‘White Deaths’ Up : Avalanche: Fatal Flaw in Ski Thrills

Rescue workers probed the snow for two days last winter before they found the boy’s body in its icy tomb on Peak 7. Alex Cates had ignored a six-foot-high warning sign and, at the age of 17, had paid the ultimate price for one small adventure.

Cates, buried by an avalanche in which four people died, became a victim of a type of natural disaster that experts say is increasingly dangerous and largely ignored.

White death, they call it. And, they say, with rare exception, it is entirely preventable.

“It’s a matter of ignorance and arrogance,” said Hunter Holloway, a mission coordinator with the volunteer Colorado Search and Rescue Board and vice president of the national Mountain Rescue Assn.

All it takes is the gentlest thump of a single ski on a fragile snowpack to turn a deep-powder paradise into a deadly current of ice and snow.

A ‘River of Cement’

“It’s like being swept away in a river of cement,” Holloway said, and, once it stops churning, the snow sets like concrete. Holloway has participated in seven avalanche search missions but has yet to recover anyone alive.

About 10,000 avalanches are reported each year in the West, but forecasters estimate that there are, in fact, at least 10 times that number. Colorado has the worst casualty toll, an average of five fatalities annually, followed by Washington, Alaska and California. In the United States last year, 128 people are known to have been caught in avalanches. Of the 17 avalanche deaths, 11 were in Colorado.

The trouble, ironically, is rooted in the fact that both skiers and their equipment are better now than ever before. More and more people are able to venture into the back country to escape crowded slopes and expensive lift tickets. Mountain highways and powerful snowmobiles have made the wilderness accessible to people who would not have hiked in.

Unwary Become Victims

“The real danger is people get away with it year after year, then you get a once-every-10-years snowpack and people will be killed right and left,” said Butch Harper of the U.S. Forest Service’s Ketchum Ranger District in Idaho. “If you get someone here from L.A. who doesn’t see a lot of snow, they get caught up in the excitement and don’t realize the danger.”

The alarming trend has stirred impassioned debate among authorities, the ski industry and wilderness buffs over whether thrill-seekers have the right to risk their lives on public land and how far the law should go to protect them.

Although free safety classes are plentiful on the slopes, many people exploring the back country and out-of-bounds areas are either unwilling or unable to take the steps needed to calculate the risk.

Throughout history, man has challenged mountain with devastating results. Hannibal lost 18,000 of 38,000 soldiers, 2,000 horses and several elephants to avalanches during his Alpine crossing in 218 BC. Napoleon also saw his troops swept away by walls of snow. In America, countless pioneers died during the Gold Rush era as avalanches swallowed whole mining camps.

The worst U.S. avalanche disaster occurred on March 1, 1910, when two trains stranded in blizzards in the Cascade range near Wellington, Wash., were buried. Ninety-six people died; only 22 survived.

“It’s a case of human being versus Mother Nature, and, when there’s a problem with Mother Nature, I’ve never seen her lose yet,” said Sheriff Delbert Ewoldt of Colorado’s avalanche-prone Summit County, which includes Breckenridge and is the scene of about one-third of the nation’s white deaths.

It is a gruesome way to die. Many avalanche victims are fatally injured by the fall, battered to death by chunks of ice, tree stumps and other debris swept along in a torrent of snow that may reach speeds of 80 to 120 m.p.h. The tumbling snow can pack the mouth and nose, creating a solid, choking block of ice.

Breathing Under Snow

Even if someone buried alive finds an air pocket, there is the risk that his breath will melt snow crystals and condensation will form on the face before rescuers arrive. Such moisture quickly refreezes, and the victim suffocates in an ice mask. Breathing may also be impossible simply because the chest cannot expand in the frozen vise of snow.

Tom Kimbrough, a forecaster for the Utah Avalanche Center, said many people have the misperception that they can outski an avalanche.

“If you’re in an avalanche, you’re in trouble,” he said. “You need to react very quickly. Throw away your poles and get your skis off if you can. Swim, and, as you come to a stop, keep the snow from your face. The last thing you should do is try to stick your hand up as far you as can.”

When an avalanche victim is buried completely, the odds of being pulled out alive drop to 50-50 after just 30 minutes. Overall, the survival rate is one in three.

“The thing about avalanches is this: You can avoid them,” said Nick Logan of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. “It’s not like lightning or tornadoes, where you just get caught by it. You have to put yourself in an avalanche hazard. If skiers are caught, they caused it.”

Signs Torn Down

But the general public’s attitude remains cavalier. People have been known to tear down avalanche warning signs on Mt. Baldy for use as toboggans.

Deep but dangerous powder often beckons just beyond designated ski areas. Skiers can ride up on the lift and easily slip across the boundary lines--a practice known as yo-yo skiing.

That’s what Alex Cates and his half-brother, George, were doing last Feb. 18 at Breckenridge.

“The weather was pretty good that day,” George, 39, who lives in Locust Valley, N.Y., said in a telephone interview. “We saw the spot when we rode up in the lift. We saw lots of tracks from people who skied there, and there still were people skiing there. So we went in.”

George Cates said he saw the huge sign warning of avalanche danger in the out-of-bounds area, “but I never read it. I wish now I had.”

He and Alex were on their first run down the forbidden slope when George heard Alex yell. He looked up to see “this wall of snow, foaming on down. I couldn’t believe it.”

Last Word to Brother

“I told my brother to ski off to the side. I didn’t know the whole bowl would come down.”

