The Ski Journal • Volume 13, Issue 2 • RAISING OGDEN AVALANCHE

Davis speaks slowly. Long curly black hair sticks out from a hat the reads “Ogden Avalanche.” He looks like a scruffier version of Sage Cattabriga-Alosa. Though you can tell public speaking is not his favorite, for the most he part seems comfortable in front of this crowd, as if he knows most of them. In this community, it’s likely he does.

This event is one of a handful of “state of the snowpack” discussions hosted each winter by Ogden Avalanche, an organization founded by Davis and other members of the backcountry community in Ogden, which is about 40 miles north of Salt Lake City. The crowd is diverse in ages and background—from the old guard, who emigrated here to escape the Cottonwood Canyon crowds in the 1980s, to Weber State University students just learning about snowpack and backcountry travel. They are united in their zest for getting into the backcountry in this heavily populated but often overlooked area. The Ogden Outdoor Adventure podcast is streaming the event live on various Facebook pages for those who couldn’t make it to the Ogden Valley.

At 33 years old, Davis is already a 12-year snow-safety veteran. He took his first level one at Brighton in 2006, and backcountry skied in the Cottonwood Canyon for a few years before moving to Ogden to patrol at Snowbasin Resort in 2008. He worked there for three years, where he started teaching avalanche courses through the Utah Avalanche Center. A body recovery in Hells Canyon, a backcountry zone just outside of Snowbasin’s boundary, was the trigger that convinced him to transition into avalanche education.

“You realize that the search and rescue part’s fun and it’s an adrenaline rush,” Davis says. “But you rarely have live finds because there has to be someone within the party to enact the rescue. Even if someone was to survive the ride in Hells without an avalanche transceiver or a partner, by the time patrol found out about it and responded, you’re already probably 10, 15 minutes in at that point. I started to think maybe the rescue side’s the backwards end of it. Avalanche education makes more sense if you actually want to save lives.”

Ogden Avalanche began as an Instagram account in December 2016. Social media is still the primary means by which the organization collects and disseminates information, though they now have a website, ogdenavalanche.org, where they post local observations. The group received nonprofit status this past spring.

The organization is, in part, a reaction to what some perceived as a lack of attention from the Utah Avalanche Center paid to the Ogden area. “I think that Utah Avalanche Center tries to do good job [for Ogden],” says Ben Bauter, president and executive director of Ogden Avalanche. “I think sometimes there’s just a disconnect.”

Davis and Bauter both have stone’s about times when the UAC forecast didn’t match up with the conditions in the Ogden mountains, usually when the Ogden area had little or even no snow on some aspects. In the cited instances, the UAC forecast was conservative, rating the danger as higher than it actually was. While on the surface that may seem like a safer approach, Bauter says it carries risks of its own. If people see a considerable rating for a long period, but aren’t seeing reactions from the snow, they get comfortable with that rating Then, when the snowpack changes, that change isn’t reflected in the forecast.

Two facts are fairly indisputable. First, the Utah Avalanche Center does an outstanding job overall for the state of Utah. For two consecutive winters, from 2016 to 2018, the state recorded zero avalanche fatalities—a span that included the highly reactive 2017-18 season. This is in large part due to the job the UAC does with forecasting and education across the state.

The other is that the Ogden area—the second-most-populous metropolitan center in the state—tends to be an afterthought in just about all matters in the state of Utah. In skiing, this makes perfect sense—six of the most visited ski areas and a handful of the most iconic backcountry zones in the United States are clustered in a narrow stretch of mountains between Salt Lake City and Park City. This is the allure of skiing in the Ogden area—it simply does not get the same traffic as the Central Wasatch. Yet it also plays into an inferiority complex already prevalent in Ogden.

Mark Staples, director of the UAC, doesn’t agree that Ogden gets overlooked. “Within a little over a 100-mile radius, we have seven full-time dedicated forecasters with decades of experience who are watching conditions 24/7,” Staples says. “It’s a pretty small area. When you look across the country at how avalanche forecasters are spread around, we have a pretty tight concentration of folks.”

How the UAC disperses those resources varies from week to week, storm to storm. “We look at the number of accidents, fatalities, reported avalanches,” Staples says. “And then that changes throughout the season too, in terms of where folks go. There might be one zone or another that gets a little more attention depending on what’s going on in the snowpack.”

