Backcountry skiing sees resurgence – and the deadliest week for avalanches since 1910
There was no warning from the snow: no thump as it broke, no roaring as it gained speed, no shaking like an earthquake as it rushed toward the bottom. Maurice Kervin, 25, just noticed a huge crack had appeared beneath his snowboard and shot like a silent lighting bolt down No
Name Peak in the Colorado Rockies. As he turned to look uphill, he was hit by a cascade of white that confirmed his worst fears. He was caught in an avalanche.
“A huge slab starts breaking out below me,” Kervin said. “Right at that moment it was like, we’re in it to win it now.”
It’s a story that has been all too common in the western United States this year, with more than 700 avalanches reported in Colorado in February. Many have even been captured on film, like a billowing torrent of snow that briefly buried three snowmobilers in a valley in Utah’s Uinta Mountains.
In February, 15 people died in seven days, the deadliest week for avalanches since 1910, when a 14ft wall of snow swept two stranded trains into a gorge in Washington and killed 96.
The number of fatalities has only continued to grow. Midway through the season, 33 people have been killed in avalanches, already surpassing the annual average of 26.
The forecasters who make a daily assessment of danger level have said these are some of the most dangerous snow conditions they’ve ever seen, with avalanches releasing more often, enveloping broader swaths of terrain and running further than normal.
As resorts have been forced to limit the number of skiers due to the
Covid-19 pandemic, more people have ventured into the backcountry, where there are no lift lines or advance reservation systems – and no ski patrollers to lob explosives on hazardous snow.
“If you put more people traveling in avalanche terrain, the chances for a human interaction with an avalanche go up,” said Brian Lazar, deputy director of the Colorado Avalanche Information
Center. “And if the snowpack is as dangerous as it is this year, the chances for a tragic outcome go up as well.”
‘We got very nervous’
As with any string of avalanches, it started with the weather. After winter storm Billy dumped up to 20in of snow in late October, the mountains of the western United States suffered a weeks-long spell of dry cold that turned this base into what hydrologists call a “persistent weak layer”.
“Everyone was high-fiving each other because people were skiing early,” said Doug Chabot, a backcountry skier, snowmobiler, climber and director of Montana’s Gallatin National Forest Avalanche Center. “Then it just shut down, which as an avalanche forecaster we got very nervous about.”
Snow is a good insulator, which is why igloos work. In cold weather, water vapor at the warm bottom of the snowpack tends to diffuse toward the dry surface air above. Along the way, it transforms rounded snow crystals into angular “facets” that don’t bond well together.
When thick snow falls on top of that weak layer, as it has been across the western United States in recent weeks, it’s like pizza dough on a pan dusted with cornmeal – it will slide right off. The more snow that falls, the bigger the slides, which are known as slab avalanches.
“It’s like having a foundation that’s crumbling,” Chabot said. “You can’t build a big house on it.”
In Colorado, which is known for weak snow layers, the state forecast center said these are once-in-a-decade conditions. In places like Utah’s Wasatch Range, they’re even rarer.
But as Dave Richards, avalanche department director at Alta Ski Area, told 700 attendees at a recent webinar, it’s not just a snow problem, but also a “people problem … which is a whole bunch of us frothing to go skiing and moving way too fast in a time of serious stress”.
Ninety per cent of avalanche accidents are set off by the victim or someone traveling with him or her. Yet as the avalanche danger has risen, so has the number of people in snowy wildernesses.
‘A cocktail of different dangerous stuff’
The main allure of Alpine touring, in which riders typically strap grippy “skins” to their skis to climb remote mountains, is being able to find untouched powder long after resort runs have been carved up. Its popularity has been growing for years thanks largely to improvements in heel-release bindings and other gear.The splitboard, a snowboard that breaks down into two skilike halves for skinning uphill, has broadened the sport’s appeal beyond skiers in the past decade.
