Forecast Calls for Pain
Bruce Tremper and the art of avalanche forecast website maintenance.
Avalanche Forecasting 2.0
This sort of rationale may be comforting to the observers, but it is not always fair—or informed.
"A lot of folks see mistakes where there is none," says Bruce Tremper, director of the Utah Avalanche Center and author of the venerated book, "Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain."
"They'll say, 'You idiot! I wouldn't have done that. And that's why I stay alive in avalanche terrain.' But they're just fooling themselves. It's just that most of the time we get away with it; the rest is randomness."
Tremper is first a snow scientist, but he's familiar with the social psychology of avalanches too. He started at the Utah Avalanche Center in 1986, back when the daily avalanche report consisted of a recorded message on a telephone answering machine. Few people apart from telemark and nordic-touring skiers were even "taking it to the backcountry" then (imagine this: underpowered snowmobiles couldn't even stray from snowpacked roads back when). But backcountry travel has since exploded and last winter the Utah Avalanche Center's website—the Internet now being the main portal for avalanche forecasting information (and avalanche accident second-guessing)—recorded 2.5 million page views.
Which is why, interestingly, Tremper these days is less concerned for the safety of backcountry travelers who routinely visit the UAC's website—and other regional forecasting sites throughout the country. It's the class of truly clueless that really worry him. And that's why, in part, last winter the UAC (along the Bozeman, Mont.-based avi center) entered a new era of avalanche forecasting by producing regular video blog-style avalanche forecasts (see top video).
In a wide-ranging interview with ESPN Freeskiing, Tremper tackles these and other topics—all things avalanche.
ESPN Freeskiing: Your book "Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain" is considered a must-read. Why?
BRUCE TREMPER: "I guess the book is selling well for this niche market, but I mean it's a small niche market and I don't make much money off it, but it sells well. I think we've sold maybe 25,000 copies—a second edition came out last fall—and I should know this stuff, but I don't."
Bruce Tremper collectionTremper on scene investigating a large avalanche on the Argenta slide path in Big Cottonwood Canyon, Utah, in 2004."I figured it was a book that needed to be written; there was nothing like it out there. And I figure I made about 10 cents an hour for the work I put into it. Still, it's good to have that info out there."
You started with the Utah Avalanche Center in 1986—how did you get there? "This is, what, my 24th season? Yes and it seems like I've been here a long time. ... I grew up in western Montana, in Missoula. My father taught me about avalanches when I was 10 years old. He took a class from John Montange in Bozeman and he came home all excited to teach me all about it. Unfortunately I wasn't a very good student at the time, but he was always encouraging me to learn more as I got more and more into backcountry skiing. 'You really need to learn more about avalanches,' he'd say. And sure enough I did and I haven't turned back. Undergrad at University of Montana, grad school at Montana State..."
"There were several professors [at Montana State] who study avalanches and all their course work and research is in avalanches, and there's always been a class on avalanches taught by professor John Montange; I think my dad was one of his earliest students. The course was called 'Snow Dynamics and Accumulation.' He really shoulda just called it 'Avalanches' but he had to make it sound scientific. And it was a very hard class to get into; there was a year-long waiting list. For field work, you'd ski and dig snow pits and look at avalanches."
Ah, grad school. "There were maybe 15 grad students there studying avalanches and we'd meet regularly to talk about our field work and the latest scientific studies. Those were heady times, as they say, because a lot of those same folks went on to be very successful in the avalanche field, and that's where we all got our start."
"But where I really started to learn about avalanches was in ski patrol at Bridger Bowl. I did it the year before I started graduate school. After that I was too busy during school, but after school I took over the avalanche control program at Big Sky Ski Area."
Bruce Tremper12/26/08, Little Water, Utah, incident: Much of the snow above the crown face fractured into these large crevasses and did not slide—because it was not steep enough.How long at Big Sky? "Three years. It was a great job for me because I was in charge of an avalanche program and that's all I did all day long: Deal with avalanche forecasting, documentation and avalanche control. When I started there, Big Sky didn't have any lifts on the upper mountain and very few people skied on the upper mountain. So it was like backcountry avalanche control in places where people never put any tracks. I learned a lot; just a great experience. And I can't think of any place where you'd have that kind of experience today. Now you're controlling slopes that have been heavily compacted by skiers."
"So I'd load up my pack with explosives, head out, then come back and load up again, and do that three or four times until it was the end of the day. And of course they were in no hurry to open any of that stuff..."