George Cates and another skier were able to ride out the frozen tidal wave. Cates landed upright, knee-deep in snow. He took off his skis and gave the other survivor a hand while frantically looking for Alex.

“It looked like an atomic bomb had gone off,” Cates recalled. “What had been a vast expanse of white snow all of the sudden . . . was dirt, ice and rock.”

One body was found before rescue workers abandoned the search at nightfall because the risk of another avalanche was too great. Two more bodies were pulled from the snow the next day after the volunteers spent hours painstakingly probing 2,000 square yards of debris and avalanche dogs sniffed and dug at the rubble of what once was a mountain.

Alex was the last one found. He was near George’s skis, buried four feet down.

Research over the last 20 years has resolved most of the major questions about avalanches--where they run and why, how fast, how far and how dangerously--but scientists still cannot pinpoint just when an avalanche will occur.

Forecasting remains a subjective art, based on weather, terrain and snowpack.

Impossible Police Job

“To try to close or regulate the back country is impossible. It cannot be done. There’s too much of it,” said Betsy Armstrong, a Colorado forecaster, research scientist and co-author of “The Avalanche Book.”

“It’s really up to the individual whether to take the risk,” she said. “Most fatalities occur to people with the highest skill levels. They couldn’t be on those steep slopes in the first place if they weren’t good skiers.”

On balance, Armstrong said, the overall risk of getting caught in an avalanche is extremely slim.

“An active avalanche area may run six to eight times per winter, and each run takes less than a minute. So you’re looking at less than six minutes out of the whole year that a particular area is unsafe,” she said.

For the ski industry, avalanches pose a tricky information problem. Public safety is a high priority, but so is tourism, and it requires skill to adequately warn skiers without scaring them away.

“I think the perception is that ski areas shudder when you use the word ‘avalanche,’ ” said Stephanie Nora of Colorado Ski Country USA, a trade organization representing 28 of the state’s major resorts.

Risk to Snowmobilers

“We’re not trying to pass the blame, but there are other people out there who need to be responsible, too. If a snowmobiler two miles from Vail is caught in an avalanche, why should he be a ski statistic?” she said.

In fact, five of the 11 people who died in Colorado avalanches last year were on downhill skis. Four were cross-country skiers and two were snowmobilers.

Nora said the ski industry is taking steps to reduce the avalanche hazard. This season, she said, warning signs will be more plentiful and more visible, gates will be used instead of ropes to mark off some dangerous areas and ski patrols will be increased.

Some states and counties in recent years have set fines and sometimes jail terms for trespassing on land that ski areas have designated off limits.

“State law says that going through a closed area can get you six months in jail and a $1,000 fine on a misdemeanor charge, but they end up with just a $200 fine if they go to court on it,” said Gary Reitman, ski patrol director at Mammoth-June Ski Resort.

At Crystal Mountain in Washington, snow safety director Paul Baugher has noticed more beginners or intermediate skiers heading for the back country.

Women, Children in Wild

“There used to be a stereotype of those skiers as robust males, but now we get ladies . . . and ski schools taking a class of teen-agers out,” he said.

Crystal Mountain, with the nation’s seventh-highest avalanche rate, posts signs and attempts to control the hazard by firing artillery into unstable slopes to set off slides before skiers do.

This year, Baugher said, the resort has also invested in an expensive Swedish detector that acts “like a glorified treasure finder” to locate buried victims equipped with small devices that emit a signal.

Yet, as Nora notes, there is no way to force people to heed warnings.

“The signs at Breckenridge couldn’t have been more foreboding if they had had a skull and crossbones on them,” she said. “It’s the dare, the challenge of it all.”

Since last February’s disaster, Sheriff Ewoldt has lobbied to close Peak 7. “I believe it’s a very dangerous area, but it’s on public land,” he said. “The ski area wants it closed, too, but the Forest Service is reluctant. They don’t want to set a precedent. It may come down to me challenging them in court. The Forest Service doesn’t have to dig people out; the sheriff does . . . .”

Opposes Closing Lands

Dennis Bschor of the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain region emphasized that the agency wants to keep public lands public.

“If you close the land, for one thing, you have an obligation to enforce that closure,” Bschor said. In much of the back country, that would be impossible, especially because helicopters and planes can’t be flown over protected wilderness areas.

“We basically operate on the assumption that people have the right to risk their life,” said Homer Bowles, recreation management specialist for the Forest Service’s northern region, which includes Montana, northern Idaho, North Dakota and parts of South Dakota.

Because closing or even adequately patrolling the vast back country is out of the question, the new emphasis is on public education.

Colorado has proclaimed an Avalanche and Back Country Safety Awareness Week and is using public service announcements, brochures and even ads on grocery bags to get the message across. The ads give avalanche safety tips and telephone numbers for avalanche conditions across the state.

In Summit County, home of the Breckenridge, Keystone and Copper Mountain ski areas, Sheriff Ewoldt is even thinking about putting officers on skis this season to ticket the out-of-bounders, in hopes of preventing another tragedy like the one last February on Peak 7.

When Alex Cates died, his family asked for donations to the Summit County rescue team in lieu of flowers. George Cates thinks the money will go for a truck or something else that might buy precious minutes the next time someone gambles his life on a sparkling hill of snow.

From his home in New York, Cates sadly wished aloud that he had stopped to read that warning sign. He asked how the weather was in Colorado.

In Breckenridge, the snowflakes were falling softly on Peak 7.