British Columbia’s avalanche professionals work like dogs on a shoestring budget to have your back in the backcountry, motivated and united, it seems, by an old skier’s bumper-sticker: The Worst Day of Skiing is Better than the Best Day in the Office.
text Dan Kostrzewski photos Jordan Manley
Locked and loaded on the Rogers Pass.
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e are closing at this time,” squawks Eric Dafoe’s radio, as the flashing sweep vehicle passes us. We watch the lights roll onward to the summit, where a backup of semis, tour buses and sled trucks will be clogging Canada’s million-dollar-a-day artery for at least the next hour. “Rogers Pass Highway: west closure off, east closure on,” comes the reply from the Parks Canada complex at the summit— location of Dafoe’s desk and base for the Glacier National Park ACS (Avalanche Control Section), the biggest mobile control program in North America. Dafoe works the extended weekend shift as a senior avalanche technician, spending most days on skis but sharing office space with a busy crew of snow-savvy professionals that include forecasters, technicians, safety specialists and visiting grad students. The complex—across Highway
Scott Aiken checking in at his roadside office on Duffey Lake Road.
The howitzer works double duty as blasting device and tourist-scaring road-closure signal.
Dropping bombs so you and I can drop cliffs.
One from the pack of stalled travelers, now sipping cafeteria coffee and buying souvenir beaver hats in the Glacier Park Lodge— also houses a Canadian army barrack for the artillery detachment stationed here as part of this avalanche mission. And right now, these fatigued military reservists, on their final day of a six-week rotation, are lined up on a start zone after drinking their own bar—Snowpunchers Lounge— dry the night before. They’re ready to lob a live 105mm howitzer round into one of 144 avalanche paths that threaten this critical national corridor, as soon as the tech holding the target book gives the green light. His radio crackles. “Fire!” he yells to an army officer. “Fire!” commands the officer. The gunners launch a shell across the highway, and a pocket pulls loose in the distance.
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weather stations in the park, before heading inside for a staff meeting. Then Dafoe, a 27-year Rogers Pass veteran, jumped in his truck to drive the road on avalanche patrol. He scoured slopes through binoculars and recorded recent slides by path and track, underestimating their size the way Hawaiians do with waves—a result of custom and history. Dafoe first arrived in 1983 as a Glacier National Park warden, eventually rising through the ranks to run its safety program, acting as both spokesperson and rescue leader during a 2003 avalanche tragedy that killed seven schoolchildren underneath Mt. Cheops. In 2004, he switched to senior avalanche technician with the ACS program, where he now logs more than 150 days on snow per season, most of them four-hour field sessions. Today, Dafoe and partner Jim Phillips boot up in the ground-floor locker room to take us on one of their tours. Before we start, Manley and I duck into the Rogers Pass Discovery Centre for backcountry permits, a requirement instituted in 1993 to keep skiers safe from active control operations but still allow access to unaffected zones. Due in part to the success of the Winter Permit System, skier days in Glacier Park have climbed dramatically since Dafoe started, increasing from 500
gunners launch a shell across the highway
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ost B.C. skiers view avalanche science as a profession centred on recreation. But throughout the province, a special fraternity exists outside of the framework of ski resorts and backcountry powder ops. Working for the Government or private industry, these career professionals ply their trade in critical transportation corridors, heavily trafficked national parks and remote Crown land, with economic value to the resource economy. These pros utilize their blasting tickets to mitigate risk, but also spend more than a hundred days a season in AT boots, monitoring snowpacks, checking weather data and setting skin tracks in spectacular ski zones. Photographer Jordan Manley and I have set out for a glimpse into these day jobs that read like dream jobs, starting where this work began in 1962—the gauntlet of Rogers Pass.
“Westbound sweep is clear to the summit,” confirms the radio, as I climb from Dafoe’s truck and fumble with Government-issue earplugs. “Clear to load,” responds Dafoe’s supervisor, senior avalanche officer Bruce McMahon, from the compound where every shot fired—often in excess of 800 a winter and as many as 80 per closure—is logged in stacks of waterproof notebooks and Government paperwork. The program’s main objective is to bring snow down when it’s ready to move and the road is closed. Firing the gun is half the battle, but nailing the timing is a more complex calculation that requires regular monitoring and serious fieldwork. Getting a feel for this quieter effort is why we’d met Dafoe at 7 a.m. the day before, at the study plot behind ACS headquarters. With manual accuracy, Dafoe had read thermometers, hydrographs and snow boards that supplement data from nine remote
per season in 1983 to more than 20,000 annually in today’s AT era. Even on quiet days tracks head in every direction, but Dafoe, who helped write the ski-touring book on Rogers Pass and has been honoured with an eponymous cabin in an unnamed drainage, has a sense we might find good snow in the Bonney Moraine. We skin up in sunshine and top out at 2,100 metres, radio our UTM coordinates to HQ, and spend a solid hour watching the boys divide the labour of digging a snow pit and completing an advanced snow profile. With the bookwork done, we click in and traverse left, benefiting from professional intuition to sniff out a fresh coat of snow. We drop into a knee-deep run down the drainage, then aim for the locker room where Dafoe and Phillips will wrestle endof-shift tasks like InfoEx writing or more weather-plot recording. Before heading in, however, Dafoe wants to ensure I have the perspective: “Take a look behind you,” he urges, pointing to the tracks exiting Mt. Bonney. “That’s why I’m reluctant to retire.”
