk. They wrapped me in a sleeping bag and had me at the Mammoth Lakes hospital in no time, where shared the emergency room with a couple of guys that had been celebrating the holiday a bit too hard and ended up in some kind of an altercation that apparently involved knives.

I had tempted the avalanche fates once too often and paid the price. In spite of knowing the dangers and potential risks, I was jonesin’ for one more run … one last run, and the hell with any pesky consequences. I wasn’t thinking about how somebody else would have to give up part of their life on a well-earned holiday to come and save my sorry ass. I wasn’t thinking about how worried by girlfriend would be when I didn’t show up to organize the planned party at the hostel. I wasn’t thinking about how freaked out my family would be when they heard I was in the hospital after getting caught in a backcountry avalanche. I was only thinking about me, me, ME.

Granted, I got off easy, all things considered, and was back on skis as soon as the first snow fell next season. And since then, I have become much more careful, especially living in Colorado, with a notoriously slide-prone snowpack, and a son who relies on me every day. So I go out of my way to avoid danger, sticking to low-angle terrain or the controlled slopes of the local resorts when the avy danger is high. But by golly, when I see fresh snow coating the hills out there, there is always a little voice inside me urging and tugging at me to go out and get some, and as I dig into my pack, fingering my beacon, probe and checking the locking mechanism of my shovel, I can always find a thousand ways to rationalize away the avalanche danger. It’s a constant battle, and for me, it takes disciplined self-control to think things through and make a decision that is based on the best available knowledge, the latest update from the avy center and an objective assessment of my own willingness to take risks.

Stay safe out there, people, and feel free to relate your own avalanche stories and experiences in the comment box below.

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