Words: MEGAN MICHELSON 2024-02-08 07:17:25
A distinctive wiggle, for a distinctive Wasatch staple, the Craig Gordon special is often more visible than his blinding white smile. Photo: Brendan Ladd I’d heard Utah’s Uinta range had a persistent weak layer, that wobbly sliver in the snowpack that makes slopes more prone to avalanches. It was early March, and I was on my way into a backcountry yurt in the region, so I’d started reading the Utah Avalanche Center’s daily forecasts for that range weeks before my trip. Beyond education, I found myself strangely captivated. The writing was quirky and funny in a way that somber avalanche forecasts rarely are. “Remember the big dry spell during January/February? (You’re thinking to yourself... hmmm, I forget what time I dropped the kids off for soccer practice today),” the forecaster wrote one day. “Well, that midwinter drought helped create a weak layer of faceted, sugary snow which is now buried under several layers’ worth of storm snow from last week. And while we might forget everyday occurrences, the snowpack has an amazing memory. In fact, now that this layer is buried, it’s our new problem child.” The analyst with the sharp wit? Craig Gordon, an enigmatic staffer at the Utah Avalanche Center for the last 25 years. Gordon, 61, has a gray buzzcut paired with a high-top manbun and what looks like an orange spray tan. He wears gold hoop earrings and sometimes posts videos with a pet parrot named Baby. He seldom wears a hat or goggles and he’s always on telemark gear he’s picked up at a yard sale or ski swap. Instead of counting the days he skis, he counts the days he doesn’t. (He usually skis about 200 a year.) Most days, Gordon wakes at 2 a.m. to get his daily forecast posted by 5 a.m. During those hours, he drinks espresso with a heaping scoop of instant coffee, before working out in his home gym. When he’s in the field collecting observations, he’s not much of a note taker, but he does have a near-photographic memory. Gordon grew up surfing on New Jersey’s Long Beach Island. At 15, a friend invited him on a ski trip to Alta, UT. He remembers riding the chairlift and seeing ski patrollers making their way across the untracked Ballroom and announcing to his friend, “I’m coming back here to do that.” He wound up at the University of Utah for a stint and scored a night job dishwashing at Snowbird. “Skiing overtook my life,” he recalls. “Much to my parents’ displeasure, I told them I’m staying in Utah to be a ski patrolman. That was unheard of in the culture I grew up in.” He got his EMT certification and eventually got hired onto the patrol squad at Utah’s Brighton ski area, where he worked for a decade. In a class at the University of Utah on snow dynamics, Gordon sat rapt listening to one of the avalanche forecasters who worked for the department of transportation in Little Cottonwood Canyon. “A lightbulb went off. I’m like, you can make a living forecasting avalanches?” he says. When a position opened in the mid-1990s as snow safety director for a startup heli-ski operation in the Uintas, a mountain range outside of Park City, Gordon left Brighton behind and jumped at the chance. The Uintas are a lesser-known range that stretch east to west for about 150 miles. While most backcountry skiers in Utah flock to the Wasatch, the Uintas have remained relatively untouched. “There was no information from that zone. It was a complete black hole since very few people recreated there,” Gordon says. The Uintas have a different snowpack than the Wasatch: It’s more continental, like Colorado, with a generally shallower, weaker and more dangerous structure. “The Wasatch gets its fair share of avalanches, but the continental zones are always on the edge of failure,” Gordon says. “That same structure is very tricky for backcountry users and forecasters.” Money dried up at the heli op and Gordon left in 1999 to take a job with the Utah Avalanche Center that focused on educating snowmobilers about backcountry safety. Community education has played an important role in his long tenure with the UAC. “Every observation is an opportunity to share information to make thing safer for everyone,” he says. “I’ve made it my life’s mission that I’m never too busy to talk to someone if they have questions about the snow.” His impact on backcountry users has been profound. In 2004, Gordon created the now ubiquitous Know Before You Go program, which aims to simplify the steps you need to take before tromping into the backcountry. He also built the Are You Beeping beacon checkpoints you see at backcountry gates at ski resorts all over the West these days. Gordon has become the de facto spokesperson for the UAC—he’s in their Instagram reels and on TV news talking about avalanche safety. As a result, he’s well recognized, and he’s developed a bit of a fan club. (The tan and buzz cut make him easy to spot, too.) “Craig Gordon stands out among other longtime avalanche forecasters because he’s an astoundingly high-energy, quotable and humorous communicator,” says Bruce Tremper, a long-time former director of the Utah Avalanche Center and one of Gordon’s early mentors. “People who hear him talk look at each other and say, ‘I don’t know what he drinks in the morning, but I want some.’” Then there is his ski style. On a slope where you or I might make 10 turns, Gordon will make 50. He appreciates the slower, more connected pace. “I like to feel the nuances of the snow,” Gordon says. “There’s a romance to it. A lot of times, you feel that … it’s talking back to you. Maybe if we go by too fast, we’re not hearing what it’s telling us.” For him, what’s most important is that the terrain he’s skiing is safe for the day’s conditions. “At the end of the day, and during my tour, I know I’m not taking any chances,” he adds. Last January, on a moderate-danger day, Gordon posted this in his avalanche forecast: “My exit strategy as I paddle out into the lineup … I’m dipping a toe in the cold water to get a feel for things before dropping into the first big wave I see. Simply meaning, in a curiously strange Craig Gordan kinda way, I’m still keeping it super conservative.” Injecting his own personality into something other people might consider straight-up science is Gordon’s way of hooking readers on something they might not otherwise pay attention to. “People want to be entertained,” he tells me. “If I throw in a reference to rock ’n’ roll or to rebellious teenagers in a description of the snowpack, people will be like, ‘Oh, cool, I can relate to this.’”
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