Ed Power - Dragons in the Snow

DRAGONS
IN THE
SNOW

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ISBN (paperback): 978-1-68051-296-0

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For Marguerite, who is far more
than my ski partner

Ill tell you whats interesting about snow. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, nature allows you to get away with it. Then there is one time, maybe, that you dont recognize something is slightly different. And I think thats probably when most experienced people get tricked.

Craig Gordon, forecaster, Utah Avalanche Center

Reading snow is like listening to music. To describe what youve read is like explaining music in writing.

Peter Hoeg, Smillas Sense of Snow

When I moved full-time to Northern Utah in January 2016, I brought with me a thirty-year career of curiosity as a newspaper journalist, and decades of enthusiasm for recreational skiing. In those first months, I was struck by the almost daily, early morning booms of avalanche mitigation bombs echoing across the valley in front of my home. As an amateur skier, I was inspired to learn more about the avalanche and backcountry skiing professionals who do this work. The result is this book based on extensive in-person or, in some cases, phone interviews with the people whose stories are recounted here. Documents related to avalanche advisories, accident investigations, written survivor accounts, weather data, websites, and other sources were also heavily utilized, and I have sought to clearly attribute those sources. With few exceptions, interviews were recorded and transcribed for narrative accuracy. Many of the people quoted in this book reviewed drafts of chapters in which their stories and voices appear. Material from newspapers, magazines, and books is duly attributed.

The risks in backcountry skiing and snowboarding are part of the allure as the rider ventures into wilderness terrain and often pristine snow. But anyone undertaking these activities should do so only after receiving avalanche awareness training and obtaining such specialized gear as a beacon, probe pole, and shovel. Traveling with a skilled partner is essential.

Emergency winter rescues in the mountains are, by nature, extremely dangerous. They are fast-paced, may involve makeshift medical procedures, often involve moments of confusion, and run on high human emotions. I have strived to accurately represent the heroic work of snow professionals and nonprofessionals whose selfless efforts have, without question, saved many lives. Any misrepresentations of facts, attributions, or other details related to these stories are unintended.

On January 5, 2017, nearly two hundred miles off the coast of northwestern North America, above the seething, frigid waters of the Gulf of Alaska, an evolutionary moment began. It was unseen by human eyes. Even the roving, photographic gaze of a geostationary weather satellite, orbiting 22,300 miles above the equator, did not at first distinguish this cold whiff of wind and water. Many months later, a weather scientist named Randy Graham, working out of an office in Salt Lake City, Utah, would describe it as a bare finger, like a tiny fetus forming. Once it had grown to far larger proportions, he retroactively altered his categorization, dubbing it a fire hose.

But it was really more like a dragon. Uncoiling from the milky, numbing waters of the Alaskan gulf, its birth was a dragons tail dipping into the waves of the notoriously anarchic gulf, feeding the buildup of its body and head. For Graham and his colleagues at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) offices, the tail grew into a white smear of water vapor across hundreds of square miles of the North Pacific. They saw it grow in time lapse, fifteen-minute increments, through daytime photos, and into nighttime infrared images, blue-hued water clouds swaddling the dragons back, and white ice clouds rimming its sinuous jaws.

The storm was still more of a meteorological serpent than what avalanche forecasters would later call a dragon in the snow. But it grew quickly. The flourishing dragon acquired motion, its tongue of wind sweeping more moisture up with its elongating tail. As that tail dipped deeper into the Pacific, it grew larger, whipping the entire length of its mass into a spinning frenzy of water and warm, tropical wind sucked from the south. The storm crawled aggressively across the oceans surface, stirring ever bigger waves like deep, maritime claw marks.

In the air, seabirds raced to escape it. Beneath the roiling sea surface, fish sensed the disintegrating world above. Though still far out to sea, this storm dragon, becoming a yet unseen creature from ashore, began to take on more form. From space, it was a white blur of inchoate energy, yet it was learning form, strengthening, gathering a more precise direction. Within a few days, the tail of the storm dragon had become massive, sucking more and more energy into its fattening belly. Instinct seemed to have taken over, and the maw of it inarguably pointed southeast.

Had forecasters studied it from the beginning, they could have charted its immature yet undeniable track. It was headed for Oregon and then into the Sierra Nevada of Northern California. Soon, under the darkness of night, this snow dragon was hurtling toward the coastline, making landfall. In the hours ahead, it was revealed as a monster fully born.

Once it had crossed nearly two hundred miles of the California mainland, the storm initiated its climb into the Sierra on January 9. So thick and heavy were its clouds and snow, it obliterated light and the expanse of daytime sky. The usual horizon of cross-stitched mountain peaks disappeared. Anything that might have suggested a redoubt of human survival seemed to have vanished. Snow, usually so welcome in Californias parched terrain, turned to something more like the delivery of a plague.