THE OUTDOORS : AVALANCHE EXPERT : His Artillery Plays a Key Role in Making Slopes Safer Around Lake Tahoe
On the day before Christmas, there was a snowstorm so fierce that Bob Moore couldn’t see Interstate 80 from his window in the U.S. Forest Service building 100 yards away.
“It was real spooky out in the mountains,” Moore said. “Everything was sliding. We had an avalanche situation that was horrible. We had a lot of snow, high winds, temperatures rising. The danger went to extreme.”
It was time to call in the artillery.
Moore is the special-uses assistant for the Truckee Ranger District, Tahoe National Forest, responsible for avalanche control in the northern section of the Eastern Sierra between the Yuba Pass (California 49) and the Sonora Pass (California 108).
Historically, the area around Lake Tahoe receives one of the heaviest snowfalls in the nation--and, as a result, also has some of the finest skiing at places such as Squaw Valley, site of the 1960 Winter Olympics; Sugar Bowl, Donner Ski Ranch, Boreal, the Royal Gorge Nordic cross-country area and Alpine Meadows, all of which Moore watches over year-round, among his other duties.
“The ski areas are under special-use permits,” he said. “I do planning, working with the ski areas on their construction projects and proposals, making sure they’re in compliance with the American National Standards Institute Code, the standard code that ski lifts have to follow, (which covers) everything from design and construction through the operation and maintenance.”
The last 2 years have been light for snow in the Eastern Sierra, but early snows indicate the region may have at least an average year again. In his office at 7:50 a.m., Moore routinely checks the graph on the thermometer outside the wall.
“Warm this morning--12 degrees,” he says. “It was zero up at my house.”
He phones Sugar Bowl.
“How much snow you get yesterday? Just a trace? How’s your wind now? Perfect.”
Moore hangs up and says: “You know when you can expect certain types of avalanches. It all depends on the particular slope and whether you’ve got enough snowpack in there to cover up the anchor points--rocks, trees, stumps, shrubbery. Once you get a snowpack above that level, the probability for an avalanche is pretty high, even for things below the anchor points. We have what we call climax avalanches where they go all the way to the ground . . . take everything with ‘em.”
Moore is at the hub of a network involving the ski area operators, the National Weather Service and CalTrans, which may close roads when avalanche danger is extreme, as it was Dec. 24.
“There were avalanches occurring,” Moore said. “They weren’t monster climax avalanches but enough that they could have caught somebody and buried ‘em.”
Moore probably caused some of them himself by firing off the various artillery at his disposal, including a pair of 75-millimeter pack howitzers, a recoilless rifle and an Avalauncher--all used to bring building snowpacks down before they become dangerous.
“The warnings we put out are all for the back country outside the ski areas, (but) we get the majority of our information from the ski areas, (which) have their own programs for doing hazard forecast evaluations within the ski area boundary,” Moore said. “If there is an avalanche problem, the operators are very good. They make the proper decisions and go into closure on their own.”
Running a ski area is a feast-or-famine business, and it especially hurts an operator to turn away revenue by shutting down on a holiday weekend. But Moore said it has never been a problem. The conditions of Dec. 24 were too ominous to ignore.
“The operators saw what was happening and just shut down the upper mountains,” Moore said. “It’s a tough decision to make, but when the storm hit, the winds were so high that most of the areas could not run their lifts, anyway. It’s not unusual in this area to have storm winds in excess of 100 m.p.h.”
Avalanches weren’t the Donner party’s problem. When those 87 unfortunate pioneers reached Truckee on Oct. 31, 1846, they found the pass that would bear leader George Donner’s name already blocked by snow. Snowbound all winter, they became the West’s great winter tragedy. Forty survived by eating their animals, their shoes and, finally, their dead.
More recently, at 3:45 p.m. on March 31, 1982, an avalanche did claim the lives of 7 people at Alpine Meadows. One survived--Anna Maria Conrad, 22--after 5 days under snow and debris.
Moore remembers the incident well. Leading a reporter down California 89, past the traffic backed up for miles trying to get into Squaw Valley, he stops at the turnoff into Alpine Meadows to look back at the steep mountain on the opposite side of the road. Loaded with snow, it would loom menacing over the heavily traveled route.
“We haven’t shut this (road) for 5 years,” Moore said. “Haven’t had snows that would warrant it.”
Farther up the road, he arrives at one of his howitzers, permanently mounted in a wood and concrete bunker. Lifting the shutters, Moore reveals the mountain just beyond the Alpine Meadows access road. The floors and walls are marked with preset coordinates for firing into specific spots as the World War II-vintage weapon is wheeled around on its rubber tires.
Alongside is a gas-powered Avalauncher that throws 2-pound explosive projectiles onto the mountain, and Moore has a recoilless rifle mounted higher on a hill in the area, as well as another howitzer on a trailer that he can tow to other trouble spots.
Moore also will go up on the ridges on skis and throw 2-pound sticks of dynamite with 60-second fuses over the top.
But the howitzer, built about the time Moore, 42, was born, is his favorite.
“This is a good weapon,” he said, touching the barrel. “Extremely accurate, extremely consistent.”
However, he estimates that in 5 to 10 years he’ll run out of ammunition. Nobody makes it anymore.
The Alpine Meadows parking lot was crammed with cars and skiers on the recent Martin Luther King Jr. 3-day weekend. Moore indicated the ridge across the way, from the Poma Rocks on the left to where it falls off into a saddle 1,500 feet to the right.
“That whole thing came down,” Moore said. “We’d taken all the extraordinary measures we could. We’d done more than we normally do.”
In ‘82, he had been on the job 8 years. At his office, he pulled some files on snowfall figures.
“You can see that at the end of March it just went straight up,” Moore said, pointing out a fall of 110 inches in a 10-day period, doubling the total pack.
Moore said that Alpine Meadows is in the most prevalent avalanche terrain and that it has a good program.
“We had a good system back then. The ski area was closed. People had been told, ‘Go home, don’t come to work.’ We had been there that morning . . . shot the recoilless rifle, shot the pack howitzer at several different locations.
“As you go back, our records indicate we had extreme avalanche hazard (warnings) out through that whole time period--before, during and afterward. Everything that could have been done was done.
“We haven’t had any sustained snowfalls like that,” Moore said. “There was (an accident) in Sugar Bowl--a fatality--I think in ’85. The area was closed. They violated the signs: ‘Closed area, avalanche danger.’ There was a physical barrier--a rope--across the ski run, and they went under the rope--physically had to stop, duck down and go under the rope.
“We’re just providing a service. If people want to pay attention to it, fine.”