Avalanche Danger Increases With Access To Back-Country Officials Encourage Outdoor Enthusiasts To Be Prepared Along Slopes

Coeur d’Alene snowmobiler John Turley never thought he needed an avalanche beacon when out zooming around the mountains on his snow machine.

Last weekend, he changed his mind.

He and a group of eight people from Coeur d’Alene and Hayden Lake were riding in the Hoodoo Pass area on the Idaho and Montana border when they came upon about 20 other snowmobilers poking through avalanche debris with tree branches.

Todd Ludeman of Moiese, Mont., had been buried for about a half-hour by an avalanche after hill-climbing the sun-drenched slope.

“They couldn’t find him,” Turley recalled. “They poked everywhere. One guy said, ‘I know he’s under there.”’ A snowmobiler from Spokane, Larry Parker, finally hit something that felt like a person, and the frantic digging began.

Ludeman was lucky that two people had retractable snow shovels on hand. Trapped underneath the heavy spring snow, he’d nearly given up hope, he said.

“I just finally accepted the point that I was going to die and what a way to die: suffocate,” he told the newspaper. The thought of his wife and children kept him struggling for air.

Ludeman was lucky. Most people buried in avalanches don’t survive as long as he did.

Although a couple of the rescuers were snowmobiling with avalanche beacons, that didn’t help Ludeman because he didn’t have one.

Three people have died in Idaho avalanches this year. The last death before that was in 1974.

Two snowboarders were killed in an avalanche at Galena Summit in the Sawtooth Mountains on Jan. 5. A month later, an experienced heli-ski guide died in a large avalanche in the Smokey Mountains north of Fairfield.

Closer to home, a snowboarder was killed at Kootenay Pass in British Columbia in January, and a park ranger died a month later in B.C.’s Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park while skiing alone.

North Idaho’s mountains are not immune to avalanches, as last weekend’s incident on Hoodoo Pass demonstrated.

Although the U.S. Forest Service has ceased recording a weekly avalanche forecast for the season, the spring snowpack still poses some risks.

The spring snowpack is often relatively stable as the snow melts during the day, freezes at night, and gradually consolidates, explained Bob Kasun, Panhandle National Forests hydrologist.

But last weekend, rapidly rising temperatures caused a new layer of snow to release on slopes exposed to the sun.

Doug Abromeit, winter sports specialist with the Ketchum Ranger District of the U.S. Forest Service, attributes the recent tragedies to physical and social changes. After long drought years, the snow pack in the Sawtooth region has been very unstable, Abromeit said.

Complicating that is the fact that technological advances in skis, snow boards and snowmobiles have enabled more people to travel on, or below, steep terrain.

He advocates avalanche awareness courses and criticizes extreme skiing filmmakers for representing dangerous back-country skiing as risk free.

Experts also advise all back-country travelers to carry and learn to use avalanche beacons, shovels, a probe pole or telescoping ski poles, and a first aid kit.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Susan Drumheller staff writer The Associated Press contributed to this report.