NO WAY WERE THEY PASSING UP A SNOWBOARDING TRIP. The next day was the last day of spring break, and Riley McCarthy and Stuart Beckman, University of Washington students and frat brothers at Alpha Sigma Phi, had their plan nailed down by late in the evening, Saturday, March 26, 2011.
Riley, 20, a sophomore who had just decided to major in engineering, and Stuart, who at 22 had two quarters to go on his degree in mathematics, were fit, lanky guys who possessed a special grace when airborne over untouched powder. And late last winter and well into the spring, powder was pretty easy to come by in the Cascades.
Riley arranged to borrow his mom’s car, pick up Stuart in the morning, and drive up to Stevens Pass ski resort. They’d meet up with three other members of the Husky Snowboard Team in the resort parking lot around 9am and the five of them would ride their hearts out. “Bring backcountry gear,” Stuart told one of the guys on the phone that night. “We might ride that stuff.”
Stuart and Riley knew about backcountry avalanches. They talked about the weather and the physics of snow all the time. But avalanches happened to other people.
MARK MOORE SHOWED UP for work that Sunday morning at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration facility at Sand Point at his usual time—3am—under a thick, overcast sky that had hung in for weeks and would hang in for weeks to come, right through the start of summer. It was March 27, 2011, the second Sunday of spring. But after much hype in the late autumn and a midwinter lull, La Niña had finally struck with a vengeance.
Especially in the mountains. Damp chill in Seattle meant snow at the higher elevations—a few inches some days, a foot or more on others. Every day since the end of February storms had added to an already overweight snowpack that inevitably released its upper layers in avalanches.
Which was why Moore was awake and sitting alone in front of a glowing computer screen at 3 in the morning. At 63, the director and founder of the Northwest Weather and Avalanche Center (NWAC) still worked the predawn shift, alternating with two other forecasters who came in daily to figure out how much snow would fall in the next 48 to 72 hours in the Olympics and on both sides of the Cascades from Mount Hood to Mount Baker—and whether any of it was likely to slide. Three people had already perished in avalanches in the Cascades since December. The last one was a highly experienced backcountry skier whose leg had been torn off when an avalanche dragged him through the trees near Mount Cashmere three weeks earlier. Though winter was officially over, the avalanche danger, as Moore knew better than anyone else, was not.
He ran his piercing blue eyes over the forecast his colleague Kenny Kramer had written up the previous day. The gist: more of the same—meaning no letup in the persistent trough that had been spinning storms into the mountains for weeks. Moore took a scan of the raw telemetry data—temperature, wind speed and direction, relative humidity, new rain and snowfall, and accumulated snow depth—streaming in from 44 remote data gathering stations NWAC maintains throughout the Cascades.
An army brat who fell in love with snow while skiing as a kid with his dad, Moore ditched a career in nuclear engineering to join the ski patrol at California’s Mammoth Mountain shortly after college. He landed in Seattle to get a master’s at UW’s atmospheric science department under the tutelage of legendary avalanche researcher Ed LaChapelle. In 1975, Moore and LaChapelle teamed up with Rich Marriott (then a UW atmospheric sciences grad student, now the morning weatherman at KING 5 TV) and National Weather Service forecaster Bud Reanier to start NWAC.
Thirty-six winters later, Moore is still at it, still in the office before sunrise, still immersing himself in maps, charts, and streams of data. Like his coforecasters Kenny Kramer and Garth Ferber, Moore is not only a scientist but a fanatical backcountry skier. When these guys look at the data sets, they don’t just see strings of numbers but coded maps to a beautiful but treacherous landscape they know and love intimately.
Published: December 2011
The NWAC states that the conditions may vary; it’s dangerous to generalize avalanche conditions and assume that all areas are safe; one section of a trail may be safe and another section a few feet down the trail may have a fracture line hidden and buried beneath the snow pack.
I never want to dance with an avalanche. I will never forget observing, literally square miles of timber reduced to toothpicks after the avalanches in the early 1990’s along the start of the Snow Lake Trail near Alpental. One of the persons interviewed described his experience of being caught in an avalanche as being “thrown around like a rag doll.” That’s nothing. A human body weighs nothing, compared to a 180 foot tall Douglas Fir Tree. As far as my eyes could see, I saw what once was virgin forest that completely shrouded the hiking trail become a graveyard of trees stripped of their branches into bare logs and strewn and piled high on top of one another. It was as powerful a scene as what had happened at Spirit Lake when Mt. St. Helens blew her top.
Neuroscientists have shown threw PET scans and other screening tools that the prefrontal cortex – the reasoning center of the brain – does not become fully developed until around the age of 25. Many times because of this, our young people literally cannot see the danger they place themselves in. Studies also show that you cannot reach young people by convincing them of the dangers; but what is helpful is to educate them about how avalanches operate and the consequences of not respecting them. Avalanche survivors in that age category could be a valuable asset in helping to further reduce avalanche deaths.
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