Responding to one of the worst avalanche seasons on record, backcountry skiers are developing tools to help fellow adventurers move more safely through the snowy mountains.
The innovation follows a season in which 37 skiers, climbers and snowmobilers were killed in avalanches nationwide, including 12 in Colorado. The 2021-22 avalanche season has claimed three lives in Colorado, including two snowshoers and their dog on Jan. 8 in Summit County.
One mountain guide created a fun and informative weekly podcast. Established guidebook authors are writing books to highlight safer backcountry ski routes. A longtime avalanche educator is developing an app that will help skiers avoid dangerous avalanche slopes.
Chris Dickson is a mountain guide and avalanche educator based in Telluride. His new podcast, The San Juan Snowcast, discusses recent observations and avalanche forecasts for one of the country’s most avalanche-prone zones. Like many in the industry, the 2020-21 ski season motivated him to try something new.
“The anomalous avalanche fatality season created a motivating force in a lot of people in the avalanche world,” Dickson said. “All of us realized the message we were sending wasn’t being heard, or we were not sending it the right way.”
In addition to providing “bonus content” from the Colorado Avalanche Information Center’s daily forecasts, he hopes to facilitate more communication and community between the secluded ski towns in Colorado’s southwest mountains.
The podcast relays community events and offers brief educational nuggets for listeners of all experience levels – from preparing for a backcountry tour, first-aid and repair kit checklists, discussions on technology and debriefs of accidents.
One of Dickson’s recent guests, Hannah Trim, is the owner of Sew Alpine. The episode explored emergency preparedness, and the two discussed Trim’s backcountry rescue sleds.
“Backcountry skiing is one of those sports that we do that can go from really fun to really dangerous pretty quickly,” said Trim, a former outdoor educator and guide.
Trim started Sew Alpine in January 2021 and worked closely with San Juan Expeditions, a guide operation in Silverton, to design a durable rescue sled for mountain guides and avalanche instructors that packs into a backpack.
The sleds, which cost about $300, can haul an injured skier out of the field, roll up as an emergency bivy sack, and create an A-frame shelter when used with ski poles.
Trim produced a handful of sleds for San Juan Expeditions, and after friends asked her to make more, she adapted the guide sled to create a lightweight version for recreational users to keep in their packs for emergencies.
Now she sells two made-to-order sleds, the O.G. Rescue Tarp for professional and heavy-duty use and the Lightweight Rescue Tarp for recreational use. She’s currently backed up with 40 new orders, and she estimates a 10-to-12 week lead time.
“I do think there are a lot of accidents we could point to where people get into terrain they probably didn’t want to be in the first place,” said Andy Sovick, whose Gunnison-based Beacon Guidebooks just published a second edition of a guide by backcountry skiing pioneer Lou Dawson. Light Tours of Colorado details more than 60 mellow backcountry routes for travelers who want to minimize avalanche exposure.
Beacon Guidebooks publishes maps and guidebooks of backcountry ski areas in Colorado and Washington. Sovick stumbled into the publishing business in 2013 after compiling his own photos and information to create the Crested Butte Ski Atlas. Eight years later, his company has published 26 maps and guidebooks. The maps are available in print, or can be uploaded to backcountry ski apps like Rakkup or OnX.
Each guidebook is written by a local expert. Sovick, for example, has skied 90% of the lines in the Crested Butte Ski Atlas, measuring slope angles and exploring complex terrain.
They also use Avalanche Terrain Exposure Scale, a tool created by Grant Statham and Parks Canada 25 years ago to help determine the avalanche risk of each slope or ski area. Beacon Guidebooks uses an ATES rating to help skiers understand the terrain.
In 2015, Sovick and Dawson discussed the value in creating a guidebook with simple backcountry ski tours. Dawson is a Colorado ski mountaineering legend and the founder of Wild Snow, the first blog dedicated to backcountry skiing.
Dawson, who has spent more than 50 years in mountain environments around the world, was the first person to ski all of Colorado’s 14ers. After losing friends to backcountry accidents, the downside of the sport started to bother him.
“If you are careful and you pick the right runs on the right days, you can eliminate danger,” Dawson said. “The objective of the book came out of that idea.”
Despite the goal of keeping backcountry skiers safer, Sovick knows the guidebooks he publishes aren’t always well received. After he published the first edition of the Crested Butte Ski Atlas, some skiers in the community said, “There goes the town, there goes backcountry skiing.”
His goal isn’t to guard secret powder stashes.
“One of the things that keeps me going is the motivation to help people learn more about their terrain, because that’s a big piece of the puzzle,” said Sovick.
He knows sharing information is also a great responsibility.
A December avalanche fatality on Crystal Mountain Ski Area in Washington occurred on a route that is documented in Beacon Guidebook’s Crystal Mountain guidebook.
“With this product and with our system and method, comes great responsibility, and I take that really seriously,” Sovick said.
Beacon Guidebooks will release up to 20 backcountry travel maps in 2022, four of which will focus on light tours around the country.
Jeff Banks is an international mountain guide and avalanche educator based in Crested Butte. He equates the safety of backcountry skiing with winning a hand at poker in a Las Vegas casino: The house always wins, and the odds are not in your favor.
“If we look at the numbers, they don’t support the fact that the avalanche community is a low-risk community,” Banks said. “If backcountry riders were governed by the FAA, they would have shut us down a long time ago.”
In January 2020, Banks met JB Leach, a software designer from Golden, while teaching an avalanche course.
Banks communicated his frustrations with the uncertainty backcountry users experience. For him, the two-day course created a nearly impossible scenario in which to provide backcountry travelers with enough tools to stay safe.
Banks decided to shake things up and introduce concepts he learned while working in Canada and Europe to supplement the course curriculum.
The concepts were based on avalanche statistics and algorithms from studies in Switzerland. Banks used the statistics to help students determine the probability of triggering avalanches.
A study published in 2018 from findings in Austria and Switzerland found that 95% of avalanche accidents occurred in terrain that local bulletins noted as dangerous. Banks then taught his students to use aspects and slope angle as their tool, rather than complicated snow science.
But Banks wanted an app for that, and two years later, Banks and leach are designing an Aspect Avy.
The app will measure a user’s risk, provide safer terrain recommendations, nudge users to stay on task during the tour and provide a debrief at the end of the day to give feedback on the user’s decisions.
“So they get coached throughout the process,” Banks said.
Each year, more and more backcountry users turn to their phones to help make decisions, navigate terrain and stay informed. Dozens of apps like Gaia, OnX backcountry, Theodolite and Open Snow have become essential for backcountry tours, with tools that track weather patterns, measure slope angles and deliver precise maps of slopes that could slide. The Colorado Avalanche Information Center this month unveiled its new online avalanche explorer tool, which allows users to filter recent avalanche activity based on zones, dates, elevations, aspects, size and triggers.
Banks is committed to using statistics to make decisions, because most of the time, backcountry users get lucky.
“It’s an unforgiving place to learn. You can make a lot of mistakes and nothing happens. And then you make a mistake and something really bad happens. There is no middle ground,” Banks said. “Those kinds of things happen because people aren’t getting feedback through their lifetime of traveling in the backcountry.
The Colorado Sun is a reader-supported, nonpartisan news organization dedicated to covering Colorado issues. To learn more, go to coloradosun.com.
