On Sunday, December 14 an in-bound avalanche at Snowbird’s Mt. Baldy peak took the life of 27-year-old skier Heather Gross. Just weeks later, right before Christmas, two young men riding snowmobiles were caught in an avalanche on Logan Peak and were killed, and just days ago, a teenager was riding a snowmobile through the Uinta Mountains backcountry when he was caught in a 500-600 foot slide and was killed, according to an article published recently in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Over the weekend, the Utah Avalanche Center was still urging people to use increased caution in the Salt Lake area due to considerably serious avalanche danger.Transworld Business got a chance to talk with Jared Ishkanian, Snowbird’s Public Relations director, about the recent tragedy, how the resort is reacting to unstable slopes, and what this means for the rest of the season.

TW: Why is there such a huge risk for avalanches this season?

JI: First and foremost, we are ten inches over where we were last year. I’m getting confirmation right now from snow safety about how that stacks up to an average year, but I think overall we are within ten percent of where we would be in an average year of snowfall.

From what I have been told and from what I understand about the snow pack this year, we got a lot of snow very early in the season. We got about four feet in early November, which was great from a business perspective because it allowed us to open up very early. Then we went through a high pressure system for three weeks in November and then we got a rain crust on top of what was essentially at that point three weeks of of sun-baked snow. And that rain crust is extremely thick, extremely durable and it’s extremely prevalent of what’s been going on throughout Utah and throughout the West. So basically that rain crust formed and was a pretty solid layer, and now what we’ve gotten is some pretty significant storms on top of that crust and what we’ve seen is that the snow is very unstable on top of the crust. At times we’ve seen slides and then snow rebuild and then slides again, because the slides aren’t taking out that layer. It’s made for a very precarious snow pack right now and that’s why everybody from the Utah Avalache Center to resorts to Ski Patrol is definitely urging safety and caution, both in-bounds and out-of-bounds.

TW: That’s something a lot of people don’t think of when their in-bounds. You just kind of feel like you are taken care of.

Yeah, and what I want to stress is that we feel very strongly that we have some of the most experienced and some of the most elite snow safety professionals in the entire country and in the entire world. We are doing all we can to try to make the slopes as safe as possible, but by the same token it seems like this is a year that is extremely out of the ordinary. And I think the number of incidences we’ve experienced so far this year in North America really enforces that people need to use caution out there.

TW: From your perspective as a resort, what have you been hearing, and what have you been doing to buffer this situation?

We’ve had calls about this in the past week and a half following the avalanche. We haven’t had any cancellations yet.  We take every precaution there is to reduce the hazard of avalanches. The truth of the matter is there is no way to completely eliminate this inherent risk in skiing and snowboarding. We are doing all we can to try to learn from the incident and try to proceed with as much caution as possible, and we feel very, very confident in our experience in snow safety and ski patrol but by the same token we acknowledge that this happened and we are doing all we can to learn from it.

We are having a lot of people asking should I be wearing a beacon in the resort – what other precautions should I be taking? We basically say we are trying to look out for your best interest as much as possible, to enforce gears, responsibility, etc., and any other precautions you want to take on top of that please feel free, and those are probably good precautions to take.

TW: You guys hear there is no such thing as bad publicity. Do you think that this in some people’s minds might equate to “that’s a ton of snow. Let’s get out there.”

I think that the bad publicity is the incident that happened, you know, but the big question going into the season wasn’t about snow pack it was about the economy, and it was about, you know, do you think people are still going to be taking trips? And I think that there is a lot of evidence that shows that a good snow year trumps the economy and trumps economic conditions in people’s minds. I mean ultimately if it’s snowing, people tend to take ski trips.

The fact of the matter this year is that we are having a pretty average snow year for us and its some outside equations that have lead to an unstable snow pack. But I think at this point from a snow safety perspective, it’s a good thing that after all the snow now we are going to a little bit of high pressure and we don’t have too much activity in Utah for the next week at all. I think overall its not really necessarily an issue of is this too much of a good thing in terms of snowfall this year, but more of a combination of factors that have lead to a very, very unstable snow pack that seems to be a little bit of an anomaly when you put it in the context of the last twenty or thirty years. People just need to keep that in mind, especially when they are going into the back country.

TW: Do you have any numbers yet on bookings compared to last year?

We don’t release any numbers on bookings. I can tell you that going into December our bookings were down for the season and I think we attributed that in large part to the economy. I think in the last month we’ve had some pretty significant snow and we’ve seen our numbers jump up a bit due to that. I think overall our bookings are still down from last year, and I think that’s more attributed to the economy than to any incident or snowfall or anything like that. There have been stories in the NY Times and everywhere else about people taking their snow trips in Vermont instead of in Colorado or Utah or British Columbia, and I think there is probably a little truth in that this year.

Tags: avalanches, jared ishkanian, salt lake city utah, snowbird

This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under FEATURES. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.