Then a stint in Alaska? "Yeah, then I had probably the luckiest break of my life: Gotta job with the Alaska Avalanche Center. Alaska's the big time. Everything comes in Alaska in just one size: Extra large. I thought I was a pretty squared away mountain guy—growing up in Montana and being at Bridger and Big Sky—but boy was I wrong."
"I worked for Jill Fredston—she's since written a number of really good books—and her husband, Doug Fessler. They're probably the best avalanche educators in the country as far as I can tell, and they're both still very close friends. It was wonderful working for them. Most good instructors in the country have learned their style of teaching and that's now spread around the country. ... But I was only able to work [in Alaska] for one year, because we lost our funding. But then I got hired the very next year as the head of the Utah Avalanche Center."
What was it like then? "Well, there was only three of us and now there's eight, maybe eight and a half. So it's gotten larger and more complex."
And people would call in for the forecast? "Yep, it was all telephone. The word Internet had not been invented. We forecasted primarily for telemark skiers—in those days snowmobiles couldn't even get into the backcountry, they weren't powerful enough yet, and snowboards didn't even exist except in the minds of a few pioneers. So there were three of us and we spent out time skiing around the mountains... We got our funding from the Forest Service back then."
"Now the job has changed considerably. Now we only get part of our funding from the Forest Service, so a lot of what we do is fund raising. ... And we also forecast for a lot of different users: Snowmobilers, snowshoers and snowboarders—user groups that just didn't exist when I started doing this kind of forecasting."
Is it possible to gauge the growth of backcountry recreation now? "It's just exploded, but there's no good numbers to know what they are. In the old days you'd go out and know everybody you'd run into. You'd almost go to a place where you knew other people would be. But boy those days are long gone. Now it's just packed with people. And skiers, I think, are now the minority. It's 'bilers, snowshoers, snowboarders, Boy Scout groups and so on. And the old style skiers who liked to go on long tours are now people who put on big fat skis and bring their video camera to go huck off a cliff in hopes of being in TGR. Yes, things have changed."
And more and more people are coming to the UAC for forecasts. "It's a very popular service. About 2.5 million page views a year and it just keeps going up and up every year. Part of it is we're offering more products, but it's also just more people and the website is the clearinghouse where people go to get their information."
This also means constant technological transitions for forecasters like you. "It has been hard for the forecasters, especially the old dog forecasters, changing everything from the phone forecasts to the Internet and even podcasting. Hardly nobody ever calls in for it now. So, yeah, it's been hard for the old dogs. The telephone is dead. People aren't going to hear your voice. And you've gotta use more graphics and photos... it's hard for people to come up to speed with the new medium."
And last winter the UAC debuted the first video-style avalanche forecasts as well? "Nowadays it's photos and videos and icons and graphics..."
Bruce Tremper12/26/08, Little Water, Utah, incident: This is where Matt and Dan were standing when the avalanche broke—the slope is 29 degrees here, but the crown face above is 32 to 33 degrees.Are you an old dog? "Oh yeah, I'm an old dog. But I keep up with the technology. I'm a pretty geeky old dog. I've always been fascinated with computers even since grad school and I've stuck with it ever since. I'm a real gizmo head. I love it. ... So I'm often the first person to explore these new things and then I have to crack the whip to get everybody else to do it too."
The telephone may be dead, but people are checking you guys out with their smarty-phones no doubt? "Yep, we have mobile versions for different phones. So yeah, that's the latest rage. Everybody wants to get it on their phone. No one's calling to get it, but they want the text version on their phone and we're trying to expirement with better ways to get the word out through new technologies. So I'm always surveying my friends' kids. And they say, 'Just text. We never even call each other.' So we're expirementing with Twitter feeds... And I think people will like that, especially after they have the latest update. They've got their skins on and they're heading up and the Twitter goes out: 'We heard about a new avalanche,' or, 'This ski area's experiencing heavy avalanching with their control work, so be careful out there.'"
How about media. Your phones must ring following avalanche accidents. "The TV channels want us to keep feeding them stuff: Shots of slides and video especially. There's just a real thirst for avalanche information and details. But we find the people who've taken avalanche courses and who read our reports, they don't get in a lot of trouble out in the mountains. So now we're trying to redirect our resources to our lower-end users. Two-thirds of the people killed in avalanches in the country as well as in Utah aren't even wearing a beacon, and most don't consult the avalanche report before they go out."
