North Idaho reports no avalanche deaths

Despite a deep blanket of backcountry snow, North Idaho appears to be heading for the first winter in four years without an avalanche death.

The safe season comes on the heels of two winters that were among the driest, yet deadliest on record for the region.

Snowmobilers and skiers didn’t suddenly get lucky or cautious, said Doug Abromeit, director of the U.S. Forest Service’s National Avalanche Center, which is based in Ketchum, Idaho.

“It’s counterintuitive to most people, but more snow is better snow,” he explained.

Avalanches typically happen shortly after a large dump of snow, or when fresh snow is deposited atop an icy crust, said Kevin Davis, director of the Idaho Panhandle National Forests Avalanche Center in Sandpoint.

The past two years have had little snow and long periods between dumps, allowing for thick crusts to set the stage for later snowslides, Davis said. Last winter, one of the driest on record, saw the deaths of two students from Gonzaga University, who died near Mullan, Idaho, while snowboarding and skiing a steep slope following one of the season’s few storms.

This winter has experienced a fairly regular series of heavy dumps, Davis said. The most dangerous times this season were within a day or two after a large snowfall. “It was usually a pretty narrow window of instability,” he said. “We didn’t have persistent weak layers that would hang on for weeks this year.”

Still, two snowmobilers were buried in early February near Jeru Peak, in the Selkirk Mountains north of Sandpoint. The men were carrying locator beacons and were freed from the slide relatively unharmed, Davis said.

Although the Forest Service has been conducting more avalanche safety classes – six workshops were offered in North Idaho this winter – Davis said it would be too much of a stretch to credit the safe season on better training. “It’s hopeful to think that some of the things we’re doing are getting out there and people are paying attention.”

The closest avalanche death to the Spokane area appears to have been a March 19 snowslide that claimed a young man on a snowmobile near Tiffany Mountain, in Okanogan County, Wash. Three snowmobilers in southern Idaho have also been killed this year.

Nationwide, there have been 22 deaths this year from avalanches. Although this is slightly lower than the last few years, the number of deaths from snowslides has been on the upswing since the early 1990s, according to Forest Service reports.

Most experts link the rise in deaths to advances in ski and snowmobile technology that allow better access to previously off-limits backcountry slopes. At the same time, they say, the death rate has not gone up as fast as the popularity of backcountry sports. This could be from better training or cheaper rescue gear, such as avalanche locator beacons. Abromeit cautioned against putting too much faith in technology. “Beacons don’t keep you out of avalanches,” he said. Typically, they just make it easier to recover the body after being buried by snow.

If anything, the advances in sport technology have put more untrained riders and skiers in dangerous backcountry snow situations, Abromeit said. “You can go farther easier.”

Snowpacks are now at their deepest, but they’ve begun settling and becoming more stable, said Davis, with the Forest Service office in Sandpoint. Regional backcountry conditions, according to the agency’s most recent forecast, are “generally safe,” especially earlier in the day, before the intense spring sun destabilizes the slopes.

But winter isn’t exactly over. A snowstorm is expected to dump another load of avalanche fuel in the mountains tonight and Sunday.