the ridge, the warden could hear tree
trunks snapping like matchsticks. “He
really thought he was going to die,” Hu-
guenin said. The experiment, which de-
stroyed much of the forest, didn’t go
over well with the locals.
Huguenin and I continued walking.
To our left, a Soviet-looking bunker poked
out of the hill. It was two stories tall; in
the 1999 experiment, it had been covered
by thirteen feet of snow. To reach the ob-
servers buried inside, a crew had to cut
a vertical tunnel with a chainsaw. Near
the bunker, an array of continuous-wave
radar antennas, designed to measure the
flow at the avalanche’s core, craned toward
the peak. Huguenin pointed to “obsta-
cles” on the slope—pressure and veloc-
ity sensors mounted on concrete-and-
steel structures. Against the mountainside,
the largest obstacle, a sixty-foot-tall pylon
studded with flow-measurement devices,
looked like a toothpick.
Avalanche country is like bear coun-
try. The threat hardly ever comes, but
it defines the place, and lends it its gran-
deur. Outside the bunker, the moun-
tains rose around us; flat clouds gath-
ered in a distant valley like steam. We
had lunch: bread, cheese, chocolate. The
snow was warming in the sun. Scoop-
ing it up, I found that, instead of seep-
ing through my fingers, it now formed
a perfect snowball—metamorphism
within a matter of hours. I thought of
how plants observed in time lapse seem
to move with animal purpose. I imag-
ined the crystals in this newly fallen
snow sintering and crackling with life.
From where we were sitting, we could
see the glide avalanche from two days
earlier. It was hard to get a sense of scale.
Huguenin handed me his binoculars.
Through them, I saw chest-high boul-
ders of snow. Without them, the ava-
lanche was a scratch on the mountainside.O
ne is unlikely to encounter an av-
alanche on the bomb-cleared trails
of a ski resort like Alta. Avalanche ac-
cidents happen far more often in the
backcountry, where skiers search for
what the First Nations author Richard
Wagamese called “the great white sanc-
tity of winter.” In a recent survey, more
than half of backcountry skiers said they
had triggered an avalanche; a quarter
said they’d got caught in one. It’s tell-
ing that the standard kit separating them
from resort vacationers consists of a bea-
con, a probe, and a shovel.
I grew up skiing at small mountains
in the Laurentians, just north of Mon-
treal. Well groomed and popular, they
were often scraped to ice. It was only a
few years ago that I went with a friend
to a large ski resort in Colorado. One
day, we travelled to a remote part of the
mountain. There had been fresh snow
that morning, and I whooped as I dropped
in, not another soul in sight. The snow
felt like a cloud underfoot; falling evoked
the childhood joy of jumping in leaves.
Carving slow curves, I recognized the
feeling of discovery: I was writing my
name on the mountain. I also under-
stood, for the first time, how powder and
silence lure skiers into the backcountry.
To some extent, backcountry skiers
can rely on avalanche forecasts. At the
Utah Avalanche Center (motto: “Keep-
ing You on Top”), forecasters make daily
field observations (“+” means fresh snow;
“•,” round grains; “Ʌ ,” depth hoar), inte-grating them into uncannily specific rec-
ommendations: “It remains possible to
trigger a wind slab avalanche.... This
snow will feel upside down and stiff.”
Different kinds of terrain are assigned
levels of danger, on a one-to-five scale;
colorful diagrams with cartoon icons
show which parts of the mountain—
above the treeline, say, or southern as-
pects—are to be avoided.
Some experts worry that such dia-
grams give skiers a false sense of secu-
rity. My sixty-seven-year-old godfather,
Richard, happens to be the most expe-
rienced backcountry adventurer I know;
a snowboarder for decades, he has logged
more than a hundred thousand vertical
metres in the past two years, in Kash-
mir, Antarctica, and other places. In the
backcountry, he relies not just on fore-
casts but also on guides, to whom he at-
tributes extraordinary diagnostic pow-
ers. Before taking a group out, a guide
might dig a small column out of the
slope. He’ll examine the layers, sussing
out weakness, assessing the look of the
crystal grains. Then he’ll tap the top of
the column with his hand ten times,
bending from the wrist. If the column
survives, he’ll do it again, bending from
the elbow; finally, he’ll do it from the
shoulder. His interest is in when the col-
umn collapses, and how. Once, on a slope
that seemed risky, a guide told Richard’s
group that, whatever they did, they must
follow, one by one, to the right of his
line. Each skier followed in turn, care-
fully staying to his right. As Richard de-
scended, a layer of snow unsettled be-
neath him, a few feet to the left of the
guide’s tracks, and sent a wave across the
bowl. The slope fell like a sheet.
One way to avoid avalanches is to
ski shallower slopes. Slopes of around
twenty-five degrees are perfectly enjoy-
able; steeper ones are only marginally
more fun. And yet it’s hard for skiers to
hold back. “The tricky part is controlling
our lust,” a forecast reads. After a stu-
dent of his died in an avalanche, Jordy
Hendrikx, a professor at Montana State
University, shifted his focus from geo-
physical research to behavioral science.
(“Understanding how a crystal grows is
not enough to change the current fatal-
ity profile,” he told me.) In one long-
running study, he had a large group of
backcountry skiers log their activity with
a G.P.S.-enabled app. He found that“Big mixup at the airport. I’ll tell you about
it later. I see my bag waiting for me.”