Personally, my experiences that season in the BC interior were, well, personal. Suffice it to say that I got a gritty inside perspective on those big accidents. Additionally, I had a pretty big accident of my own. It didn’t make the headlines, and nobody died, but it sure scared me shitless. I’d like to tell you the story, but on one condition: pay attention to the separation between UNSTABLE (WHOOP, WHOOP) and MANAGEABLE (AAAAH) signs along the way.

Axl Knows November Rain
He may be a crazy bastard or a genius, but Axl Rose was onto something when he screeched about the November Rain. It sucks. November 2002 fit the bill perfectly. There was enough early-season snow on the ground to fill in and cover up all of the surface features, like rocks and bushes. Then it rained. Hard. The snow on the ground was soaked, creating a thick, wet crust at the snow surface. Then it snowed some more, just before things got cold and dry for a while. The meter or so of snowpack that remained began to rot away. This created a thick weak layer of faceted crystals, right above the November rain crust (WHOOP,WHOOP). As winter progressed into the new year, snowfalls stayed slim and temperatures remained cold.

The November weak layer lurked like a troll under the bridge. It slowly got deeper and deeper, so that the potential for avalanches releasing on it got bigger and bigger. In the deeper snow areas of the BC interior, even the most persistent weak layers usually stop producing avalanches after a month or so. Defying expectations, the November facets continued to surprise skiers. In the middle of January, the layer killed seven people in an avalanche, followed by seven more a few weeks later.

Still Looking for Turns
Meanwhile, like many other backcountry enthusiasts, I was feeling rattled, but still looking for turns. The November facets were buried 1-2 meters deep, and I was making an effort to avoid thinner snowpack zones, with higher chances of skier-triggering the layer. A friend of mind, let’s call him Hank, suggested a mission to an area that I knew to be somewhere in the transition between the deep and thin snowpack climates of the Golden region (WHOOP, WHOOP). I expressed some doubt, but Hank had been there on a sled recon, whereupon he was pleasantly surprised at how much snow there was, on the order of 2 meters (AAAAH). So off we went.

The Scene
The road up the drainage crossed over the runouts of some slide paths. These came out of gully features interrupted by a series of vertical ribs (rib, gully, rib, gully, etc.), that started off a continuous ridgeline about 500 m above. The slope with the gully-rib sets was fairly steep coming into the valley bottom, between 35 and 40 degrees (WHOOP, WHOOP), but was broken up into a mountainside of staircase pillows (AAAAH). Parking the sleds in the thicker trees next to one of the slide fans, Hank informed me that these lines were our objective. I looked around, noting that there was indeed more snow than some zones I had seen lately (AAAAH), but not as much as the drainages further west, and not 2 meters of it (WHOOP, WHOOP).

Nonetheless, the ski lines were accessed directly below the broad flat ridge, with no big alpine features overhead (AAAAH). Furthermore, the uptrack route followed a fairly mellow slope, through a low notch around the end of the ridge, climbed a low-angled bench through a boulder field, then back towards the shoulder of the ridge and up. In short, the route had almost no exposure (AAAAH) until we would get close to the shoulder to the top. So off we went.

On The Way Up
On the skin up, the surface was hard and scoured in the open, but sugary next to big rocks. We triggered several whumphs (aka snowpack settlements or flat snowpack failures without avalanche release) in the flattish boulder field, but they weren’t propagating more than a few meters. Boulder fields are often variable and weak and full of hollow spots. It can be iffy to extrapolate this kind of snowpack behaviour to surrounding skiable terrain. But the wind effect was worth noticing, as the snow from the flats had been blown over into the ski lines (WHOOP, WHOOP). We discussed it, but kept going, as we were not yet in exposed terrain.

