Canada’s Avalanche Experts Expect More Danger, Fatalities This Season

As Dwight Pahl remembers it--although it is something he’d really rather forget--his first clue was a sharp gust of wind rolling down the mountainside on what had been a perfectly still day.

It wasn’t wind. It was the blast of air riding ahead of an avalanche. Before he had time to react, Pahl and his snowmobile were engulfed in a white maelstrom, tumbling like feathers in a hurricane.

“It was completely out of control,” Pahl recalled. “I didn’t know if I was up or down or sideways. I didn’t have any idea of which way my body was going.”

By a stroke of chance Pahl finds unfathomable, when the slide had run its course he was left standing upright, chest high in snow, while one of his companions, Murray Perrin, was buried so deeply his body wasn’t recovered for hours.

A day after his buddy’s funeral, Pahl, a 37-year-old oil field worker, sat numbly at home in Medicine Hat, Alberta, grappling with his sense of loss and guilt and confusion.

“It happened to us in an area where it shouldn’t have,” Pahl said more than once during a 30-minute telephone conversation. “We’d never seen any signs of slides in the area. It was known as a safe spot. . . . We got caught in something that shouldn’t have happened.”

January was a perplexing and dangerous time in the mountains of Western Canada for Pahl and other outdoor enthusiasts. Sixteen people have been killed in avalanches so far this winter in what is expected to become a record year for such fatalities. Canada’s toll matches the number of deaths so far in the United States, where the population is 10 times greater.

Canada, a country synonymous with snow, has one of the world’s most elaborate and respected programs for avalanche forecasting, prevention and warning. But the unpredictable weather associated with El Nino and the surging popularity of winter recreation have thrown its avalanche hunters off their stride this year.

“The system is obviously not working in terms of the number of dead people we’ve got right now,” conceded Alan Dennis, managing director of the Canadian Avalanche Center in Revelstoke, British Columbia, which is run by a private, nonprofit association of ski resorts, mine operators, forestry firms, outdoor outfitters, helicopter ski companies and government agencies.

Moreover, he said, the danger is likely to increase with each new snowfall on the already unstable slopes.

“It looks like we’re stuck with this all winter,” Dennis said. “It’s just out there waiting. All it takes is a skier hitting the right spot or a snowmobiler cutting across the snow in the right place to set it off.”

Knox Williams, his counterpart at the Colorado Avalanche Center, agreed.

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” he said. “The carnage is predictable.”

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In Canada, the epicenter of avalanche danger is here on the western ridges of the Rockies in British Columbia.

The area surrounding Rogers Pass, at the heart of Canada’s Glacier National Park, is primitive and forbidding country, and the avalanches crash down with enough power to sweep a semitrailer-truck over a cliff or knock a locomotive from its tracks. In 1910, Rogers Pass was the scene of the worst avalanche disaster in Canadian history; it killed 62 people who had been clearing away an earlier slide.

Avalanche season begins as early as October and can last until May. The economic losses resulting from a big slide that blocks the Trans-Canada Highway or the intercontinental railroad, both of which cut through the pass, mount quickly into the tens of millions of dollars. Signs tell motorists to move quickly through avalanche zones. Park rangers and police ticket those who ignore the warnings.

Despite the threatening landscape, every winter the region draws thousands of snowmobilers, heli-skiers and back-country trekkers from across the continent and from Europe. And every winter Dave Skjonsberg, a ranger with the Canadian national park service, leads the world’s largest and most ambitious avalanche-prevention team into Rogers Pass.

Skjonsberg and his co-workers have a relatively simple and time-tested expedient for dealing with the avalanche hazard: They shoot it.

The concept is simple: Anticipate the danger spots and then trigger the avalanche under controlled conditions, before it can unleash itself on an unsuspecting motorist, skier or snowmobiler.

The 18-member team draws on 35 years of records and the data from several weather stations to anticipate where and when the avalanche danger is greatest. Then, after clearing the highway and railroad of traffic, Canadian soldiers roll out the artillery: 105-millimeter howitzers and 106-millimeter recoilless rifles that are mounted on fixed emplacements and fired at targeted slopes.

It takes as many as 100 rounds to trigger an avalanche, and the army fires up to 2,000 shots a year in Rogers Pass in avalanche protection.

Eighty percent of the work is done at night, when the disruption to traffic is minimal. Elsewhere, avalanche teams trigger slides with propane cannons or bomblets dropped from helicopters.

The prevention program has become an international model. But the avalanche center is increasingly being tested. Advances in technology, especially in snowmobiling, have opened vast new wilderness areas to outdoor enthusiasts and revelers with varying degrees of back-country experience.

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In Revelstoke, a two-hour drive southwest and downhill from Rogers Pass, the avalanche center’s Dennis said the surge in winter recreation is partly to blame for the increase in avalanche fatalities.

“There are more and more people going out there who are lacking in adventure skills,” he said. “They have snowmobiles that can get them to very remote and harsh terrain, but they don’t have the avalanche skills to match.”

Often, Dennis added, all that’s required is knowing how far up the mountain one can safely go. He calls it “crossing the stupid line.”

“Too many people don’t know how to calculate the risk,” Dennis said, a hint of agitation creeping into his voice. “They don’t know where the stupid line is. How far up the mountain is the stupid line?”

This year, the hazard has been compounded by El Nino, he added.

Early snowfall in Western Canada was light, meshing with predictions that El Nino would mean a mild winter here. Golf courses at some Canadian mountain resorts stayed open through December.

January, however, brought the first blizzards in the west--and crippling ice storms in Quebec and Ontario--and that snow settled on slick, packed crust in the upper Rockies. The combination makes for particularly unstable slopes, even in normally safe areas, as Pahl and his fellow snowmobilers discovered. On the January weekend Perrin was killed, there were nine other fatalities, all skiers, in two other avalanches in Canada.

The heightened danger has made for a grim atmosphere at the avalanche center, which operates out of a modest set of offices in Revelstoke, an outdoor sport center located between Vancouver and Banff, Alberta.

The center is linked by computer to 52 sites across Canada that submit daily reports on avalanche conditions. Dennis and his staff compile an assessment of danger levels throughout the country that is available on a toll-free telephone line (1-800-667-1105) and the World Wide Web (https://www.avalanche.ca/). The report is updated at least twice weekly.

Avalanche hunters say there is something eerily beautiful--and frightfully deceptive--about watching an avalanche from a distance. The power of a wall of snow and ice moving at speeds that can reach nearly 70 mph can be gruesome. Nearly half of all avalanche fatalities are caused by trauma rather than suffocation, when victims strike trees and rocks or are swept off cliffs. The bodies of some of the skiers killed earlier this year in Canada were battered nearly to the point of dismemberment, according to the friend of one victim.

“It’s like getting hit by a big wave of surf,” said Dennis, who survived a small avalanche years ago. “But the big difference is you’re going to be held down. You’re not going to float up to the surface afterward.”

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Avalanche Accidents in Canada

Number of avalanche fatalities in Canada each year.

1997 to date: 16