Join the 33rd Annual Backcountry Benefit!
This year's party is set for Thursday, September 10, 2026, from 6–10 PM at Black Diamond HQ (2092 E 3900 S, Salt Lake City). Tickets include dinner, two drink tickets, and an entry into the prize drawing, with adult tickets at $45 and youth/student tickets at $30. As always, proceeds go directly toward keeping the daily avalanche forecasts, awareness campaigns, and education programs running for everyone who heads into the backcountry. Get your tickets today!
Why the Backcountry Benefit started
Every September, the parking lot at Black Diamond Equipment fills with tents, kegs, live music, and more than a thousand backcountry skiers, splitboarders, snowshoers, climbers, and snowmobilers. Now in its 33rd year, the Utah Avalanche Center's Backcountry Benefit is the biggest party of the season and the organization's single largest fundraiser. But it didn't start as a party. It started because the Utah Avalanche Center might not survive funding cuts.
A loss that shook the community
In 1993, Black Diamond Equipment had just relocated from Southern California to Salt Lake City. Among its newest employees was a young, enthusiastic skier named Roman Latta. On a late-season powder day, Roman went up to ski Wolverine Bowl with fellow Black Diamond employee Andrew McLean and others. Andrew and his wife dropped into one of the couloirs without incident. When Roman followed, the slope slid, and when the debris hit the main bowl, the whole bowl released. Roman was buried deeply. Despite fast, courageous work by his partners and a medical team flown in soon after, he died of his injuries a few days later.
Government funding cuts make a bad year worse
That same year, the U.S. Forest Service, which had almost single-handedly funded the UAC since the late 1970s, announced it would slash the UAC’s already-thin budget. Suddenly, the avalanche community wasn't just grieving; it was facing the possibility that the forecasting, awareness, and education programs helping backcountry travelers make safe choices might not make it to the next winter.
A mother's response
Roman's mother, Mary Lee Latta, was understandably devastated by the loss of her son. Mary Lee was determined to make the effort to keep up the education that the UAC provided. Rather than let the UAC’s work quietly disappear, she got to work saving it. Her brother, former Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson, offered his home for a fundraiser. About 50 people showed up. Around the same time, Wendy Ziegler and a group of backcountry community members formed the nonprofit Friends of the Utah Avalanche Forecast Center to raise private funding to support the mission, giving the UAC a path to survive without full reliance on federal dollars.
Black Diamond steps in
Ted Wilson happened to be one of the first people Black Diamond founder Peter Metcalf met after moving to Black Diamond to Utah. Furthermore, losing an employee to an avalanche had hit the company especially hard. When Metcalf heard about the living-room fundraiser, he offered Black Diamond's Salt Lake headquarters as the venue the following year. The first year Black Diamond hosted the event drew about 80 people who huddled under the building's eaves in the rain, bid in a small silent auction, and drank beer from 12 kegs donated by a then-tiny Uinta Brewing.
From backyard fundraiser to the region's biggest party
From there, the event grew steadily. Black Diamond staff, most notably longtime organizer Colleen Graham-Nipkow, began devoting countless working hours each summer planning it. Live music became a fixture. One booking was a then-unknown band called The String Cheese Incident, which drew such a crowd that police showed up to enforce the permit's end time. Other backcountry brands started donating booths and auction items, and local politicians began showing up too, easy to spot in their suits among the technical shells and puffy jackets.
Along the way, the event added online bidding for the auction, a formal Vendor Village, new bands, and eventually a new name: the Backcountry Benefit. This name reflects how central the party had become to Utah's entire backcountry community. Uinta Brewing still pours the beer decades later, and the party now routinely raises well over $100,000 a year for avalanche forecasting, awareness, and education.
It was never just about the party
It's easy to see the Backcountry Benefit as simply the best night on the Utah outdoor calendar. But it exists because a community refused to let a preventable tragedy be followed by a second loss: the loss of the forecasting, awareness, and education programs that might prevent the next one. What started as a few dozen grieving a friend in a living room has become the financial backbone that keeps daily avalanche forecasts, awareness campaigns, and education programs running for everyone who heads into the backcountry each winter.
