When I Heard the Collapse...

When I heard the collapse, I thought, No problem.  

But this was before I understood avalanches as well as I do now.  The slope fractured like a pane of glass and even though I was on a 22° degree pitch at the top of the slope, it was as if the White Whale had surfaced and swallowed me whole.  

Many years ago.  It’s late January.  We’ve had a dry early winter. The snowpack was hard slab over depth hoar, depth hoar having the consistency of rocksalt, the strength of a house of cards.  The backcountry avalanche forecaster Evelyn Lees calls it Considerable avalanche danger today but we have no intention of getting on anything steep.  Barb Eastman is my ski partner for the day and we just plan to walk and ski the ridgelines. 

We skin up the Bowman trail, through White Fir Pass and weave through the Yellowjacket Trees.  It’s cold, windy and overcast.  We get to the top of Yellowjacket and rip skins.  Main Yellowjacket to the west, Depth Hoar Bowl to the east.  It comes by its name honestly.  

Barb is sipping tea and having a snack. I’m impatient, tired of the wind.  I tell her I’m skiing down the “Ridge to Nowhere” that separates the Cabin Run from Main Yellowjacket and will wait for her there.   

The skiing is not pleasant.  I jog over wind-whales on the ridgeline, then bob and weave among the krummholz. I peer onto the slope to the right and see it’s low angle.  I can hear myself think, “I’ll just swoop across the top and be back onto the ridge.”  Before I know it, my skis are onto the slope, but… it’s clear I have to travel a touch farther than I expected. 

Whumph. 

I hear the collapse, see a puff of smoke, but think, No problem.  

Spiderwebs of cracks all around.  Some above, some below.  I’m still moving across the top of the slope but now I’m on my side on a thick hard slab block, moving downhill.  

I imagine Barb still sipping her tea.  

She has no idea.  

And so I swim for the first tree, not caring whether I snap my femur, only so long as I am not buried.  If I am buried, I am dead.  I hit the tree, grab a branch but am pulled off.  I swim toward another tree, grab a branch and am pulled off again.  But by this time, all of the flowing snow of the avalanche has gone by. 

A full body check.  I’ve lost hat and sunglasses, one ski pole but everything else is intact.  All I can think of is that I can’t be late to pick my 7 year old son up from school.  

The avalanche broke to the ground 3-5’ deep and 500’ wide.  It snapped 10” diameter trees.  I was lucky.  By the end of the day, I learned that my colleague Kowboy had remotely triggered a similar sized avalanche near Wilson Peak (but from the safety of the ridgeline) and that Ricardo Presnell had been killed in an avalanche in the lower Meadow Chutes of Silver Fork on a steep rollover that now bears his name.  

Why was I impatient?  And more importantly, why would I ignore the ability of a hard slab avalanche to propagate wildly, even across lower angle terrain, and especially when depth hoar is at play?

Many, many lessons...

See you next week -


Drew

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