How we Generate Avalanche Advisories

The Utah Avalanche Center is the interface between avalanches and the public. People who venture into backcountry avalanche terrain literally make life and death decisions. They base those decisions partly on critical avalanche information from the Forest Service Utah Avalanche Center (UAC), so we take our jobs very seriously.

We often think of ourselves as natural detectives. We gather as much information as possible from a wide variety of sources, and then communicate our analysis to the public. We look at weather, talk to ski area avalanche control programs, helicopter ski companies and highway control programs and volunteer observers on a daily basis, our most important source of information comes from our own observations. We regularly travel into the mountains, where we can be in intimate contact with the snow. Doing field work in uncontrolled backcountry avalanche terrain is not only where we get our best information, but it's also where we can get instant feedback.

We split our time more or less equally between the field and the office. With a staff of seven people covering northern Utah, we have a rotating schedule in which one person sits in the driver's seat in the office as the forecaster for the day while the others either head into the mountains to look at snow, work in the office on various special projects or take their scheduled days off. 

Field day

A typical "field day" might begin at 6:00 in the morning when we wake up, listen to our trusty NOAA weather radio, get on our home computer and look at the data from the automated mountain weather stations. We call our own avalanche advisory to get the latest information and decide where to go for the day.  After clearing our plans with the office, we jump in the car or on the bus and head for the mountains.

We almost always go into the backcountry-meaning outside of controlled ski area boundaries-where we put climbing skins on our skis and huff-and-puff to the top of a mountain, take off the skins, ski down into another valley, put the skins back on again, go to another ridge, and so on. We use snowmobiles to access more remote areas. We always travel with a partner and carry avalanche safety equipment like electronic avalanche beacons, shovels, probes, belay rope and radios. We seldom have a regular patrol area; we simply go to the area that concerns us the most, or to a place that we know is representative, where we can look at snow on a variety of aspects, elevations and terrain types.

We gather information in many different ways. For instance, we dig snowpits on many different slopes to get a good feel for the distribution pattern of snow stability. A snowpit is about a 5 foot (1.5 meter) hole in the snow; we do a variety of stress tests on snow in the pit to determine the stability of the overall snowpack (click HERE for an overview of snowpit techniques). We also look at the crystallography of the various layers, temperatures and we document this information in a snow profile.  Though these tests might sound complicated or time-consuming, we usually spend no more than 15 minutes in a single snowpit. We would rather dig several quick pits in several areas than do one detailed pit in one area because we want to know the distribution of the pattern. Once we figure out what kind of avalanche dragon we're dealing with, we can communicate it to the public.

We also test the snow in other ways, such as sawing off cornices, which roll down the slope, thus testing the stability of the snow. We keep close track of the pattern of recent avalanches, and we always pay very close attention to the present snow surface because it's much easier to map a layer of snow when it's still on the surface then after it's buried by the next storm.

Once we get home, we leave a detailed message on the answering machine in the office and type up a field report, so the next day's forecaster will have the information early the next morning. Often we also call that person and talk to them in more detail, making sure not to call after 8:00 pm, because they have to be up by 3:00 AM the next morning.

People always ask if it's dangerous. We don't normally think of it as being dangerous but, like driving on the freeway, it certainly can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. It takes quite a bit of training and experience to be able to travel safely in the backcountry and several years of experience and training to be an accomplished avalanche forecaster. Most of our staff have degrees in physical sciences such as meteorology, geology or engineering. We also have several years experience doing avalanche control at ski areas, are all accomplished mountaineers with many years of accumulated mountain smarts. Finally, we all stay in top physical condition so we can efficiently cover lots of terrain. 

Office Day

Our office days are brutal. We usually arrive around 4:00 am, sometimes earlier on big storm days. There's only one avalanche person in the office, which is co-located with the National Weather Service near the Salt Lake Airport, so the pressure and time constraints are intense. First, we check our answering machines and e-mail for field observations not only from our staff, but from the army of volunteer observers, ski areas, helicopter skiing companies and highway control programs that contribute to our advisories. Then we work with the lead National Weather Service forecaster and type up a detailed mountain weather forecast that goes out by 6:00 am. After that, we furiously kick into high gear and write backcountry avalanche advisories customized for five different zones in northern Utah, record those advisories into six different answer machines, do three live radio interviews, all while trying to answer the phone from ski areas calling to leave observations or talk about avalanche hazard.

The recorded advisories are on by 7:30 and by 8:00 am, when we're done with the last live radio interview, we finally collapse with relief, take that bathroom break we've wanted for the last couple hours and take a walk outside and watch the sun rise and hope that our information is accurate because an average of 800 people call the avalanche recording with 13,000 page views over the Internet many of these people head into the backcountry to test our analysis with their lives.

Then, when most people are eating a late breakfast, it's lunch time. After lunch, we start answering phones, collecting data, updating clipboards and just catching up. Finally, by 10:00 am we start the whole process again to put out an afternoon update, which is usually finished by noon or 1:00 pm. Then our day is done. We head home and get some sleep. Meanwhile, the rest if the staff is out in the field, looking at the snow so the UAC can do another advisory the next day.