Forest Service Budget Crunch Leaves Some Montana Avalanche Forecasters in Limbo

A U.S. Forest Service budget shortfall appears likely to force some of the centers that produce the avalanche forecasts relied upon by Montana’s backcountry skiers and snowmobilers to scale back their operations this winter.

The possibility has drawn concern from a coalition of recreation-oriented groups, which sent a letter earlier this month urging the agency to fully staff the 14 avalanche centers USFS administers across the nation, three of which serve portions of Montana. The group wrote that a reduction in avalanche forecasts would have “significant negative impacts to public safety.” 

The agency’s shortfall, first widely discussed last month in an online meeting hosted by U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore, has spurred the agency to initiate a freeze on hiring seasonal employees outside the agency’s fire program. It has also left Montana avalanche centers in varying degrees of limbo as they work to understand how their individual payrolls and operations will be affected.

Sources involved with avalanche forecasting told Montana Free Press that outlooks for individual avalanche centers have changed on a weekly or even daily basis as the agency struggles to chart a course forward in response to the $750 million funding shortfall. Different centers are also in different situations, partly because they use a variety of staffing and financial structures.

The Gallatin National Forest Avalanche Center and Idaho Panhandle Avalanche Centers are arguably the least impacted centers in the Forest Service’s Region One, which includes Montana, North Dakota and parts of Idaho and South Dakota because they don’t rely on “1039 employees” — so called because they work fewer than 1,040 hours, or six months, per year. 

In an email to Montana Free Press, GNFAC director Mark Staples said his operation doesn’t use the part-time employees subjected to the hiring freeze. He said his center would start issuing daily avalanche forecasts as soon as enough snow accumulates in the mountains around Bozeman for skiers, snowboarders and snowmobilers to start their wintertime recreation.

The Idaho Panhandle Avalanche Center, which produces forecasts used by Montanans skiing and snowmobiling in the far northwestern corner of the state, is similarly positioned by virtue of its reliance on permanent — rather than seasonal — employees, director Chris Bilbrey said in an interview.

But for the West Central Montana Avalanche Center, based in Missoula, the outlook is grim. Executive Director Patrick Black told MTFP Oct. 28 that, without the $40,000 of annual Forest Service funding support the center relies upon, the Missoula-area center may have to scale back the frequency and geographic scope of the center’s forecasts, which cover parts of the Lolo, Bitterroot, Nez Perce and Salmon-Challis national forests. The center has also relied on Forest Service vehicles, usage that is also subject to the agency’s belt-tightening effort.

Unlike the other three avalanche centers that serve portions of Montana, the Missoula center Black leads is dependent upon Forest Service support but not technically housed under the federal government’s umbrella. Black said he’s spent much of the past several weeks scrambling to sort out what the Forest Service’s “struggle to remain solvent, for lack of a better way to put it” means for his ability to bring the center’s three seasonal forecasters back on payroll. 

Although it can vary from one year to the next, the $40,000 cost-share typically covers 30% to 40% of WCMAC’s payroll. Without it, Black said he may be forced to start his staff later in the season and reduce forecasting operations. The center might produce one forecast per week instead of four, he said, or cut back on snowpack analysis for some of the harder-to-reach regions in the center’s forecast zone, such as the area outside of Seeley Lake that’s become an increasingly popular destination for snowmobilers. Without use of Forest Service vehicles, he’s still unsure how he and his forecasters will access field sites, he said.

Black added that he’s particularly concerned about the funding shortfall given the remarkable growth in wintertime backcountry users that’s been reported both nationally and in Montana. Some 2.2 million skiers in the U.S. now use specialized gear to access backcountry terrain, according to a ski industry association report, and Black points to the near-doubling of visitors to missoulaavalanche.org in the past five years as evidence of that growth locally. During the 2022-2023 season, the last year with enough snow to justify a full season of forecasts, about 150,000 unique visitors accessed the website.

One of the three forecasters Black had hoped to bring back on this season told Black that she needed more certainty in her employment future than he could provide. Rather than holding out for the possibility of the mid-November start date she’d been anticipating, she told Black that she’s exploring other job opportunities.

“It’s a sad reality for her. She wanted to stay with us, but she couldn’t afford to live in limbo,” Black said. “Many avalanche centers are in similar spaces with staff that they can’t bring back.”

Much of the challenge for Black and other avalanche center directors relates to reliable budget forecasts — and that’s something, he said, that has both short-term and long-term components. Congress last passed a bill funding the Forest Service for a full fiscal year, rather than relying on temporary allocations outlined in continuing resolutions, in the late 1990s, according to USFS Budget Director Mark Lichenstein.

