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BY DAVE PHILIPPS
THE GAZETTE
(This story originally appeared in The Gazette on Feb. 12, 2006)
On Jan. 1, 12 snowmobilers were taking turns "highpointing" on a steep slope in the national forest north of Rocky Mountain National Park.
One at a time, they gunned their machines up the hill as high as they could, then swung around and pointed their skids down at the waiting group below.
Over and over they shot up and slid down. Then, just as one rider reached the apex, the whole slope seemed to turn liquid and an avalanche rushed down on the group.
Snow partially buried five of them. Two others disappeared.
The group dug frantically in the snow but didn’t find the two until an hour later. By that time they were dead.
What's it like to wait to a rescue dog to find you buried under snow? Read one reporter's account of a training exercise.
"They were ignoring the most basic rule of avalanche safety: Travel one at a time through dangerous terrain," said Lou Dawson, the godfather of backcountry skiing in Colorado. "I’d like to say they are an exception, but they’re not."
Dawson sees the same story again and again. Though avalanche-danger forecasting has gotten better every year and safety equipment has improved, the number of avalanche deaths nationwide keeps creeping up because people make decisions in the backcountry that don’t make sense.
In the avalanche business, this is known as "the human factor" — the trickiest variable.
"There are 10,000 factors and they can all change from one slope to the next," said Spencer Logan, a forecaster for the Colorado Avalanche Information Center.
But the murky algorithms people use to decide whether a slope is safe or not are the most critical, Logan said. "After all, it’s people, not snow, that cause avalanche accidents."
For years, the avalanche community largely ignored the human factor. Experts focused on the physics of slides and on developing better rescue technology. But the number of annual avalanche deaths continued to rise nationwide, from four in 1955, to 14 in 1975, to 24 in 1995 to near 30 today.
So researchers started to recognize taming the human factor as the next step in avalanche safety.
It can’t come too soon. Colorado leads the nation in avalanche deaths, with more than 200 in the last 55 years. Snowslides have killed more people than any other natural disaster in the state, and February is the month most deaths typically occur.
People have reported more than 50 slides in Colorado already this season.
But it’s not easy to study. In trying to make sense of human behavior, researchers are immediately confronted with a world of contradictions. The most striking is that people with advanced avalanche-safety training, who should know better, are statistically most likely to get buried.
Last year a Colorado Springs man died in a slide near Aspen while taking an advanced avalanche-safety course.
Often, instructors conclude avalanche courses by saying "congratulations, you are now twice as likely to die in an avalanche."
But why?
"In the Rockies the snow can seem stable. But it’s counter-intuitive. It’s voodoo," said Craig Dostie, editor of the backcountry skiing magazine Couloir. "You start to believe things that aren’t true. If you ski there, boy, you better know your avi."
But even knowing your "avi" is no guarantee. It’s just as important to know yourself, says Dale Atkins, who has worked for the Colorado Avalanche Information Center for 18 years.
"All these strange human quirks have to do with how we perceive risk," said Atkins.
He started getting interested in avalanches at age 13, after he helped his local search and rescue team recover a cross-country skier's body buried in the snow. For years he has tracked avalanche deaths across the country.
It didn’t take long for patterns to emerge.
"Every accident started looking the same, only the names changed," he said.
In almost every case, a weak layer of snow on steep slopes slid shortly after a storm.
Avalanche classes were already teaching students to stay away from these places. But the number of avalanche deaths continued to climb.
"Some of us started to suspect avalanches weren’t a terrain problem, they were a human problem," Atkins said.
So researchers such as Atkins and Ian McCammon in Utah started looking for patterns and noticed four distinct mental traps that led people into trouble:
Familiarity: believing an area where no slides have been seen in the past will continue to be safe. Almost 70 percent of deaths happen on familiar slopes.
Following the crowd: believing a slope which has been skied before is less likely to slide.
Commitment: dismissing or underplaying risks because of a previous assessment that conditions are safe, or because a lot of effort has been expended to reach a spot.
Powder fever: dismissing or underplaying risks because powder conditions are epic and a slope is untracked.
All these things were at play when a slide swallowed the highpointing snowmobilers.
Spotting these behavior traps is one thing. Correcting them is another. And it will mean changing how hundreds of avalanche safety classes held every winter throughout the Rockies are taught.
Dawson, the ski mountaineer, has survived four avalanches. The most serious broke both femurs.
On his backcountry skiing blog, Wildsnow.com, he regularly argues that the teaching method for avalanche classes is fundamentally flawed.
"Too much emphasis now is on rescue. Beacons are sexy and fun to teach. You get to dig around in the snow looking for them. But people start to wear a beacon as if it is a talisman. And worse, because they are wearing a beacon, they go into terrain they would normally avoid," he said.
"If you’re buried with a beacon on, you still have only a one in two chance of being dug up alive. Not very good odds."
In the days before beacons, he said, people were taught to avoid avalanche areas. And, more importantly, they were mentored by veterans over several seasons. Now, people are more likely to take a weekend-long class and consider themselves good to go.
Gradually, the avalanche community has started trying to incorporate the flavor of that old-school mentoring into classes.
"We still educate people about snow science and rescue," said Atkins, "but more and more we take a technique borrowed from Socrates. We teach through stories. It gets closer to the natural way people learn."
A detailed account of every avalanche accident is posted on the avalanche center’s Web site.
Avalanche classes now often include tales of simple but deadly goofs by experienced people.
Sometimes stories still don’t do the job. The human factor has proved adept at ignoring warnings and risk levels.
So, Atkins said, he increasingly advises people to stop before they ski or snowmobile a dangerous slope and think, not about the possibility that they could die, but about how the death would affect the four people who care most about them.
"They think about their friends, their family. That usually opens their eyes to the true risk," he said. "Sometimes you need to appeal to emotion to really reach people."
CLASSES
** Colorado Avalanche Information Center calendar
** REI - Colorado Springs
** Colorado Mountain Club classes
** Friends of Berthod Pass
SLIDE CENTRAL
The Boulder-based Colorado Avalanche Information Center, the oldest avalanche-forecasting program in the nation, has for decades been forecasting slide potential for skiers, snowmobilers and Colorado Department of Transportation workers who maintain mountain passes.
Staffers use detailed weather and snowfall data, as well as meticulous backcountry field observations, to come up with daily forecasts ranging from low to extreme danger.
PHOTO: Rescue training. Courtesy of Rocky Mountain Rescue Group
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