We got over to the shoulder of the ridge. We would have to throw in some switchbacks to climb the last hundred meters or so. The slope angle steepened above us (WHOOP, WHOOP), so we decided to contour over the shoulder and have a look at the ski terrain, while it was still relatively mellow. Our skis went from penetrating about 5-10cm over a hard layer, then 15-20cm over a softer layer; windloading (WHOOP, WHOOP)! We looked at the small bowl between us and the ridgeline, and the lines all looked pretty well filled in. Hank walked out to do a snow test pit. There was a short slope above and a steep runout below, so I hung back near the shoulder to watch and record Hank’s results. In that somewhat loaded spot, the snowpack was about 1.75 m deep. The upper snowpack was about 1.25-1.5 meters of soft snow over a stiff slab, which sat on the obviously weak and sugary November layer (WHOOP, WHOOP). Hank did a couple of compression tests. On one test, there was a hard failure on the November layer, but it had a fast “pop” when it went. That was pretty scary (WHOOP, WHOOP), but it did not go on the next test. There weren’t any other significant failures or layers in the snowpack, but that was sketchy enough for me. I felt spooked.

We looked around and talked: windloading across the bowl from the shoulder and below the ridge, and tests that indicated any fracture we might get going in the November layer would go big and deep under such a stiff slab. We decided that the only acceptable riding option would be to stay on a rib to minimize overhead exposure and avoid gully-funnel terrain traps, stay off any convex rolls, and watch for thin areas (like rocks and small trees) that could be trigger points next to windloaded fat spots. So off we went.

The shoulder got narrower and steeper as we switchedbacked up. This was the first exposure on our uptrack. To climber’s right, the snow surface was steep, hard windslab, interspersed with little pecker pole treetops poking through; lots of trigger points, with potential for a long avalanche ride through the cheese grater. To the left was a cross-loaded wind pillow, into the steep convex-rolling terrain of the bowl. No good. So we made tight switchbacks on the steep shoulder, moving one at a time, spaced an entire switchback apart. I did not dig the route, wedged on the transition zone between hard slab and wind pillow, and I found myself hugging a tree each time I waited for Hank (WHOOP, WHOOP). Though it was only three or four switchbacks, I was stoked to get off that shoulder and gain the ridge.

At The Top
Moving along the ridgetop, the surface was bulletproof. To the windward side of the ridge, some rocks were blown clean of snow. On the loaded, leeward side where the ski lines were, there was a cornice in spots. We did not get any whumphs on the ridgeline (AAAAH). As we skinned along the ridgetop, we could see clearly see the loading patterns in the little bowls above the slide path gullies, between vertical ribs. There was cross loading across the bowls, with fat spots on the climber’s left sides, where the slope was totally filled in and uniform. Looking further to the right, across the bowls, the snow below the ridgeline got a progressively thinner, with humps, then tops, and then full big rocks sticking out of the snow (WHOOP, WHOOP). These were the “thin areas next to fat spots” that we wanted to avoid. Adding concern was the gap between the ridgeline and the start of the ribs we wanted to ride down. It was fifty meters of turns onto the open slopes at the tops of the bowls, either in the fat spots or the thin spots (WHOOP, WHOOP). We did not like this. Scoping the bowls, of which there were about six, we found that only one had a suitable line. Right below the ridge were a bunch of rocks that stuck up a meter or more above the snow, with just enough room between them to ride through, but not enough to create pockets that could rip out and take us for a ride (AAAAH). The rock maze led down about fifteen meters before the slope got open, into a short gap of about twenty meters, between the rocks and the start of the rib below. Almost as soon as it began, the rib had a high crest with a good stand of tighter trees on it, where we could pull up for a safe stopping spot (AAAAH). There was lots of room on the rib for two sets of tracks. So off we went.

Holy F@#$!
I spotted from the ridge as Hank dropped in. Weaving between the rocks, Hank was just hitting the open slope when I heard a giant BOOMBOOMBOOM! The ridgeline rumbled beneath my feet. I could see the rocks shaking off their caps of rime one after another, then a fracture line appeared, snaking towards the loaded rib on the other side of the little bowl.
(Start making the WHOOP,WHOOPS now. You’ll know when to stop.)

Everything started to move in slow motion. I remember it with utter clarity. It is frozen into my brain forever.

“AVALANCHE!” I screamed as loud as I could. Then I screamed again, and again, as Hank, ears covered by a toque and a helmet, continued through his first big turn on the open slope.

