Avalanche safety: Stay on top of the slopes and “crush pow”
Pete showed up in New Mexico at the right time. On the last Friday in February, the skies were dumping at Taos, in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains, though it had barely snowed all season. Staff were out skiing, and most ticket booths were shuttered when we arrived, save for the will-call office. Our stoke, as skiers say — enthusiasm — was high, and we spent the morning cutting fresh tracks.
In the afternoon, Pete wandered off to Bootdoctors, a local pro shop, to have climbing skins cut for his touring skis, which have bindings with a releasing heel for striding uphill. The skins, in turn, attach to the bottom of the skis and provide traction; he’d need all of it during the three-day avalanche-safety course we’d signed up for, in southern Colorado, for backcountry skiing.
The trip had been a long time coming. Pete and I had grown up together around Boston, and just after college we’d taken our first backcountry turns at Tuckerman Ravine, on the back side of Mount Washington. The trip marked our last time skiing together for a while; shortly after the Tuckerman trip, I moved to China for a few years, and Pete moved to Cleveland. In the dry smog of Beijing, I often daydreamed about the Rocky Mountains, which I’d first visited with Pete in high school. Pete’s move to the monotonous, flat shores of Lake Erie left him with similar yearnings.
So when I finally moved back to the United States last year, to Albuquerque, we were both antsy for a return to the backcountry. Two of the great Rocky Mountain ranges — the Sangre de Cristos, straddling southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, and the San Juans, in southwest Colorado — lay just three hours away to the north. Most skiers visiting Colorado still fly into Denver, electing to drive west across Interstate 70 to resorts dotting the highway, leaving the southern ranges — which are closer to Albuquerque
than to Denver — an undertrafficked afterthought. Flying into Albuquerque for a week-long ski expedition to the Southern Rockies, hours away from the Denver crowds, sounded like a great idea, and Pete didn’t need much convincing to visit. We’d spend a warmup day at Taos, take the backcountry safety course in the San Juans, then head to Telluride for a glitzier victory lap.
From Taos en route to Durango, a common access point to the San Juans, we drove across northern New Mexico, an expanse vast enough that it’s a good idea to fill your gas tank before crossing the first mountain pass. Only three major resorts are located in the San Juans — Telluride, Wolf Creek and Purgatory — making the range a haven for backcountry skiing and snowboarding. Guide companies abound in the San Juans, and many offer safety courses certified by the American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education (AIARE). Over the past decade, backcountry skiing has become increasingly popular, AIARE’S executive director, Richard Bothwell, told me. Meanwhile, avalanche deaths in the United States largely plateaued in that span, since a small spike around 2010.
“I’d like to think that’s in part because of education,” Josh Kling, the founder of Kling Mountain Guides in Durango, told me.
That was motivation enough for us. The next day, after crashing in Durango, we showed up for Kling’s class in the basement of the Durango Mountain Institute at Purgatory Resort, about 25 miles outside of town. Five other students attended. Over the next three days — one inside, and two outdoors in the mountains — we’d begin learning how to manage avalanche risk. We’d also drink a lot of beer together.
Ski guides Tico Allulee and AJ Appezzato introduced us to avalanchesafety techniques, philosophy and strategies, employing both technical speak and backcountry slang. There were two main goals in what we were doing: The first, as Tico repeated constantly, was to ski powder, or “crush pow.” “Don’t get smoked” — the vernacular for getting caught by anavalanche—wasthe second.
When it comes to crushing pow while not getting smoked, there’s a fire hose of information to consider, and it can take years to begin to deploy it skillfully. Tico and AJ were careful to stress that one could never fully eliminate risk, only manage it. Most of the classroom day was spent learning about the different kinds of avalanches, where and under what conditions they form, how they slide, how to diagnose them and how to translate avalanche forecasts onto the “rose” — a diagram of elevation and direction in the AIARE field books used to plot zones of safety and danger — to plan a trip based on that information.
Our team threw on our backcountry gear and skinned a few hundred yards to an open mountain clearing above the highway between Silverton and Durango. Avalanche debris fields were visible on distant faces, and we spent the day tramping around in the snow, running burial retrieving drills and digging snow pits, paying close attention to the snowpack’s basal facet layer — a weak area near the ground which can cause avalanches once the snow gets deeper. Then we headed to the local bar for well-earned beers.
The next day, we skinned to our first line, a route down the mountain that skied like a dream, powder stashes for two runs of bliss. By 2 p.m. — our predetermined time for returning from the backcountry and Tico’s preferred bar time — we were back in the bar, getting classmates’ contact info for future trips and toasting one another. A happy visit to the watering hole was the sign of a good backcountry day. “Better to be toasting your bros on a good day than pour one out for a homie,” AJ remarked.
Our final two days felt like a dream. We skied three lines of tree powder, and diagnosed one avalanche-prone zone, working our way around it.
After four days skinning uphill to backcountry lines, a day at Telluride was a flashy ending to our southern tour. At Telluride, we skied from 9 to 4, down tight tree chutes, high mountain gullies and wide-open groomers of luxury corduroy serviced by an arsenal of highspeed lifts.
This season, I’ve already begun looking at the weather forecast, trying to hold back my excitement. After a few early October snowfalls, Tico provided the right perspective.
“I’m trying hard not to get stoked about skiing,” he wrote me. “It’s only October, today’s pow is winter’s basal facet layer.”