Snow around town doesn’t look impressive, but at upper elevations where backcountry and heli-skiing occurs, conditions are the best they’ve been in several years, the director of the Haines Avalanche Information Center said during a presentation Monday at the Sheldon Museum.
“There’s a solid, deep snowpack above timberline. There are no active, persistent, weak, deep layers. We had a couple of those last year and the year before. There’s nothing like that this year,” Erik Stevens said. “It’s a good sign, but things could change.”
In January 2014, warm temperatures at high elevations melted back the snowpack, exposing crevasses and limiting the areas for good skiing, Stevens said.
Consistent melt-freeze cycles are generally good and create a stable snowpack for spring skiing here, but too much rain at high elevations hardens surface snow, essentially ruining skiing conditions, Stevens said. “The best snow (for skiing) is light, dry powder, and that’s basically what forms avalanches.”
Since 2010, Stevens and Jeffrey Moskowitz have operated the information center, a website that aims to provide information to backcountry users about avalanche hazards. The site receives some information from Southeast Alaska Backcountry Adventures and from some guides at Alaska Heliskiing, as well as from other users.
Stevens and Moskowitz, who gave a broad presentation including tales of historic avalanches, told a crowd of about 12 local residents that predicting avalanches is a new, uncertain science, and that anticipating slides requires a “holistic” approach to appraising conditions.
Digging snow pits to assess layers in snow is just one factor in determining a slope’s hazard, as the stability of layers can change within a few feet’s space. Additional factors skiers should consider include recent and winter-long snowfall and rain, wind, temperature, appearances and the frame of mind of other people in the party, Stevens said.
No system of avalanche assessment is foolproof, Stevens said, because “you never have enough data. In the end, you use your intuition.” Even keeping a distance from a cornice can be tricky, he said. “It’s amazing how far back a cornice can break off if you’re at the wrong place at the right time.”
Stevens recounted an April 2011 avalanche that he almost didn’t survive. It occurred in part because he and a fellow skier had pushed each other until late in the afternoon on a warm, spring day, a time when avalanches are most likely to occur. The pair had climbed a ravine near Mount Sinclair on the east side of the Lynn Canal.
He and his friend were engaging in “group confidence,” a kind of faulty thinking that has led to accidents, he said.
“Avalanches occur when people know conditions aren’t safe, but they decide to go anyway… We knew we were late in the day, but neither of us wanted to turn around. By the time we were on the top, we knew it was way too warm,” Stevens said.
The pair skied about 1,000 feet down the ravine, his friend in front, when an avalanche swept up Stevens and carried him about 2,000 feet to its bottom. His friend, who was skiing below him, had skied into a safe zone. Stevens had just enough time to sink an ice axe into the snow beneath him, slowing his tumble.
The axe gave him a little bit of control and he hung onto it, although the snow’s pull dislocated his shoulders as many as 10 times during the fall, sometimes simultaneously. Toward the end of what he estimates was 15 seconds of terror, he lost the axe and went into a “ragdoll tumble” he didn’t expect to survive.
Fortunately, he landed on the surface of the snow, with injuries not much more serious than dislocated shoulders and a sprained ankle.
Interestingly, the avalanche that caught him wasn’t one he and his friend triggered, but was a “natural” one that had dropped off a cliff above them. The slope they were on was stable, as were nearby ones they had been skiing on for several days. “We couldn’t even see the slope (the avalanche) came from. We couldn’t know it was coming.”
Accidents due to avalanches aren’t uncommon, Stevens said. By his count, in the past four years, there have been eight serious accidents around the Chilkat Valley related to avalanches, and he’s heard of about a dozen more that weren’t reported.
He’s hoping that backcountry users who experience avalanches will report them to the local avalanche center, to put that information to work for others. Reports can be provided anonymously, he said.
“We’re not trying to judge people. We’re just trying to get information and trying to help others learn from our mistakes,” Stevens said.
Stevens, who moved here from Colorado, said he’s been awed by the volumes of snow here and by places like Chilkat Lake where there are 5,000-foot-long avalanche chutes. “It’s amazing to think of the amount of snow that’s coming down the mountains around here.”
The Haines Avalanche Information Center website is alaskasnow.org/haines. Stevens said his group is hoping to provide avalanche education workshops for snowmachiners.