The coronavirus pandemic accelerated these trends. After Colorado shut down ski resorts in March 2020 sales of Alpine touring gear like avalanche beacons, probes and shovels jumped up 34%, according to Snowsports Industries America. An estimated 1.3 million people took part in backcountry skiing and snowboarding in the 2019-2020 season.
This fall, sales were 76% higher than the year before. Splitboard producers sold out of several models. In January, vehicle counter in Hyalite Canyon, a popular Alpine touring location near Bozeman, Montana, registered two-thirds more traffic than in January 2020.
“Covid just gave more of a push to say, ‘Why am I going to spend X amount of dollars on a ski pass when I can spend some of that on equipment and get into the backcountry?’” said Nate Bondi, whose Bondi Outdoor Leadership company has doubled the number of avalanche hazard management courses it is teaching this season. But the more people in a backcountry bowl, the more likely that one will hit the soft spot that triggers an avalanche – and the more people are likely to be “caught, carried and buried”, as avalanche forecasters say.
A slide in Wilson Glades in Millcreek Canyon this month tied the record for the deadliest avalanche in Utah history, enveloping seven skiers and killing four. The two groups of skiers there only became aware of one another when Chris Gmitro, who managed incredibly to hold on to a tree as the avalanche roared over him, followed an avalanche beacon signal and dug out a stranger.
Once an avalanche settles, the snow can become as hard as concrete. First responders at one slide in Colorado in February, for instance, broke eight shovels and had to use chainsaws to search for survivors. The small amount of oxygen available in the snow around an avalanche victim’s face is quickly exhausted. After 15 minutes, the chance of getting out alive plummets.
At Wilson Glades, Gmitro and another skier dug two men from another group out alive, but were too late to save four people, including Gmitro’s girlfriend of four years.
Before the season began, many avalanche forecasters were afraid that the growing popularity of backcountry skiing would lead to a rash of newbie deaths. Instead, most of the victims have had years of experience, like those at Wilson Glades did.
Will Miner, a University of Colorado student and mountain guide who is spending twice as much time Alpine touring this season to avoid the resort crowds, said the backcountry now feels crowded too.
“Every popular spot is being overrun with new people, everyone’s secret spots are now public. It pushes [more experienced backcountry skiers] further out, and then it slides and they don’t get lucky for once,” Miner said. “It’s a cocktail of different dangerous stuff mixed together.”
Fatigue and risks
The psychological landscape has been just as fraught as the physical one. Traveling in the backcountry is inherently risky, and the difference between life and death can come down to judgment calls about what lines to ski and how to best approach them.
According to avalanche data analysis done by Ian McCammon, an engineer and mountain guide, backcountry riders’ judgment often falls prey to several “heuristic traps”, including “familiarity”: terrain that a person has skied safely before may not be safe in current conditions. Even skiers with decades of experience may have encountered conditions like this year’s only a few times, which can lead to a bad call.
Another danger lies in the difficulty of resisting fresh powder after weeks of low snowfall, even if the avalanche danger forecast is high.
But Covid-19 may also be muddling decision-making in the backcountry. When longtime backcountry rider Kurt Damschroder wanted to ski a steep slope outside Park City, Utah, in January despite his partner’s misgivings, the pair agreed to meet at the bottom. After an avalanche carried
Damschroder 250ft downhill and fatally buried him, the partnertold the Utah Avalanche Center that the isolation, financial difficulties and “near-constant stress Covid brings” had “an impact on this accident”.
As people have tired of following coronavirus safety measures due to “pandemic fatigue”, they may also have begun neglecting avalanche safety measures due to “risk management fatigue”, Avalanche Canada has warned.
“It’s hard to say no when you’re bored and your need for arousal is not met,” said Sue Kraus, chair of the psychology department at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado.
But many remain undaunted by the backcountry perils this season. Snowboarder Maurice Kervin miraculously survived the avalanche on No Name Peak by deploying his airbag, an inflatable backpack flotation device, and struggling to stay on top of the snow even as it ran him over a small cliff. A video of the accident from his helmet camera got thousands of views on Instagram.
