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Be Careful Out There

As much as we all love mountains, none of us can afford, even for a second, to forget that mountains have never, ever loved us back

By Dave Skinner

The avalanche death of local legend Ben Parsons has everyone stunned. Call me one of his fans, proud of a fellow Brave, Bobcat, and Bridger Bowl veteran, just an all-around good guy.

But my horror was compounded upon learning when and where – Jan. 5 on Stanton Mountain in Glacier Park. Both persons involved are considered experienced backcountry adventurers, one a world-class mountaineer.

In Kalispell that morning, it was 22 below zero, part of our third Arctic blast of the winter. This matters for two reasons – first and most important, 22 below is serious, even dangerous cold, the kind where, if anything goes wrong, things get ugly fast.

Well, things got ugly. How matters – to anyone who plays in our backcountry, or even thinks about it. Please download and study the Flathead Avalanche Center’s report on the Parsons tragedy, as well as other incident reports.

Don’t be surprised at what you read. I wasn’t. Back in the early 1980s, steep, deep and cheap Bridger Bowl was the best place in the world to pretend to go to college while honestly majoring in skiing. But it was also one of Earth’s finest classrooms for the study of snow, in all its fickle moods, both outrageously good and mind-blowingly bad – and I was “in class” at least 200 days.

The 1980/81 season was terrible. Opening day came Jan. 27 with 47 inches, fluff on top of dirt down low, with an old, weak November “base” up high. After a couple decent storm cycles, concerned about the weak layer, the patrol set charges in the South Bowl. The whole thing slid to the bottom, down to granite, never really recovering that season.

At the other extreme, one dump in 1982 or 83 began roughly Sunday night, pounding Bridger for at least 48 hours. Starting with a good base, at just below the freezing point, a steady temperature fall squeezed every possible flake out of the air. Technically, it was a perfect storm.

Finally, on “Big Wednesday” morning, the numbers were in: 60 inches, 32 below, no wind, charges fired, everything open. Everything. There were maybe 150 skiers on the whole hill, with half of us thawing out at any one time. None of us will ever forget that epic, singular day.

Just a day later, a chinook blew all that cold smoke into variable breakable crust – and we hard cases tried to ski it, right? But that skier action in a stable, controlled snowpack allowed the next cycle to adhere and integrate when it came, continuing a great year. Out of bounds? Out of bounds, for real, for quite a while.

For me, Bridger Bowl was a giant laboratory of risk management, where what we (or the professionals) didn’t know about the conditions could be, at least, painful. What was known about the snow determined whether we skied, turned around, or stayed home. Period.

Beyond the ropes? Exclamation point!

So, on Jan. 5, the avalanche danger rating was “moderate,” certainly not “extreme,” but “human-triggered avalanches are possible” nonetheless. The forecast warned skiers to “carefully evaluate wind loaded areas before committing to a slope and keep in mind that small wind slab avalanches could step down to deeper weak layers in the snowpack.” Sadly, that’s precisely what occurred – pretty much every factor noted in the forecast, happened.

But the thing that sticks in my mind, and would have kept me off Stanton all by itself, was how, “unfortunately, the consistently cold weather […] caused these layers to weaken even further.” Simply put, cold, dry snow doesn’t pack or settle well – which the South Bowl had spectacularly demonstrated during 1981’s lousy season.

In this case, Montana got three Arctic blasts in December alone. Critically, the third blew hard on a significant fresh snowfall. Blown snow, especially in rarely-skied backcountry, cloaks many unknowns, not just hidden obstacles, but the underlying conditions that matter most.

As much as we all love mountains, none of us can afford, even for a second, to forget that mountains have never, ever loved us back. Please, be careful out there.