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Enjoying the spoils of a job well done on the Duffey.
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I strain to keep up with the fluorescent, safety-orange shells of skiers 20 years older, but considerably faster.
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hey’re hoaring stellars, man! They’re classic hoaring stellars,” exclaims Scott Aitken, as excited as a snow scientist can be about crystal structure. Aitken is a B.C. Ministry of Transportation avalanche technician with 25 years working the Duffey Lake Road, the back route out of Whistler. “The last part of a cold front coming through gives you dropping temperatures and that’s when the stellars form—this fluffy beautiful skiing snow,” he says, passing the crystal card. “And then you get a clear night and you get surface hoar; it grows quite readily onto that [stellar] shape, it’s already in a kinetic growth form.” “The bond to the crust looks good,” echoes a call across the blustery snowpit from Doug Tuck, an assistant tech and Aitken’s partner since 1990, two years before this high-mountain highway was paved. We’ve been receiving an education on the Duffey since meeting up with the pair at the coffee shop down the street from their cramped two-man command centre in Pemberton. Unlike the Trans-Canada, the Duffey is a secondary provincial route that sees low vehicle volumes but still demands respect and attention due to its subalpine elevation—a trait that makes it an increasingly popular access point with the MEC-clad touring crowd. “We’d see maybe one set of tracks a winter,” Aitken reflects on the early days. Their bright yellow MOT truck is carrying us over the summit, past diversion mounds and salt sheds backdropped by what was once their own secret stash. “Now we almost have moguls in our start zones.”
Manley and I had tried to make this scenic drive in December, but two flat tires that day prevented us from watching Aitken shut the highway, flip open his laptop and remotely detonate one of three GasEx exploders in Path 51—known to these guys as The Nemesis. To monitor current conditions in 51 and other active paths, Aitken has programmed his cellphone to call when the Storm Pro weather-station data indicates potential hazard. He can decide to close, control or place the road crews on high alert, a call he can make from home in Whistler. Closing the Duffey, however, is far easier than getting it back open, which can take up to 12 hours in the worst conditions. The pair also keeps watch over back roads to hamlets like Birken and Bralorne, meaning that even with two full-time assistants hired with Olympic-year funding, each new cycle is a busy time. Still, it’s the Duffey—from the snow board highway cam at the summit, all the way to dry, dusty Lillooet—that demands most of their attention. Daily forecasts, field maintenance, paperwork and control by GasEx or helideployed charges are possible responsibilities during nine-hour, no-lunch workdays. Since this quieter day between storm fronts allows time for a full day of fieldwork, a snow profile is on tap for a site high above Duffey Lake with a planned return down Chute 56—one of many lines logged in their fieldwork atlas. We get a jumpstart with a tandem lift from their 300cc Ski-Doo Tundras, then switch to skins for the benched ascent to treeline. “All winter we tell the assistants, ‘It’s not about the skiing,’ ” says Aitken, as I strain to keep up with the fluorescent, safetyorange shells of skiers 20 years older, but considerably faster. Which begs the question of what it is all about for these guys.
“Blowing shit up. Cheating death. Keeping the public safe,” Aitken wryly summarizes. After the profile work is complete, the techs confirm their hypothesis on the weak layer with stress tests, finding planar failures and a touchy Rutschblock result that sends Tuck tumbling into the snowpit. “Looks like it’s run already; it could be quite crappy skiing,” says Aitken as we click in and roll up to the crest of the natural line down Chute 56—seeing only slick bed surface ending in choked rubble, old tracks traverse sheepishly out of the carnage. “But it’s still better than a good day in the office.”
Doug Tuck getting deep into his work.
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Finally, a legitimate use of our tax dollars.