Since then, Kervin, who is also a bitcoin investor and owner of a small apparel company, has continued to go out on his splitboard several times a week.
He said he’s trying to be more conservative and make better decisions with the knowledge gained from his close call.
“But we’re going to take risks because this is what we love to do,” he added. “Skiing a run on a 2ft day, first tracks, is pretty insane shit, and I’ll be out there looking to do it again.”
Scott Schuyler doesn’t need to see the Skagit River to know something is wrong. As he walks down the river’s steep embankment, wet rock and moss under each step, he can hear the problem. “The river should be singing to us right now, it should be free flowing,” Schuyler says as cold February rain drops silently disappear into his quilted blue jacket. The riverbed below him, once home to one of Washington’s greatest rivers, sits eerily quiet and nearly empty of water, even in the middle of the state’s famously wet winters.
As Schuyler explains it: “The river has been stolen from us. It has been harvested for money.”
Schuyler is a member of the Upper Skagit Indian tribe, which has lived along the Skagit River for at least 8,400 years and considers it to be sacred. A century ago, Seattle’s public utility dammed the river in three spots, creating a hydroelectric complex that provides 18% of the city’s energy. On this particular two-mile stretch near the Canadian border, the entire river has been diverted into a hydroelectric tunnel, reducing this wide riverbed to a stretch of sleepy pools.
The tribe wants Seattle to remove the Gorge Dam, the lowest of the three dams, and return the river to the section the city de-watered. The tribe says Seattle’s century of hydroelectric work on the Skagit has contributed to a sharp drop in river’s salmon runs, which has ripple effects across the region. The Skagit is the last American river outside of Alaska still home to all five species of wild salmon, although the fish stocks are dwindling: two species are now listed under the Endangered Species Act and a nearby resident killer whale population, which depends on the Skagit River’s salmon for survival, is listed as endangered.
“Our people are a fishing people, a salmon people. The salmon are disappearing and it’s hurting our people,” Schuyler said. For thousands of years, the tribe has followed the river into the mountains to hunt for elk and sheep in the summer, and then fished as thousands of salmon migrated upstream in the summer and fall, providing a lifegiving force to the tribe.
The city’s federal license to operate the dams expires in 2025, and in order to obtain a renewal, the city is required to work with various other stakeholders – including the federal and state agencies and the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe – to study the dam’s effect on the river.
But less than a year into the reapplication process, the city has found itself in disagreement with almost every stakeholder involved, including powerful state and federal agencies. Crucially, the city’s public utility, Seattle City Light (SCL), has denied the tribe’s request to study removing the Gorge Dam, and instead the city has asked the federal government for the right to draw more, not less power from the Skagit Dams.
The battle over the Skagit River and its dams is in some ways a proxy battle over the hidden expense of fighting climate change. On one side are governments and utility companies looking to hydropower as a lowercarbon source of energy; on the other are conservation-minded scientists and other stakeholders, often Indigenous people who live along targeted rivers, who decry dams as devastating to the local environments. In a wealthy, liberal city like Seattle, activists say the gap between the SCL’s $1.4bn budget and its seeming lack of imagination around protecting the environment is thrown into high contrast.
“We live in an era of social justice and that’s the mantra of the city of Seattle,” says Schuyler. “But what’s going on does not fit that mantra. It’s not social justice, we see cultural trauma.”
While the city of Seattle contends that they are the “greenest utility in the country” and prioritize fish safety over power production, scientists involved in the federal relicensing process agree with Schuyler and his tribe that the dams are damaging the river.
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), says the dams are partially to blame for the decline of the Skagit River’s salmon and the orcas that visit Puget Sound, which the river drains into, every year. In a letter to the federal energy regulator, the NMFS also stated that the dam’s current operations are “not adequate to support survival and recovery of” orcas and endangered salmon species.
Salmon are a migratory family of fish that are born in rivers but then swim to the open ocean where they spend most of their lives, before migrating back upstream to reproduce. It’s nearly impossible to precisely measure how Seattle’s dams have impacted the Skagit’s fish because dam construction started in 1919, well before scientists had a chance to measure the river’s predam health.