"A lot of the deaths are just from plain old ignorance, so we're putting a lot of effort this year into trying to reach these avalanche-unaware users. We really don't have a forecasting problem, we've got a marketing problem. So really we're just trying to come up to speed as to how bad the problem is and how to reach that group. And it's a really big job. ... Ian McCammon is a well-known avalanche educator and he's done a lot of cutting edge work, so we're also working with him. He's done a lot of sampling of people who are leaving the backcountry gates, trying to get a sense of their level, their mental models, what they know about snow and what they don't know, and really how best to reach these people."
"There's really five levels of users: 1. Unaware. 2. Aware. 3. Engaged. 4. Emergent mitigator. 5. Routine mitigator."
Laymen's terms? "This is just how they seperate people into different levels of awareness. The unaware are those who can hardly spell avalanche. Maybe they believe the myths, like they're triggered by loud noises. But they're not aware of the concept of slabs; it's like rolling the dice with them. All they know is what they've seen in some bad movie."
"To get them to the aware stage, you have to engage them somehow, shock them somehow, make 'em look at a billboard, whatever it is—get them to realize that avalanches are triggered by victims and it's not just bad luck. So we're trying to grab the unaware people, shake 'em by the neck and get a little information to them. Sometimes all it takes is just a little information to save someone's life."
"Then to get to the engaged level is the realization, 'Hey, it can happen to me?!' And once you get 'em to that stage, you've got 'em. They're reading our website, they're maybe thinking about taking an avalanche class; maybe they're not mitigating problems, but they're aware enough of the bigger problem."
"So that's why we're working on these Level 1 and 2 people to get 'em engaged in the whole system. The 4s and 5s, we've got them already. They're reading the avalanche report; we're reaching them. They're trying to be an avalanche geek."
Do people, experienced skiers even, act differently in the backcountry when they're with you, avalanche guru? "Yep. [Laughter] 'Well, if Bruce Tremper's willing to jump into that slope, I guess it must be OK!' They do too. They turn off all precautions. But if they only knew..."
One of your responsibilities is investigating fatal accidents. Explain please. "Going to look at an avalanche accident is a really important thing to do because that's how you really learn about avalanches. It's just an eye-opening experience, like, 'Wow, this thing is huge and I never want to be caught in something like this!' And then, 'Wow, look how hard it would be to dig someone out of this debris!' And then, 'Wow, these people are just like me. They make the same decisions I do, and they just guessed wrong.'"
In addition to being a super resource and tool for backcountry skiers, the Internet is also the place where avalanche victims get second-guessed to death, well, a second time. What's your opinion of this trend of Monday morning quarterbacking? "There's always a lag time from the accident happening until when you can actually figure out what happened. And in the news cycle, that's forever. But if you can get some information out early, you can also really capture people. And that's a lot of people here in Utah glued to their TV every night hearing about an accident. So we try to get information out as soon as we can. And things are accessable here compared to other places; we're a small little range. But a lot of times you can't do that either. It takes a lot of time to gather the information. And people do get frustrated with that. Well, if CNN can do it instantly, why can't you guys? Well, our budget is about $250,000 and that's spread out around eight folks, so it's just keeping us above the poverty line."
Internet speculators like to operate under a pure-motive umbrella; they're interested in extracting whatever "lessons can be learned" from accidents. But this is clearly disingenuous at times—it's just scavengers picking over a body. Or is it? "As humans we want to be able to explain everything and we feel nervous if we can't. The world is complex and random, but if there's a cause and effect relationship, well, that's more comforting. So when someone is killed in an avalanche other folks who spend time in avalanche terrain desperately want to know what mistakes they made—things they wouldn't, of course, have done themselves."
"So a lot of folks see mistakes where there is none. And that's human nature. When accidents happen, they'll say, 'You idiot! I wouldn't have done that. And that's why I stay alive in avalanche terrain.' But they're just fooling themselves. It's just that most of the time we all get away with it; the rest is randomness. But people don't want to admit that because that means admitting there's a lot more danger in what they're doing than what they want to believe. And I believe that's what leads to a lot of this fascination with avalanche accidents."
Does this fascination upset you? "It's so universal. Everyone does it. You can't fight human nature and you just have to accept that as one of the insanities of being a human being. We all do it. It used to upset me, but then I found myself doing the same thing."
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