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afety off, first fuse lit,” relays Rich Barry through the headset, moments after he hoists the 25-kilo bag of explosive ANFO I hand him from my middle seat in the helicopter. Then, in accordance with WorkSafeBC procedure, he yanks the double pull-wire, igniting the two-and-a-half-minute fuse. “First fuse lit, timer started,” responds his supervisor and private avie consultant Kevin Fogolin from the front seat. The machine is hovering somewhere above Brem River, a remote logging camp that consists of a lonely wooden dock, a one-lane road, a cab-less fuel truck and a decommissioned B.C. Ferry acting as a floating bunkhouse. It’s a warm spring day in the Coast Mountains during Fogolin’s busiest season as, 2,200 metres below, logging operations are starting to heat up. But up here, far above saltwater fjords carving deep
into glaciated peaks, the snowpack could be more than five metres—meaning the runouts down these near-vertical paths still threaten the valley floor. With the door locked open and Fogolin’s assistant harnessed in, we inch closer to the massive mountaintop cornice so Barry can two-hand toss the bag into the sweet spot, aiming to trigger a slide that will clean the path while the cutblock below is off-limits to road builders, chokers and fallers. “Hold on,” Fogolin cautions, urging patience for a cleaner shot above the face of a towering unnamed mountain that has most likely never been skied. We’re deep in a range of impossible access with AT skis on standby in the basket, two hours by water taxi across Georgia Strait from the West Coast Helicopter hangar and Fogolin’s home office in Campbell River. “It’s off and it’s stuck,” confirms Barry an instant later as he takes out his camera to record the result. Then we bank hard,
spinning quickly away out of the blast zone with the door wide open to the valley floor. Hovering, we then wait to watch a mountain explode from a safe distance. Fogolin directs the aerial effort because he’s the man in charge of GIS mapping the avalanche risk zones that intersect with work plans to harvest timber, build seasonal camps or construct hydro projects. As a subcontractor of Stethem & Associates, he also generates daily hazard forecasts and reduces risk for industrial projects near the Toba and Butte inlets—complex, Alaska-style terrain that he grew up gazing at through binoculars from the roof of his parents’ house. “One morning we were on Vancouver Island having coffee, getting ready to go, and then 45 minutes later had our skis on, looking down on the Waddington Glacier,” he recalls. “You almost have to give your head a shake, it’s like, ‘Holy cow.’ ” Manley and I had taken a longer approach to this job site, arriving by water taxi at the Brem River camp as temperatures spiked to 17˚C in the valley and 9˚C in the alpine after the last storm cycle. Fogolin picked us up on the dock and then the heli pilot lifted us all toward a 2,500-metre wall of relief, and to a rare flat spot for a snowpit study site above Cutblock 61. He finds an isothermic pack and the weak crust predicted with these high temperatures after an intense Pacific storm. “It’s a prime day for avalanches out here,” Fogolin summarizes—meaning we might trigger a serious slide. Not that this possibility ruins his day.
Hovering, we then wait to watch a mountain explode from a safe distance.
With great risk comes great reward. Enjoying the sunset in Toba Inlet from the best seat in the house.
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DNA Avalanche Info • Canadian Avalanche Centre Regional Avalanche Forecasts; avalanche.ca/ cac/bulletins/ cac-forecasts • Canadian Avalanche Association Pro-Level Training; avalanche.ca/ caa/training/ avalanche-operations Rogers Pass • Ski Touring in Rogers Pass by J. P. Kors, John Kelly and Eric Dafoe; canrockbooks.com • Glacier Park Lodge; glacierparklodge.ca;
“I feel pretty fortunate to be able to call this my workplace.”
1-888-567-4477 • Rogers Pass Backcountry Reports; (250) 837-MTNS • Glacier Park Winter Backcountry Permit Info; pc.gc.ca/glacier (under activities, ski touring) Duffey Lake Road • Mount Currie Coffee Co.; mountcurriecoffee. blogspot.com; (604) 894-3388 • Cayoosh Summit Highway Cam; images. drivebc.ca/bchighwaycam Toba and Butte Inlets • Exploring the Coast Mountains on Skis, by John Baldwin; johnbaldwin.ca • West Coast Helicopters; westcoasthelicopters.com Campbell River • Discovery Launch Water Taxi; discoverylaunch.com; 250-287-7577
“I feel pretty fortunate to be able to call this my workplace,” he says, as point-release slides let loose across the deep V-neck of a valley below. “It’s pretty awesome.” By any measure, however, it’s not a normal job, so I ask Fogolin how he got here. “Like most avalanche people, it was the love of powder skiing and an element of self-preservation,” responds Fogolin, who rose through ski-patrol ranks then took his levels through the CAA and CSGA. “It’s not like a lot of occupations where you go to
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university and get a degree and then you become an avalanche guy. It’s the experience along with the training that provides an opportunity to get into the field.” And my opportunity to take the middle seat, next to the ANFO, arose after Manley captured a couple explosions, and was then dropped on an unnamed peak for a better angle. From our hovering vantage, we see the puff and then hear the boom. The cornice fails and the result propagates two Class-III slides ripping down each
side of the arête. We fly in for a close-up, watching a raging waterfall of snow pour down the 1,400-vertical-metre, two kilometre path to the edge of the road path. “That’s beautiful,” Fogolin says, as he watches the incredible sight of destructive power with a combination of awe, excitement and respect shared only by big-mountain skiers and avalanche professionals. “Now I’m happy with those guys eating lunch down there for the rest of the season.” ×