It’s a tried and true formula for forecasting for the entire region. “We’re doing it the same as we’ve done since the early 1980s and that we’ll do for years to come,” Staples says. This includes daily communication with the Snowbasin and Powder Mountain ski patrols, as well as with the Utah Department of Transportation, which employs its own forecasters to watch for avalanches that could hit transportation corridors. (In January 2019, avalanches crossed North Ogden Divide, closing one of three roads into the Ogden Valley for several days.) It also relies on observations from backcountry users in the area. Davis, Bauter and many others who contribute to Ogden Avalanche also continue to send observations to the UAC.

Even as he contends the UAC has it covered, Staples isn’t against the idea of a local organization supplementing the UAC forecast. “In broad terms, more information is better,” he says. “We want folks to get as much information as they can because really we all have the same goal and focus. More information is always better.”

Denver, Ben’s wife, drops in first. It’s a short shot, maybe 500 vertical feet, but it has a decent pitch through the trees. She makes short, clean turns through fantastic snow, getting the most out of the soft, settled powder before we transition and skin to our next run. The Tom Brady storm continues to deliver.

It’s the morning after the state of the snowpack discussion. Denver has joined Ben, Kory and I for a tour somewhere on the Ben Lomond massif. I won’t say exactly where, but can divulge that we skinned for about an hour before getting to this line, and we will walk a lot more before we finish skiing and take our approach track out to the parking lot. Unlike many backcountry zones in the Central Wasatch, there is very little easy access on Ben Lomond. To ski here, you have to trudge. Locals call it the entry fee.

It’s often worth it, though, especially in these sheltered zones lower on the mountain. Jim Steenberg, author of the book Secrets of the Greatest Snow on Earth, calls Ben Lomond, “pound for pound the snowiest place in Utah,” which he qualifies by adding that Snowbird gets more snow, but the data is gathered at 9,650 feet (roughly Ben Lomond’s summit). Ben Lomond gets just slightly less, but at 8,000 feet.

In terms of skiing quality, Steenberg has even more caveats. “The storms at Ben Lomond are typically monsters that occur during southwesterly flow. This gives a big snowpack, but often creates high avalanche hazard and is not optimal for a high frequency of powder days,” he writes on his Wasatch Weather Weenies blog. “I’ve skied on Ben Lomond many times and it is an extremely windy place on the ridge and above timberline. Finding good powder in the alpine requires good fortune.”

The big takeaway is though it has similar snowfall in relative proximity to the Cottonwoods, forecasting on Ben Lomond is an entirely different animal. And that’s just one zone. Unlike the Salt Lake City mountains, the Ogden area mountains aren’t so much a range as a series of disconnected massifs, each with unique elevations, snow conditions and weather patterns.

In short, the Ogden area is a complicated place to forecast. “Even Snowbasin to Powder Mountain to Ben Lomond in the Ogden area are wildly different,” Bauter says.

It’s an issue Ogden’s tight-knit backcountry community handled in the past by sharing information privately. “You’d send out a text to all your different friends that you knew had skied that day,” Bauter says. “We were all just talking to each other anyway. And then Kory and Mike Henderson, who was working for the Weber State outdoor program, talked about it one day, and started the Instagram.”

Ogden Avalanche has helped galvanize Ogden’s backcountry community. The old guard and those new to the region now have a way to share information. And that was always the goal, according to Davis and Bauter—not to replace the UAC forecast, but to provide the community with more resources, to keep them safer. For the past two seasons, Ogden Avalanche has hosted the “Backcountry Bash,” a party that has raised close to $15,000 for the UAC. A large portion of that will still go to the UAC, even as Ogden Avalanche works to support itself.

“Being a part of the community I think is the biggest part,” Davis says. “Being a part of the ski patrol community at Snowbasin, the ski patrol community at Powder Mountain, the guide community at Whisper Ridge, and being a part of the North Fork community. And then the climbers, the snowmobilers at Monte Cristo… It’s a community, and Ogden’s always had that communal feel to me. I always liked that about Ogden. That is more important than the minute accuracy deficiencies with the forecasting through the UAC. People in Ogden want things from Ogden.”

Photo Caption: “Mike Henderson convinced me it would be fun to ski the south face of Ben Lomond Peak, which rises steeply above North Ogden. Here, Mike makes his way up to the main ridge before sunrise. The skiing was sketchy with plenty of no-fall areas. The line is not one I need to repeat again, but overall it encompassed a fun adventure just minutes away from our homes. At the time of this photo, Mike was part of the local Weber State University outdoor program but has since returned to Wisconsin with his wife to raise their young son.” Photo: Chris Morgan

The Ski Journal - Volume 13, Issue 2

RAISING OGDEN AVALANCHE

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