"Is it safe?"
The more I asked the question, the more I felt like Dr. Szell, the sadistic Nazi dentist from Marathon Man .
"It" was an early season snowpack in the Cariboo mountains west of Valemount, B.C. The question was directed to any of the half dozen certified mountain guides busily analyzing conditions on the lower flanks of a slope of perhaps 32°. The mountain above us rose 1,200 metres and steepened; we'd skied to our current position on a long traverse.
The area had been blessed with copious snowfall, as evidenced by the deepening pit being dug, deep enough now to swallow a person of normal height. I was attending guide training at Canadian Mountain Holidays' Cariboo Lodge. It was December 2003, less than a year after B.C. had suffered back-to-back avalanche tragedies that had left 14 people, half of them students on a backcountry skiing excursion, dead.
The people around me had, collectively, well over a century of backcountry experience. That's not the level of experience people who head into the backcountry a couple of times a winter have; it's the kind of experience people who work every day, all winter long, guiding skiers in uncontrolled terrain accumulate. If anyone could venture an educated guess about the stability of a slope of snow, it was these men and women.
In attendance that week were a veritable Who's Who of avey rock stars - Bruce Jamieson, Dave McClung, Werner Munter, Chris Stetham and Peter Shaerer among them. I'd read their books, devoured their academic papers, spent one-on-one time interviewing them and generally making a pest of myself trying to glean some insight into the question always front of mind when skiing outside the ropes.
"Is it safe?"
"Look for yourself," one of them said, handing me a sizing grid and loupe.
Looked like snow crystals, well-faceted, unique, beautiful, potentially dangerous.
"Is it safe?"
They'd isolated a column of snow, identified layer boundaries from individual storms, conducted compression tests, learned about as much as they could from it and decided to take things to the next level. Splitting into two groups, each cut a rutschblock - an isolated block of snow about two metres square, dug out on three sides and "cut" with a cord on the high side. One of the guides gently stepped onto the top of our block, skis on. He compressed it, bringing his own weight down with moderate force. Nothing moved.
He jumped. Nothing moved. Another guide joined in and they both jumped. Nothing moved. A third stepped on and all three jumped up and down half a dozen times. The block didn't budge.
"Is it safe?"
"Sure seems to be."
The second group had cut their block about 15 linear metres away and maybe 5 metres uphill on what gave every appearance of being a uniform slope of snow. A guide stepped onto the block and prepared to apply the first quantum of pressure. Before he could, the whole block slid on one of the interstices between snowfalls about one-and-a-half metres below the surface.
"Is it safe?"
"Apparently not," came the surprised reply.
At the end of a week of classroom and fieldwork, after asking endless questions of guides and academics, two valuable lessons emerged from the cauldron of information I'd simmered together. The first was that there's nothing more valuable than experience. No amount of education, understanding and hypothesizing begins to replace skis-on-snow time. The paradox is, of course, you have to survive long enough to earn that experience.
The more valuable, immediate lesson became my backcountry mantra: Terrain is the problem; terrain is the solution. You can make mistakes of judgment on 30° slopes and probably live to embroider the story over beers afterwards. Make the same mistake on a 40° or 45° pitch and your loved ones will probably be asking, "How could this have happened?" at your funeral.
The questions being asked in the wake of last weekend's avalanche on Boulder Mountain outside of Revelstoke isn't "How could this have happened?" And while less generous commentators ask, "How could those involved be so stupid?" the focus seems to be shifting towards asking, "How can we reduce the chances of this happening in the future?"
Fair question. This is the second year in a row lives have been lost when snowmobilers ventured into demonstrably, reportedly, unsafe terrain. Last year it was Fernie; this year, Revelstoke. In both cases, the avalanche danger was elevated and well-reported. The Canadian Avalanche Centre has documented and posted a season-long history of deep and multiple instabilities all over that part of B.C. and was warning anyone who cared to listen about the dangers.
The participants in the Big Iron Shootout didn't care to listen. The two deaths that resulted from the Class 3 avalanche unleashed the usual responses. CBC dramatized it into a mini-series of faux news and profound ignorance. Bloggers and commentators, cloaked in their security blanket of anonymity, quipped about flushing out the shallow end of the gene pool. Sledhead haters jumped on the opportunity to bash their favourite whipping boy. Nanny-staters moaned about how the government should control the backcountry or ban dangerous activities. Sledheads called it an act of God and said it wouldn't stop them from going where they want, when they want.
Reasonable discourse came, however, from the most unexpected source: the government of British Columbia. Take a deep breath and let that sink in.
Solicitor General Kash Heed said the province is "looking into" new regulations for snowmobiles that could include licencing, registration and mandatory insurance. Well, duh. It's about time.
B.C. is one of the few provinces that doesn't licence and regulate snowmobiles. Throughout eastern Canada - where the "sport's" primary dangers are falling through lake ice, running into other sleds and having a blood-alcohol level high enough to qualify as a distillery - snowmobiles are licenced. In the wilds of B.C.'s mountains, anyone with a wad of cash or a high enough credit score can throw a leg over the most powerful machine on the market and head for the hills knowing nothing more than how to start the thing and which thumb works the throttle.
It takes more training, testing and education to licence a 14-foot fishing boat with a 5-horsepower outboard. And in this province, licencing for such a boat is mandatory.
Last weekend's rescue is going to cost provincial taxpayers more than a million bucks. The follow-up even more. Registering, licencing and insuring sleds isn't going to keep sledheads who don't know the difference between risky and stupid from killing themselves. But it might help a few make better decisions and it'll definitely help cover the costs of digging the others out of their icy graves.
'Bout time.
