Over the course of the last year, avalanche forecasters and safety experts have rolled out a number of new tools local skiers and snowboarders can use to make more informed decisions in the backcountry.
The rising ease of access to consequential mountain terrain and the popularity of backcountry sports has meant that more people than ever are exposing themselves to avalanche risk each winter. And among Mountain West states, the most avalanche fatalities have occurred in Colorado due to its consistently unstable snowpack.
In an effort to keep skiers safe, the Crested Butte Avalanche Center (CBAC) has continued to expand its forecasting platform in the North Valley. In Gunnison, Beacon Guidebooks founder Andy Sovick is creating maps that will help members of the outdoor community better understand their risk long before they click into their skis.
In December, on the heels of a revamped public avalanche observation page, CBAC released a new free app called “Avy.” The app was developed and funded during the winter of 2023-24 by the Northwest Avalanche Center (NWAC), which covers Washington and parts of Oregon. As one of the largest centers in the United States, it has a consistent donor base and the capacity to take on multi-year projects.
Since the app was launched, seven other forecasting centers have joined the platform, including Crested Butte. The partnerships allow the centers to split costs and add more resources to the app over time.
While its website is still the go-to place for daily forecasts, the app functions offline — a useful tool when skiers don’t have cell service. With Avy, users can also submit avalanche observations from the field. Skiers can take photos of an avalanche, fill out a brief form — similar to what they would do on a computer after a ski tour — and submit. It will automatically upload when they return to cell service. One of the goals is to encourage more observations from the public, said lead CBAC avalanche forecaster Zach Guy.
“I know people are busy when they get home. They want to have a beer, go pick up the kids from school or whatever it is,” he said. “So you can do that [submit observations] really quickly while you're out in the field.”
Last winter, CBAC also launched a new observation page. It now has a color-coded map that makes it easy to visualize where others have seen avalanches and other signs of snow instability. For example, skiers headed out to the Slate River can see the pinned locations of the recent avalanches in the area. Users can adjust the time frame, and view avalanche patterns over the course of a couple of days, a week or for the entire season.
“There’s just a ton of great ways to view the data that we're out there collecting every day,” Guy said.
How dangerous is the terrain?
It can be difficult to talk about avalanche conditions in a printed ski guidebook because the snow changes every day, Sovick said. As his Gunnison-based publishing company, Beacon Guidebooks, grew and began creating guidebooks for zones across the country, Sovick struggled to find a way to universally talk about avalanche risk. Each zone had a different snowpack and climate.
When an author in Seattle told Sovick about the avalanche terrain exposure scale (ATES), Sovick knew it was the answer to the problem he faced. ATES can be compared to the whitewater rapids classification system, which labels river runs on a scale of one to five. Class one is the easiest, and class five are larger, with more dangerous features along the water.
“No matter what river you're going on, that objective scale gives you an idea of what the hazard is going to be, regardless of conditions,” Sovick said. “That's what we've been missing in the avalanche world.”
The ATES scale originated in Canada more than two decades ago when a group of students and teachers died in an avalanche. The group had not known they were at risk and the Canadian government responded with the intent of preventing similar accidents. Avalanche scientists, mountain guides and researchers came together to create a new way of measuring avalanche exposure.
The ATES scale shows a mountain’s capability of producing an avalanche, regardless of the snowpack and weather. It divides mountain slopes into three categories: simple, challenging and complex. For example, if a slope is flat, forested and far away from overhead slopes, it is unlikely an avalanche will occur, regardless of how much snow falls. This slope would be labeled as simple. The opposite is true for a steep bowl with no trees, where avoiding an avalanche path would be difficult or impossible. This ski zone would likely carry the tag of challenging, or complex.
The rubric that avalanche experts use also takes into account how many avalanches occurred there in known history, and how large they were. Run-out zones, or how far an avalanche can travel in the worst case scenario, are also factored in.
The ATES scale has not been widely used in the United States until recently. Last year, Crested Butte became the first area with an ATES-rated avalanche center forecast zone through a partnership with onX Backcountry. onX is a GPS navigation mapping system designed for hiking, backcountry skiing, mountain biking and climbing. The new Crested Butte map (available on the CBAC website) corresponds with Beacon Guidebooks’ backcountry skiing guide for the area.
So far, Beacon Guidebooks has rated more than 3,000 backcountry ski routes across the country. Sovick rates zones with the help of local guides and forecasters who are extremely familiar with the area. Sovick spends months poring over maps, and goes through multiple drafts before the final product is published. The less familiar he is with the area, the slower the process.
What began as a side project for Sovick, has turned into a large part of his career. Four years ago, Sovick began adding all of Beacon Guidebooks’ ski routes and descriptions to the onX platform. What started out as a big idea to add the ATES scale to all of the terrain in the app, has slowly come to fruition.
Sovick now works full-time with onX. He is using computer algorithms and a team of engineers to help him do the same work he was doing by hand for his guidebooks — allowing him to cover larger landscapes more quickly. So far, the ATES scale has been applied to 29 regions around the country.
“The whole goal at the end of the day is to give people one more tool to stay out of an accident … this is not like the silver bullet of staying safe in the avalanche in avalanche terrain, it's one more tool to use to increase your margin of safety,” Sovick said.
(Bella Biondini can be contacted at 970.641.1414 or bella@gunnisontimes.com.)
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