Meanwhile, I saw a slab pull out below the ridgeline, then zippering down along the loaded rib opposite our line. It was deep. That whole, loaded side of the bowl was pulling out, breaking up, and trucking into the gully. I remember hearing the craziest whoosh-hissing noise of all time as the slab picked up speed. I was freaking: if Hank did not stick to the plan and turn back to the rib right away, he was screwed. I kept screaming. I saw Hank’s head twist suddenly to the right, then he cut hard up into the trees on the rib to his left.

“HOLY F@#$!” he yelled. I stopped screaming then, 'cause Hank was safe.

Glancing around, I could see the ribs and bowls along the ridgeline pulling out, one after another, curving out of the range of my vision. The fracture was running in the stiff upper slab, jumping over terrain features, and pulling out the loaded spots for hundreds of meters in either direction. Trees were shaking everywhere. There were powder clouds rushing down the mountainside in every single gully. The world was falling apart around us. The moments ticked by as Hank and I watched and waited in fascinated horror.
When things had finally stopped rattling around, I could see that every bowl below the ridge had avalanched, pulling out every rib almost to the high point.

Every bowl and rib, that is, except our line (AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH)!

The rib itself and the short slope between the rocks and the rib were intact. Hank’s tracks were all still there. The fracture was confined to the loaded side of the bowl, stopping in the middle of the gully. The avalanche had pulled out almost to ground, at an average depth of 1.5 meters, cleaning out everything in the gully to the valley bottom, pillows and all.

Once I felt strength return to my wobbling knees, I slid down to Hank. We looked at one another. “Holy f@#$!” we both said aloud at once.

“That was close,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Hank, “I barely heard you yelling; you got my attention just as I saw the avalanche coming down into the gully out of the corner of my eye.”
“This is the only line that did not run, as far as I could see.”
“Holy f@#$.”
“Let’s get down and go home.”
“Good idea.”
“Let’s stay in the thick-ass trees on top of the rib.”
“Good idea.”

Because there was still snow on and below the rib, neither of us wanted to be in the gully below. We picked our way to the valley bottom, avoiding even tiny pockets of open slope.

On the fan below where the gully spit out, there was a (Canadian Avalanche Size Classification) size 2.5 pile of avalanche debris with logs in it. This means it was somewhere between being big enough to wreck a skier and/or a car. The last few pieces of chunder stopped about three meters from our sleds, tucked “safely” into the woods. We fired up the sleds and headed out. On the way, we passed five or six more piles of new avalanche debris between size 2 and 2.5_, many of which had hit the road.

Holy f@#$!

Making It Home Alive Rules

Safely back in the warm truck, Hank and I got to talking about the incident.

First, we agreed that there had been way too many warning signs and spooky feelings to ignore. Sure, whumphs in the boulder field might be questionably relevant, and our test results were creepy but far from the scariest I have seen, and maybe hugging trees at steep hard exposed switchbacks is a good habit, etc. but all of those factors added up to bad feelings, and we knew it. Taking the obvious loading patterns too lightly was the cherry on the cake. I will never, ever, ignore any WHOOPWHOOPS again, and that mindset has saved my ass since!

Second, we agreed that our line choice had surely saved Hank from a grisly fate. Good terrain management and riding habits can make the difference between life and death. However, that does not justify hitting it in the first place, and it certainly did not make us feel good about how the day had gone. I think about it this way; had I known ahead of time that the avalanche would happen and only our line would hang in, there is still absolutely no way I would have been riding it. The margins of safety were too f@#$in’ close for comfort. The line between living and dying was mere meters from Hank’s tracks, and that is never acceptable.

Third, there is the lesson that the entire backcountry community in Canada learned the hard way that year. Don’t mess with hard slabs on deep instabilities. A lot of terrain must be avoided entirely when that shit is in the snowpack, no matter what you think on the day. Sometimes you gotta go for mellow turns on low-angle slopes all year long, which is still better than rotting in some cubicle or shopping or playing Nintendo or digging dead bodies out of the snow and trying to make sense of your life after that. Believe me.

Keep it in perspective, keep it fun, keep it safe.