The White Wave

By Kurt Repanshek

It sounds guttural, like the throaty roar of an accelerating jet bouncing around the inside of your skull. Or, if massive slabs break off to start the avalanche, the cascading roll of snow reverberates like thunder tumbling off the mountains.

As the rising white wave slams through glades, snapping trees and pinballing boulders downhill, the cacophonic surge of the crumpled mountainside damn well sounds like the world crashing down upon you. Regardless of your interpretation, it’s a sound you want to recall—rather than have it be the last you ever hear.

To that end—how’s your avalanche training? All it takes are powerful legs and sound lungs to get into the backcountry. But can you safely return with something to talk about over beers?

“If you don’t know how to save your buddy, or at least find your buddy in the simplest scenario, you really shouldn’t be out there,” says Jim Conway, a snow safety expert and lead guide for Jackson, Wyoming–based Teton Gravity Research, perhaps the world’s leading backcountry film production house.

Conway should know. He’s OKed the routes for some of the world’s top skiers, snowboarders and climbers as they worked on TGR productions. Over the years, he’s also survived three slides with his limbs intact, thanks to reflexes and coolheadedness honed through decades of training and preparation. And a good measure of luck.

Live long enough and play hard enough in the mountains and you’re bound to come across an avalanche or two. That’s why avalanche preparedness is mandatory for backcountry travelers.

“We don’t even think you should go into the backcountry unless you know rudimentary rescue skills,” says Conway.

During the winter of 2005–06, U.S. avalanches killed 24 backcountry skiers, snowboarders, snowshoers, and snowmobilers. That total is down slightly from the 28 recorded the previous winter and shy of the record 35 killed during 2001–02. Still, it’s a number you don’t want to contribute to. If the victims had had better training and the latest backcountry gear, all those numbers would surely have been lower.

“Gear and technology combined far outpaces people’s avalanche awareness and avalanche skills,” says Craig Gordon, a forecaster with the U.S. Forest Service Utah Avalanche Center. “The equipment probably gets folks into terrain that years ago it would have taken [them] a number of years to even have entertained going into. …  And what we’re finding more and more is a lot of folks who are killed in avalanches don’t have the basic rescue equipment, and don’t have avalanche beacons and probes.”

While heading out quick, light, and fast works in some sports, it’s not the answer for negotiating Utah’s Wasatch Range or Alaska’s Chugach Mountains, two steep, snow-heavy places where Conway likes to play. Unfortunately, with the advent of plastic telemark boots, stouter bindings, and lighter, fatter skis, as well as more powerful snowmobiles for those who favor that backcountry transportation, “you don’t have to be an expert in your sport to get into avalanche terrain,” Gordon points out.

“What we’re finding is that more and more people are skiing or boarding experts, but not experts in the backcountry and certainly not experts with snow and avalanches. Those are the folks who are getting caught,” he adds somberly.

Is that really surprising? With the ready availability and relative affordability of the latest backcountry gear, including avalanche beacons, probes, shovels and even the AvaLung device that allows you to breathe when buried under tons of snow (as long as you haven’t been strained through trees or a boulder field, or tossed off a cliff), it’s easy to buy all the courage you think you’ll need. But courage alone can’t assess danger.

And really, with easy access to avalanche training courses across the country, there’s no excuse for heading into the high country minus the savvy to recognize dangerous conditions. While avalanche centers (which you can find by visiting www.avalanche.org) offer free introductory courses, your life is probably worth the $450-or-so cost of a multiday course if you’re planning to venture into the avalanche zone.

“The Level 1 course will actually teach you how to begin to evaluate snowpack, and it will go into more depth on the rescue part of it,” explains Conway. “It’ll give you some solid route-finding skills, things that there just isn’t time to do in a short course. A short course just gives you an overview of that stuff and kind of tells you what you need to do, but not enough detail for someone to really go out in anything but low to low-moderate hazard days.

While it’s easy to memorize the red flags of avalanche danger (see the sidebar), sometimes we dupe ourselves by falling into one of four psychological traps that even experienced backcountry users are susceptible to.

“The first one is ‘familiarity,’” Conway says. “You get accustomed to riding the slope all the time, and you tend to maybe not make the evaluations you need to just because you’re so familiar with it. And then another one is ‘commitment.’ That’s something I deal with a lot when dealing with the pros. You know, ‘My whole career is riding on this day; I need to do some stuff.’”

“‘Summit fever’ would be in that category. Somebody has just hiked all day to get to something they’ve been looking at for years. The tendency is to maybe overlook or ignore some of the red flags telling them that maybe this isn’t the day to do it.”

A third trap is what Conway calls “social-proof.” You’ve seen others ski a monster bowl that really should be avoided, yet, because someone else has, you do, too. Such a case played out near The Canyons Resort in Park City, Utah, in 2004 when a slide in Dutch Draw—a steep, deliciously tempting bowl adjacent to the resort on U.S. Forest Service land—killed a young, experienced Idaho man when it slammed him mercilessly into a stand of trees.

“He actually had avalanche training and knew better and knew he didn’t have the right gear, but they’d see people just one after another making tracks on that face,” recalls Conway. “Their plan was not to go touring at all, the hazard was too high that day. … But what happened was every time they’d ride up the lift they’d see another set of tracks on that face, and finally they said, ‘Well, everybody else has done it, it must be good to do.’”

It wasn’t.

A fourth trap is “scarcity.” There hasn’t been fresh snow in weeks, so you go in search of whatever you can find … and in the process let down your guard.

While Conway has had three close calls, his pilgrimages into the backcountry every winter are motivated by something no doubt shared by countless others.

“How could I not? It’s what I do,” he says simply. “I actually don’t like the fear part of it. If we could take avalanches out of the picture, it would be a better sport to me. But that’s what it is. Mostly, I like being in the mountains.”

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