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Utah's Backcountry Remains a Dangerous Place This Weekend
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Published on Friday, January 29, 2010 - 11:00 AM






by Marc Guido

Salt Lake City, UT - It's been nearly a week and two avalanche fatalities since the last storm cycle dropped up to seven feet of snow on Utah's Wasatch Mountains, but avalanche experts are warning backcountry skiers and riders that while tempting, those powder-covered slopes remain dangerously unstable. "The avalanche danger is what we call 'Scary Considerable'," Utah Avalanche Center director Bruce Tremper wrote in Friday morning's advisory. "Not many people would go down a dark alley where there was a considerable danger of being attacked by a gang wielding knives and baseball bats. But for whatever reason, the word 'considerable' doesn't get the same response when it comes to avalanches."

The water weight added to an unstable snowpack from last week's series of storms has already resulted in Utah's first two avalanche fatalities of the season. A 1,700 to 2,000 vertical-foot slide in Hell's Canyon, just outside Snowbasin's boundary along the Ogden Valley ski resort's No Name sector, killed 42-year-old Todd Bell of South Weber, Utah, on Sunday. Bell was skiing alone and was not carrying a transceiver or other avalanche gear, but he is believed to have been killed by trauma.

The party of snowboarders that discovered Bell's body likewise was not carrying avalanche gear, nor was a third group in nearby Coldwater Canyon that inadvertently triggered numerous slides and had to be hoisted out of the ravine by the Life Flight helicopter. The backcountry avalanche danger rating at the time was "high" with pockets of "extreme".

Another slide was triggered in-bounds at Alta Ski Area on Sunday morning by ski patrol carrying out routine control work in Greeley Bowl. That avalanche ran farther than expected and temporarily buried an unnamed Alta patroller, who was unhurt in the incident.

This week's second fatal avalanche occurred on Wednesday in the Meadow Chutes, just west of Solitude ski resort in Big Cottonwood Canyon, and killed Ricardo Presnell, a 51-year-old resident of Cottonwood Heights. Presnell was wearing an avalanche transceiver and was extricated from approximately four feet of debris after about 40 minutes, but died of trauma sustained when the slide swept him through a stand of aspen trees. The avalanche was estimated to be about 200 feet wide and between 800 and 1,000 feet long with a three-foot crown.

That same day, skiers were caught by separate avalanches in the SolBright area, between Brighton and Solitude, and in Yellowjacket Gulch in Mill Creek Canyon, where Utah Avalanche Center forecaster Drew Hardesty inadvertently collapsed a hard slab and held onto a tree to keep from getting swept downhill by the slide. Other skiers triggered a slide in the same vicinity again on Thursday.

The fact that an avalanche professional unintentionally triggered a slide that nearly swept him away indicates the current instability of the Wasatch backcountry snowpack.

"Unusually dangerous conditions exist today and through the weekend for most of the mountains in Utah," Tremper continued this morning. "Many slopes lie hanging in the balance waiting for a trigger, such as the weight of a person or snowmobile.

"Right now, the snowpack resembles a giant rat trap, cocked and loaded with an irresistible layer of powder cheese. Many slopes are just waiting to be tickled and the entire mountainside will shatter like glass, breaking down to the ground, creating a very large, mostly unsurvivable avalanche," Tremper concluded. "What do we call these kinds of conditions? We have no idea. Danger ratings were not created to describe them. Better terms might include: 'severe', 'don't go', 'serious', 'forbidden' or 'What? Are you nuts?'."
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