20 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 23, 2020
another ski patroller, mentioned that
she had prepared some of the hand
charges they would be using that morn-
ing. “And I will light them, and throw
them into the darkness,” Richards said.
We rode the lift up in the moonlight.
Snow was falling on the fir trees. Rich-
ards spent his childhood at Alta: his fa-
ther was a ski patroller for thirty-three
years, and his mother, who later became
a university administrator, worked the
front desk at the Rustler
Lodge. Richards started
his career as a professional
skier, then worked as a
heli-skiing guide, before
joining the patrol full time.
“The thing that makes it
for me is the snow,” he said.
“Working with a natural
material that can be—” He
paused. “It’s light and fluffy
and soft and downy, and
it’s everybody’s favorite thing in the world.
It’s also one of the most destructive forces
in nature. Under the right conditions,
that soft, wonderful little snowflake can
tear forests out of the ground, throw cars
through the air, flatten buildings. And
you get to watch that.”
At the top of the lift, we started hik-
ing. A voice crackled over the radio.
“Copy,” Richards said. “Just give me a
holler when you pull the trigger.” A
moment later, the radio crackled again;
Richards ducked and covered his head,
and an explosion went off somewhere
nearby. We resumed hiking. After a few
minutes, we arrived at a two-story shed.
A garage door opened onto a pair of
hundred-and-five-millimetre howitzer
cannons, of Second World War vintage,
installed on semicircular tracks. The gun
barrels were pointed at the mountain-
tops. A crew was loading bags of gun-
powder into the undersides of artillery
shells—enormous bullets, six inches wide
and two and a half feet long. Richards
wrapped a rag around a large stick and
jammed it into a gun barrel, to clean it.
“One Sunday morning,” he began sing-
ing to himself. “As I went walking ...”
The patrollers donned foam earplugs
and large over-ear headphones; Rich-
ards and his co-gunner walked around
one of the weapons, checking locks and
bolts. They turned a crank, and the bar-
rel swung toward its first target.
“Zero, zero, two, seven,” Richards
yelled—the elevation and the deflec-
tion. Two other patrollers confirmed the
coördinates. “Ready to fire,” Richards
said. “Fire!”
He pulled hard on a chain. The
muzzle flashed, and a plume of acrid
smoke filled the air. There was a high-
pitched ringing.
It wasn’t possible to see the mountain,
but Richards listened for impact and, a few
seconds later, yelled, “Report!” Outside,
while the barrage contin-
ued, a patroller named Kyle
took a small cast-booster
explosive out of his pack:
it resembled two cans of
beans wired together with
licorice, the cartoon ver-
sion of a bomb. He pulled
the fuse and tossed it un-
derhand over the cliffside.
“That didn’t go where I
wanted,” he said. Ninety
seconds later, it exploded into a black-
and-white cloud of snow dust.
Afterward, the cleaning and stow-
ing of the guns began. When everything
was done, it was nearly nine o’clock.
Richards prepared to ski back toward
the base. During the night, the resort
had sent an alert to Alta skiers, telling
them to expect between nine and four-
teen inches of new snow—some of the
best skiing of the season. On the way
down, the sun shone on fresh powder
reaching up to Richards’s waist. Small
cracks shot out from his ski tips as he
descended. Piles of snow slid downslope.
He paused and, turning his ski pole up-
side down, began using it as a probe.
The pole slid easily into the first foot
of snow. Feeling resistance, he pushed
harder—and broke through into a hol-
low. After the snow settled and drifted,
there could be avalanches.T
he project of avalanche control in
the Alps goes back at least to 1397,
in Andermatt, Switzerland, with a law
that prohibited logging. Swiss peasants
had moved farther into the mountains.
Their new farmhouses sat in avalanche
paths. It was soon discovered that old-
growth trees anchored the snow and
kept slides from gathering mass. During
the eighteen-seventies, Johann Coaz, the
head of the Swiss Forest Service, made
records of historical avalanches. He drew
up maps of potential disaster zones anddesigned walls to protect vulnerable set-
tlements; the stones used to build them
were hauled up the mountainsides by
hundreds of men.
Around the same time, prospectors
in the western United States began find-
ing silver ore high in the mountains. At
Alta, which began as a major silver camp,
miners logged the alpine forests for fire-
wood and to reinforce their tunnels. Ac-
cording to legend, the avalanche danger
grew so high that women weren’t allowed
to live there in winter. Alta was aban-
doned in 1927, when the price of silver
plummeted, but, in the nineteen-thir-
ties, European-style ski resorts spread
across the American West. The first me-
chanical lift appeared in Alta in 1939.
After the Second World War, some
veterans of the U.S. 10th Mountain Di-
vision, who had trained for alpine com-
bat, found themselves responsible for
snow safety at the resorts. In 1945, Mont-
gomery Atwater, a freelance writer who
had fought with the 10th, heard about a
snow-ranger job at Alta and applied on
a whim. “That Alta was ideally conceived
by nature to become the first avalanche
research center on this continent and
that I was there to take the plunge were
mere coincidences,” he later wrote, in
“The Avalanche Hunters,” from 1968.
Alta lies at the center of three storm
tracks, from Canada, the Gulf of Alaska,
and the Pacific. Storm systems accumu-
late moisture in the Salt Lake and, as they
rise into the mountains, release about
forty-five feet of snow each winter. Atwa-
ter learned that although snow always be-
gins the same way—with a water droplet
condensing around a dust mote or pollen
to form a six-pointed snowflake—it can
take innumerable forms later. Snow acts
like both a solid and a liquid: it flows—
even a blanket of snow on a hillside is
slowly creeping—while maintaining its
structure. Scientists consider it to be
“warm,” because it is always close to its
melting point. This is why, before you
make your first snowball of the day, it
is hard to know how well it will pack:
you are working with a material that is
about to change state. It’s like building
a bridge with red-hot steel.
We think of the snow on a moun-
tain as a solid mass. In reality, it is a layer
cake created by serial snowfalls, each
layer distinctive and changeable. “The
snow cover is never in a state of repose,”