In a letter dated Sept. 11, Regional Forester Leanne Marten wrote that the seasonal hiring freeze arose out of the “exhaustion of the supplemental funding received through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law” — the pair of massive spending packages Congress authorized in 2021 and 2022 — and the agency’s responsibility “to plan for the most conservative funding picture.”

Within weeks of that letter landing in the inboxes of Region One higher-ups, Hilary Eisen with the Winter Wildlands Alliance started researching the number of forecasters subject to the hiring freeze and rallying support for their renewed employment.

On Oct. 4, Winter Wildlands Alliance and 41 cosigners, including the American Avalanche Institute, Beartooth Mountain Guides, Montana Alpine Guides, Bridger Bowl Ski Area and the Montana Backcountry Alliance, asked the Forest Service to exempt seasonal avalanche forecasters from the hiring freeze. The signatories argued that avalanche centers are “models of efficiency” that provide critical services.

“Snow is already falling in many western mountain ranges and avalanche season will soon begin. Tens of millions of Americans engage in winter recreation on Forest Service lands and rely on the tools provided by Forest Service avalanche forecasters to work and recreate safely in avalanche terrain,” the organizations wrote. “Immediate action is needed to ensure that the Forest Service Avalanche Centers are fully staffed before the end of the year.”

Eisen told MTFP that she’s been given inconsistent information on the agency’s plan for dealing with the hiring freeze — where she’s been able to track down information at all.

For example, her organization and others directed a letter to Moore on Oct. 4 “asking some pretty basic questions.” As of Oct. 28, she said she still hadn’t received a satisfactory response — “and when I’ve reached out to the Forest Service at [lower] levels, I’ve not gotten very clear answers if I’ve gotten answers at all.”

Eisen said she’s learned that there are 13 Forest Service employees nationally who are hired on a seasonal basis to fulfill a variety of avalanche-oriented duties ranging from producing forecasts to educating recreationists on avalanche risks to investigating the factors that contribute to one of the roughly 25-30 avalanche fatalities that occur in a given winter. 

Although Eisen has been told that all of the Region One forecasters will be exempted from the freeze, she’s spoken personally with at least one forecaster based out of the Flathead National Forest Avalanche Center who she said won’t be rehired due to the agency’s budget woes.

MTFP asked a Region One spokesperson whether the Flathead Avalanche Center would be staffed at the same level as the 2023-2024 season. The agency didn’t answer directly. In an Oct. 23 email, Region One spokesperson Cassie Wandersee highlighted the agency’s work over the past few years to transition 1039 positions to permanent seasonal positions, which aren’t subject to the hiring freeze.

“At this time, we anticipate avalanche centers in the Northern Region will continue to provide the same levels of public-safety services through forecasting and education,” she wrote.

That programming forecast doesn’t track with what Jenny Cloutier with the Friends of the Flathead Avalanche Center has learned.

In an Oct. 17 conversation with MTFP, Cloutier said that while backcountry users recreating in the Flathead, Whitefish and Swan mountain ranges will still have access to daily avalanche forecasts, there will be fewer educational offerings than there have been in recent years because some of her nonprofit’s trainings are produced in coordination with Forest Service staff. 

“It’s complicated and it’s just plain sad,” she said of the budget debacle, adding that she considers the Forest Service an important partner.

“I wish we could know what our funding structure would be like for a decade at a time just to have some more consistency so we weren’t in this sea change all of the time with the funding,” Cloutier said.

Like others interviewed for this story, Cloutier said she doesn’t know how long the period of funding limbo will last — or if Congress has the appetite to reverse the budget scenario that contributed to the hiring freeze.

Funding could be coming as soon as late December, she said — or it could go the other way, and the entire agency could be forced into the kind of federal government shutdown that shuttered most Forest Service and National Park Service facilities for a month in 2018 and 2019.

“Nationwide, does anyone know what’s going to happen in the next couple of months?” she said.

For his part, Black, in Missoula, said while he doesn’t relish the “cliffhanger” position he’s in, he can appreciate how it has garnered more discussion surrounding both “the plight of a nonprofit avalanche center” and “how thin or nonexistent our margins are.”

“I wish the stakes weren’t so dire,” he said.

In a follow-up email to MTFP, Black wrote that avalanches kill more people on public lands than any other natural hazard. Ninety-five percent of those avalanches, he said, occur on Forest Service land.

This story originally appeared in the Montana Free Press, which can be found online at montanafreepress.org.