1
By now you're probably aware of the tragedy at Palisades Tahoe, the in-bounds avalanche that took a life.
Now the odds of dying in an avalanche are miniscule. Assuming you pay attention to the rules, assuming you have respect for the outdoors, assuming you're in the outdoors with an abundance of snow to begin with.
Now I've experienced the snow move three times. Only one time was it frightening to the point where I realized my life was in danger. But instinct kicks in, you get the hell out of there, at least I did, after the other five people immediately abandoned me. No friends on a powder day? Believe me, you've got no friends in an avalanche.
All three of these events happened in-bounds. Two at Mammoth Mountain, in California. Now in the third case, at Snowbird, they immediately closed that side of the mountain, and then the whole damn ski area, like they did today. Yes, both Alta and Snowbird, in Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah, are closed today. Because it doesn't stop snowing and it doesn't stop sliding and it's damn dangerous.
Not that you can convince people of this. Evidence is this movie. About the slide at Alpine Meadows in 1982.
Now the odds of having an avalanche, a life-threatening avalanche, in the northeast are miniscule. Yes, it can happen on Mt. Washington. But there are no lifts there. In other words, you have to put yourself in danger.
And people are putting themselves in danger all over the west. It's the new new thing. To go out of bounds in search of untracked powder.
Which doesn't float my boat. Not only going out of bounds, but the powder itself.
In truth, there's very little light powder, of the kind you see in photographs and movies. You know, the kind where you can blast through the lighter than air snow like it's not even there. It doesn't even happen all the time in the aforementioned Little Cottonwood Canyon, which has the lightest snow in the U.S. Conditions have to be exactly right. And when they are, it's astounding, you can literally blow the snow off your car, but like I said, it's rare.
And when you're in this kind of powder it's completely different from the "powder" of the east coast. Of even the powder in Colorado. The new snow in the east is heavy. To ski it you must lean back, whereas when it's perfect in Little Cottonwood Canyon you ski exactly centered. As for Colorado... I've never seen it as light as I have in Little Cottonwood Canyon, never.
As for Little Cottonwood Canyon, don't confuse this with Park City and Deer Valley. The latter get much less snow and it's heavier, because the altitude is lower and they're not in a box canyon.
All this to say that I believe powder is overrated.
Have I gotten up at the crack of dawn for untracked runs?
Yes. It's not a good experience. There's a line before the lift opens. And when you get off you fight for the powder. And if you know what you're doing you can get one completely untracked run, and then a couple of cut-up runs, and then...you ski the crud (cut-up powder) until it disappears.
Now the word is out. In the seventies in Little Cottonwood Canyon it would take nearly a day for the powder to get skied out. Well, maybe not that long, but hours. You wouldn't continue to get completely untracked runs, but you could find a facsimile thereof. Today? It's an hour.
As for Vail, my home mountain... Vail is so vast that it takes more than an hour, but after not much longer than that you won't find any untracked runs. Unless you go in the trees. But you can ski good crud all day, maybe even the next day.
Which is why I no longer get up to get first tracks on powder days.
It's not that I hate powder, I just ski it on storm days, which most people hate. As for the hard core, the very hard core is on my team, but the rest need to go out after a big dump for some kind of bragging rights, and believe me, there's plenty of bragging in skiing.
Having said that, there are plenty of treed areas at Vail. But the vaunted Back Bowls are in most cases sans trees, which is why I avoid them on storm days, you can't see a f*cking thing. And I've skied so much I have good judgment, as in this is not how I want to die, I play the odds. And if you can't see where you're going, the odds of getting into trouble are very high.
But there's still that lure of untracked snow. Which is how those skiers got in trouble in Palisades Tahoe this past week.
2
Not that I want to blame these skiers. I blame the ski area.
Now that's not what you've been reading. Everybody has been saying the ski patrol did all it could do. But it's more complicated than that.
When I lived in Utah, the ski patrol and its edicts were inviolate. Cross the line, and in most cases this was a rope, and not only would they pull your ticket, they'd pull your season pass. So you'd be skiing the wide open Regulator Johnson in crud and just to your left, on the other side of the rope, it would be pristine, untouched.
But you knew the rules. And no one broke them. Occasionally a tourist, but they'd be yanked immediately and word would spread.
But something happened over the past couple of decades. Backcountry skiing became a thing. Furthermore, under the law, so much of the ski areas being on Forest Service land, you couldn't prevent people from doing this.
Now get this straight... In most cases you have to hike to this out of bounds stuff. Sometimes from the very bottom up. Which is why despite all the hype, not that many people do it. And it's very dangerous, and people think they're inviolate, that they'll survive no matter what. But statistics say otherwise. They're dropping like flies. Because snow science is not an exact science, and so many of these bozos think they know more than the scientists anyway. And they can't forgo that wide expanse of untracked snow.
So... This is not how I want to go. I don't ski out of bounds. I just don't want to take the risk. And what's another untracked powder run anyway? I've had enough. But these same people who cross the lines are not silent about it, they like to brag, about where they've been and what they've done, telling you that not only was their ski experience better than yours, but they themselves are better than you!
And let's not forget peer pressure. If you're going with a group of guys outside the ski area boundary, it's very hard to blow the whistle, to say no-go, you're seen as a party pooper, a wimp. Which is why I avoid these circumstances to begin with. Worst are the weekend warriors, who despite riding a desk all week think they can ski like experts over the weekend or during a holiday. This would be like asking Mikaela Shiffrin to win World Cups only skiing two days a week. It doesn't work that way. You need to ski every day to get a fine feel for your skis, for your edges, for the snow, in order to be able to compensate, adjust when you get in trouble. Which is also the reason you should be wary of skiing in-bounds with weekend warriors. They always want to ski the hardest slopes the second or third run. Their judgment is off, or nonexistent.