But fish stocks have clearly declined. The NMFS estimates that in the 19th century, nearly a million steelhead returned annually to the Puget Sound. This winter the Skagit River, which is Puget Sound’s largest river, had less than 4,000 steelhead migrate up the Skagit to spawn; Schuyler said his tribe’s allotment was only 75 individual fish.
The de-watered riverbed stands in sharp contrast with the region’s famously wet winters. Snow-capped peaks dot the horizon as Schuyler drives deeper into the mountains of the North Cascade national park. These peaks are one of the snowiest places on earth and the Skagit drains the most heavily glaciated American mountains outside of Alaska – yet the de-watered riverbed below the highway is barely large enough to be called a creek.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which is responsible for regulating the county’s utility companies, is unlikely to force the city to remove any of its dams. But Schuyler said he hopes the relicensing process will expose the hydroelectric project’s environmental harm and that the residents of Seattle could then decide to remove the Gorge Dam. Because SCL is a public utility, the residents of Seattle are the legal owners of the Skagit’s dams.
There are signs that the relicensing process is raising awareness.
In January, the fisheries service wrote a letter to FERC claiming the city’s public utility was disputing “foundational scientific information” needed to inform the relicensing process. The Board of Commissioners for Skagit county wrote an open letter criticizing the Seattle utility, calling “the status quo” on the Skagit River, “unacceptable”.
Even more troubling for the city, a scientist at the state’s department of ecology threatened in February to withhold a water quality certificate required to operate the dams because the utility has repeatedly denied the department’s study requests. Jim Pacheco, a scientist at the department, described the utility’s latest rationale for denying a requested study as “laughable” and warned that not receiving the certificate would have “disastrous consequences” for SCL.
Andrew Bearlin, the utility’s Skagit license manager, said in an interview with the Guardian that SCL does not have fundamental scientific disagreements with the other scientific agencies.
“We don’t disagree on the fundamentals of the science, I would say we struggle sometimes to have the space to understand each other’s perspective on that science,” Bearlin said.
One scientific dispute at the heart of the relicensing process is whether wild fish have ever migrated upstream past the location of the city’s dams. The utility has claimed that natural barriers, including large boulders, have historically blocked almost all fish from migrating upstream before they can get to the Gorge Dam, meaning the dams have a “limited effect” on migrating salmon. But the fisheries service said in an October regulatory letter to FERC that the utility “has not cited actual data” identifying natural barriers to fish passage. The service also said that observers have seen salmon swimming at the base of the 300-foot Gorge Dam, suggesting that “no such barrier exists”.
The utility has long claimed in marketing materials that “all three of the dams are upstream of a natural barrier to fish passage” and that their dams “do not interfere with wild salmon migrations and spawning”. But in January, SCL removed any reference to natural barriers just as the FERC relicensing process was growing increasingly contentious. A spokesperson for SCL said the removal was part of a longplanned website overhaul and not related to the FERC relicensing.
After initially rejecting a fish passage study in March 2020, the city reversed course in December 2020 and agreed to study fish passage past the dams. Chris Townsend, SCL’s director of hydroelectric licensing, told the Guardian that SCL was always planning on including the study.
The city has continued to refuse the tribe’s request to study removal of the Gorge Dam because it is a “key piece of a green energy future”, according to Tom DeBoer, SCL’s chief environmental officer.
“It doesn’t make sense, in this era of moving to 100% clean energy, to be taking out these carbon-free resources that are critical to integrating wind and solar,” DeBoer said.
Schuyler said the city could continue drawing electricity from the upper two dams even if the Gorge Dam came down, and vowed to continue putting pressure on the city to rigorously study the river. He said he hopes these scientific studies will convince Seattle’s residents that their dams are far from harmless.
“We’ve lived here for 10,000 years,” he says. “We’ve protected and fought for the Skagit, and that’s continuing to this day.”