When hurricane-force winds and a monster thaw swept over Turnagain Pass and down Turnagain Arm in January, avalanche experts breathed a sigh of relief and consoled themselves with the thought that at least the crummy weather would help stabilize what had been becoming an increasingly dangerous snowpack.
The only problem is, things didn't work out that way. Mother Nature tossed a curveball in the form of a frigid cold snap quick behind the thaw. Ever since, avalanche conditions have been building toward another extreme.
Exactly how extreme became obvious on Tuesday when avalanche control work at the Alyeska Resort in Girdwood took down a sizable chunk of snow on the North Face. Chugach National Forest avalanche forecasters say that slide should serve as a big warning for anyone planning to play outdoors south of Anchorage in the days ahead.
The Girdwood resort, which came close to being wiped out by an avalanche decades ago, goes to great lengths to blast heavy snows to prevent the buildup of avalanche dangers. It shoots off as much artillery in a year as a small army.
Elsewhere, though, control is nonexistent. In the Turnagain Pass area, where outdoor recreation of all forms has been undergoing steady growth for years, skiers, snowmobilers, backcountry snowboarders and snowshoers are left to their own judgment on avalanche dangers.
Too often it fails them.
Snowmachines triggered a monster avalanche on the west side of Turnagain Pass in March of 1999. It swept more than a dozen riders off the mountain. Six of them died buried in the avalanche rubble. It was the deadliest Alaska avalanche in recent times.
Since then, both skiers and snowmobilers have been caught with some regularity on either side of the highway that splits the pass area into motorized and non-motorized recreation zones. Most have, by luck, survived. A skier buried five or six feet deep in December was dug out safely by friends.
Fortunately, said avalanche experts, she didn't hit anything that could kill her when the avalanche tumbled her down the mountain, and she was wearing a rescue beacon. Luckily, too, they said, her friends knew how to use their beacons to locate hers, knew how to probe to find her body, and were able to dig deep enough fast enough to save her.
It doesn't always work that way.
Last year just about this time -- only a day after forest officials warned of building avalanche dangers in the pass -- three snowmobilers in a party of six or seven were caught in an avalanche they triggered. One was able to dig himself out. A quickly mounted search for the other two proved futile. They died buried in rubble in the shadow of Seattle Ridge.
As Chugach Forest avalanche forecaster Carl Skustad sat in his Girdwood office Wednesday looking at snow reports from Tuesday and weather forecasts for the rest of the week, he was starting to worry that the stage is being set for this to happen yet again in the days ahead.
"We've been kind of ramping up to this over the last weeks,'' he said. "The mountains around Girdwood and Turnagain Pass are setting a trap, and you don't want to get caught in that trap.''
The danger, he said, is with the bond between pre-January snows and the snows that came after "that crust that was laid down during the January hurricane.''
Because of frigid temperatures after the storm, a layer of something more like frost than snow developed on top of the crust. Then it got buried under a lot of new snow. That weak layer is strong enough to hold the snow atop it, but any additional weight -- a skier, a snowmobiler, maybe even an animal -- could cause it to collapse.
Down in the flatlands when this happens, the snowpack makes a whomping sound and then just settles. Up on the slopes when this happens, the snowpack makes a whomping sound and then gravity takes over, pulling tons of snow or tens of tons of snow or thousands of tons of snow downhill in a rumbling avalanche.
It's dangerous already, Skustad said, but only going to get more dangerous if the 7 to 15 inches of snow forecast by the National Weather Service shows up in the Turnagain Pass area today and Friday. And if the snowstorm is, in turn, followed by the alluring blue-sky weather predicted for the weekend, some powderhound could easily end up caught or killed in an avalanche.
"I'm most concerned about snowmachiners in Seattle Creek,'' Skustad said, but they aren't the only people at risk.
As avalanche forecaster Matt Murphy noted on the Web site for the Chugach National Forest Avalanche Information Center (www.cnfaic.org/advisories/current.phpid=), even snowmachiners riding in the Placer River valley near Portage could be at risk.
"Based on the water weight (of the snow) above," he noted. "I'd guess that Placer is next on this list for big avalanches. Be very careful on the lower steep slopes out there."
Meanwhile, he noted, Turnagain Pass could be prone to dangerous slab avalanches in areas where ski or snowmachine traffic has compacted snows in recent weeks.
If someone gets caught in a big slab event, a beacon is unlikely to save them. Beacons help protect only against suffocating beneath snow. They offer no protection against being smashed between Volkswagen-size, rock-hard blocks.
A beacon can "save you (only) if the trauma doesn't kill you,'' Skustad noted.
Better, he advised, to outsmart an avalanche than hope to survive one.
Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.
By CRAIG MEDRED
cmedred@adn.com