So, if you go out of bounds, be with others, wear a transceiver/avalanche beacon and pay attention to the reports, and when they say avalanche danger is high stay out. And beware when it's lower than that. You're alive until you're dead, remember that.
3
So the truth is it's been a lousy ski season so far. Well, at least until the last ten days or so. As in there hasn't been much snow. Which hasn't kept me off the slopes, I skied 28 out of 29 days last month, and the day off was for travel. And do you see that, how I was bragging right there? Yup. But I'm also saying that you've got to do it every day for that edge. Because you can get in trouble very easily on the mountain. And you want to be alert and experienced and in shape when you do.
And be exercising good judgment.
Like the day they opened the Back Bowls in Vail in December. I was on the hill, it happened around noon, but I didn't go. Because I know. That until the snow is packed down you don't know what you'll hit underneath. I've had the bad experience, of hitting a gully and getting thrown forward out of my stopped-dead skis. I learned my lesson. I don't want to sacrifice my entire season for one rope drop, for one untracked run.
But then it didn't snow again. And Vail kept the Back Bowls and Blue Sky Basin open when they were nearly unskiable. The heavily tracked slopes were rocky, and that which was not heavily tracked was frozen solid. Only amateurs went back there.
But then it snowed.
So what you've got at these ski areas is pent-up demand. From the tourists who are there only briefly, from the locals champing at the bit. So ski areas are eager to drop the rope, open more territory.
And in truth, so much of Vail is flat. There's very limited avalanche territory. But at Palisades Tahoe? That's why people go there, for the challenge. And the biggest challenge, other than the cliffs you have to hike to at the very top of the ski area, is on KT22, named such because one of the founders had to kick turn twenty two times to get down. It's just that steep.
Which yields bragging rights.
So, Palisades Tahoe was caught in a conundrum. Do they play it safe or give the people what they want, i.e. do they open up the KT22 lift and the untracked slopes beneath it.
Now I wasn't there. I'm not a member of the ski patrol. Snow science is that, a science. However, this never happens in Little Cottonwood Canyon. People don't die in-bounds there. Now the snow is very different, in Tahoe it's heavy, with a high water content. But still...
I'm thinking there's some bad judgment here. That the patrol felt pressure, whether external or internal, to open KT22.
4
That's the deal you make. You ski in-bounds and you're safe. They don't guarantee it, but it's evident nonetheless. Want to put your life at risk? Go out of bounds. But if you're playing by the rules, the rules will save you, right?
Well, now I'm going to contradict myself. I just did some research, to find out if there'd ever been a death in an in-bounds avalanche in Little Cottonwood Canyon. And it turns out there was one as recently as 2008. And a skier even got caught in a slide on Lover's Leap in Vail (however, they lived): rb.gy/283ifv
The previous in-bounds avalanche death was all the way back in 1977: rb.gy/yff9t7
However, the devil is in the details:
"Sunday was the first day Snowbird opened that part of the resort -- the easternmost area -- and crews had performed avalanche control that morning, Fields said."
Hmm... So it seems to happen everywhere. Early in the season. So maybe in both these cases, at Palisades Tahoe and Snowbird, they felt pressure to open terrain before it was ready.
Or maybe it's just the luck of the draw.
Or maybe you don't want to be a guinea pig. Like I refused to be in the Back Bowls in Vail last month. Maybe there's an inherent danger at the beginning of the season, and skier beware, but that's not the impression one gets from the ski patrol, from the ski area itself.
5
So my friend Joe, a refugee from the music business, now lives in Tahoe. And after communicating about the avalanche last week he recommended I watch a documentary about the 1982 avalanche at Alpine Meadows, just over the hill from where last week's avalanche took place. Yes, it used to be two different ski areas, Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows, now they're connected via ownership and a gondola. The Squaw side gets all the press, but a lot of the locals prefer the less-crowded Alpine.
So we pulled up "Buried" and couldn't turn it off.
And you won't be able to either.
First you'll get the renegade ski culture of the era. Something I'm very familiar with. It's hard to make a living, which is why most people move on, including me, but for a while there you're living the life, long before the health problems that accost you as you get older, back in an era where you could at least pay the bills on minimum wage.
And in truth, avalanche science has progressed since 1982. Now they don't fire howitzers, they have Gazex systems planted at the top of the avalanche zones, that essentially trigger slides via compressed gases. Remotely.
Not that avalanche danger has been completely eradicated.
So what have we learned? A confluence of decisions led to the loss of life last week. Will there be adjustments in the process? I believe there will be. Then again, guests who fly across the country, across the world, pressure ski areas to open terrain, and if you don't, your competitor will.
But if you want to familiarize yourself with the game, what is involved, I highly recommend this documentary, it covers all the exigencies, and the decisions, and how events like this can haunt you forever.
As for me... Life is all about risks. And sometimes you get caught on the wrong side of the line. But if you never get up close and personal to the line, if you never cross it, you don't know where it is.
Then again, not every decision is one of life or death.
Avalanches compact snow into the equivalent of concrete. Good luck if you get buried. It happens, but do your best to improve your odds of avoiding this situation to begin with.
I certainly am.
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