Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

LEE CANYON TRAGEDY: Ski resort avalanche rare

Experts say a fatality such as Sunday's hasn't occurred in years

Kyle Canyon resident Gary Gray stands on his balcony in the Echo Canyon subdivision Monday and points at the mountain where an avalanche buried 40-foot trees Sunday. Elsewhere on Mount Charleston, Allen Brett Hutchison, 13, died in a Sunday avalanche. Photo by John Gurzinski. An employee grooms the slopes at the Las Vegas Ski and Snowboard Resort on Monday, one day after 13-year-old Allen Brett Hutchison died in an avalanche. The resort will remain closed pending a visit by an avalanche fatality review team from the National Avalanche Center. Photo by John Gurzinski.

The cascading wave of snow that swept a 13-year-old Las Vegas boy to his death on Mount Charleston Sunday is the first fatal avalanche inside a U.S. ski resort in years, national experts said Monday.

Mammoth avalanches such as the one that killed snowboarder Allen Brett Hutchison have been a rarity inside ski resorts for decades with the advent of snow control measures such as precision blasting, where explosives are used to pre-emptively unleash dangerously unstable drifts before skiers take to the slopes.

No such control measures were taken Sunday on the slope where the avalanche unfolded, said Brian Strait, general manager of the Las Vegas Ski and Snowboard Resort. But resort officials cleared the area to open earlier in the day after charges exploded on a nearby slope failed to trigger a snow slide.

"We deemed the ski area to be safe to open," Strait said.

While 146 people have died in U.S. avalanches over the past five years, leading experts said Monday they did not believe any of those deaths occurred within ski resorts.

"This kind of tragedy inside a ski area is very rare, much less than 1 percent of avalanche fatalities," said Ed Adams, a civil engineering professor at Montana State University who has studied avalanches and the mechanics of snow for 25 years.

The vast majority of the 30 or so people who die annually in U.S. avalanches are skiers, snowboarders and snowmobile enthusiasts recreating on uncontrolled backcountry mountainsides.

"Ski areas tend to be well controlled. It's definitely been years since this has happened," said Doug Abromeit, director of the U.S. Forest Service's National Avalanche Center in Ketchum, Idaho.

Hutchison, an eighth-grader whose family lives in Summerlin, was riding a ski lift up one of the resort's intermediate trails about 3:30 p.m. when what witnesses described as a 10- to 20-foot wall of snow rushed down the mountain and plucked him from the elevated chair. Witnesses said he tumbled like a rag doll swept up by overwhelming force before disappearing in the briskly moving snow.

Nearby skiers rushed to search for the boy and were later joined by resort ski patrollers armed with probes that they poked through the drift in search of the boy. They soon found his boots and board. Within hours, about 100 police officers and searchers had joined the effort.

They discovered Hutchison's body just before 10 p.m. under about 7 feet of snow. He died of asphyxia and had suffered multiple blunt force injuries, the Clark County coroner's office said. The avalanche scene revealed a snow wall that was 75 feet wide and about 300 feet long, the Forest Service said.

"We don't know if the avalanche is what took the young man out of the chair," Strait said. "It's not so much the height of the avalanche as it is the air blast that's blowing out in front of the avalanche."

Federal regulators on Monday ordered the Lee Canyon resort closed until an avalanche fatality review team from the National Avalanche Center can investigate Sunday's disaster.

This month's second major snowstorm prompted the Forest Service on Friday to issue an extreme avalanche warning for the roughly 50,000 acres of Spring Mountains wilderness in and around Lee and Kyle canyons.

The alert, the highest level of the Forest Service's five-tier warning system, did not apply to the 65-acre resort, which has the authority to issue its own warnings. As 22 inches of snow fell Friday and Saturday and another 8 inches piled up Sunday, the ski resort opted to remain open.

"That wasn't an area they thought was at risk," Forest Service officer Robbie McAboy said of resort officials.

Strait, the resort general manager, said his expert team had tested the snow volatility on another slope early Sunday morning by firing eight rounds from an avalanche control gun at its steepest slope, followed by four more rounds.

He said the slope where the snow later surged wasn't tested "because an avalanche of this magnitude has never occurred in this area in the 40-year history of the ski resort. This was an extremely unusual, unpredictable event."

The general manager said he has spoken with Hutchison's parents and extends his condolences and prayers to them. Strait said he empathizes with survivors of the avalanche and rescuers, but said his ski patrol responded to the avalanche scene sooner than in 15 minutes, as some bystanders have claimed.

Meanwhile, authorities spent hours Monday afternoon trying to contact Kyle and Lee canyon residents, reminding them of the avalanche alert and recommending that they find shelter elsewhere until the threats pass. The notice was not a mandate, and it did not inspire a mass exodus among residents on Monday afternoon, indicating many were content to stay put and take their chances.

Claudia Reed, an Echo Canyon resident, was debating whether to use the Mount Charleston Library for shelter.

"They're worried that's going to go," Reed said, referring to snowpack on the mountain above her home. "If push comes to shove ... I'll grab a sleeping bag and just sleep in the library. I work there, why not?"