Avalanche Forecasts Endangered Funding Research Programs A Struggle In U.S., Canada

Money for avalanche research is declining even as more and more people are taking to the backcountry each winter to ski, ride snowmobiles and hike, avalanche experts say.

The weekend of tragedies in British Columbia, Montana and Idaho underscored the dangerous force of snow and ice in the Pacific Northwest. Twelve people were killed in six incidents Friday through Sunday. Six were backcountry skiers, the other six snowmobilers.

To avalanche researchers and forecasters, the deaths emphasize the need to continue studying the way avalanches are triggered and how backcountry users can protect themselves.

Funding, however, is on the decline.

“The reason you have to call me in Canada is because of the low level of funding in the United States,” said David McClung, a geology professor and member of the avalanche research group at the University of British Columbia.

Even with strong support from private industry, McClung said, “We’ve struggled terribly to survive here. It’s even worse in the United States.”

The Northwest Weather and Avalanche Center in Seattle, the only agency that regularly forecasts avalanche dangers in Washington state, was ready to close when Gov. Gary Locke came through a few weeks ago with $40,000 in emergency funding, director Mark Moore said.

The center is funded by several state and federal agencies as well as the Pacific Northwest Ski Areas Association. It hit a funding crisis late last year after the state Department of Transportation decided its share of the funding pie was too large and cut it by half, Moore said.

The emergency money solved the current crisis. “But funding is still up in the air for next year,” Morris said.

The Northwest Weather and Avalanche Center forecasts avalanches through weather stations perched on mountains throughout the state. Those forecasts are recorded daily for people considering backcountry skiing or snowmobiling.

About 30,000 people call the hotline each year, Moore said. Another 100,000 visit the agency’s Web site.

Washington leads the country in the number of avalanche deaths. In 1997 - a particularly bad year - five people were killed by falling snow and ice, Moore said.

“We’re filling a particular but important niche,” he said. “We’re able to put out a detailed mountain weather forecast - but only if we have the instrumentation.”

Even with little money, researchers are learning more about the forces that converge to trigger an avalanche, said McClung of the University of British Columbia. Armed with financial support from the tourism and forestry industries, UBC researchers have developed computer-assisted avalanche forecasting which has proved quite accurate, he said.

Conditions at a particular site are fed into the computer - snow depth, temperature and the degree of the slope, for instance. The computer then calculates the probability of an avalanche occurring. More important, the computer can sift through volumes of stored information, find the most similar set of circumstances and indicate what happened then.

Because of funding problems, the researchers have been able to implement the program at only one site, McClung said.

But even with advances in forecasting and research, avalanches remain extremely hard to predict, experts say. Forecasters need to note wind velocity, snow conditions, the kind of precipitation and the degree of the slope.

And there are what Eric Simonson, a mountain-climbing guide, calls “micro-environments” - pockets with a different, often undetected set of conditions.

Most avalanches are triggered by people skiing or snowmobiling. Snowmobiles are a particularly potent force, Simonson said.

“If one were to devise the most effective avalanche-triggering device, you couldn’t do much better than 1,000 pounds of vibrating metal,” he said.

Moore, of the Northwest Weather and Avalanche Center, said his agency’s outreach work is hardly done. The agency has spent years trying to warn backcountry skiers of avalanche dangers. Now, he’s seeing far more snowmobilers and snowboarders in remote areas, people who he believes still need a lot of information.

“We’ve had a significant increase in the number of people using the backcountry, most notably snowboarders and snowmobilers,” he said. “But that’s another segment of the population that needs education. From what I’ve heard and seen, they’re not really aware of the avalanche dangers.”