The Ski Journal • Volume Eleven, Issue Three • The Dean Cummings Protocol

It’s a mountain-town joke built on cliché. But there’s some truth to it. Ski guides need to be self-confident. Poor decision-making can be disastrous.

When Dean Cummings walks into a bar in Valdez, AK, he doesn’t need to tell you what he does for a living. Dean’s opened up countless lines around the Chugach while skiing and guiding there for the past 25 years. Square-jawed with a permanent goggle tan, he’s 50 years old, but could pass for 35. His taut, compact frame radiates energy. His eyes tell you he doesn’t fuck around. He’s the kind of guy that orders a chicken-fried steak for breakfast. He’ll give you home-smoked Copper River salmon for lunch and feed you moose burgers for dinner.

Dean owns and operates the New York Yankees of Alaskan heliskiing, H2O Guides. They’re the biggest operation in Valdez, with history that dates back to the wildest times in what is still a very wild place. H2O has exclusive access to extensive terrain well beyond Thompson Pass and an excellent safety record. They might not offer the bohemian charisma of some of the other ops in AK, but that’s not part of the program. H2O’s business is delivering skiers into big lines while keeping them safe. It’s serious business. With Dean at the helm, they’ve pioneered many of the AK-specific techniques required to go deep into the 49th state’s alpine via helicopter. From snow safety to communications to staging to guide training and beyond, H2O has their own, self-developed protocol. And conditions permitting, they will get you where you need to go.

I’ve spent a week with H2O each April for the past four years. I’ve learned that Dean’s no-bullshit approach inspires confidence in big terrain. He’ll put you on a tight leash in critical moments and he’ll let you rip it top-to-bottom when the situation allows. He’ll do it with total confidence.

During downtime, I’ve also come to know a man with big ideas. Dean is an educator with reach beyond his Alaskan clients. He’s passionate about the potential for Valdez to become more than a subdued port town with a seasonal influx of heliskiers. He has the self-conviction to follow through. And he truly loves the land, the state of Alaska, the freedom that comes with easy access to wild spaces.

In 2013, my first year in Valdez, Dean loaded up our crew in his dually-equipped Ford with a tank full of jet fuel mounted to the bed, and gave us a tour of town. He pointed to a mountain rising to the northwest and suggested it would make a prime location for a tram, with lifts in the back bowls for winter skiing, and summer hiking and sightseeing. A rise behind the deep-water, cruise-ship-ready harbor could fit a housing development and village stroll. As the terminus of the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline, the municipality has the money to make it happen, but things move slow in this town of 4,000 or so folks, he said.

Four years later, Dean has yet to break ground on his expanded vision for Valdez. Yet he remains optimistic about the future of outdoor recreation in the deepest reaches of Prince William Sound. After a sunny, stable day in the Chugach this past April, we sat in that same truck on the lightly used dock and watched the sun set on the imposing peaks across the harbor. There, the monarch of Valdez heliskiing told me his story.

Dean Cummings: I grew up in Los Alamos, the home of the atomic bomb. There were more PhDs per capita there than anywhere else in the world, with a diverse group of scientists from all over the world.

There were five of us children—I was the second to youngest, with three sisters and one brother. My mom Carol ran a nursery and a flower garden. My dad, Boyd, was a computer technician, a big outdoorsman and an alpha skier. He took us to the rope tow and said, “You’re not riding the rope. You need to herringbone up the mountain, because this is how you learn how to ski.” So, we all herringboned up to the top and it’s truly what taught us our inside edges. Then he was like, “Now just get up there and reverse it. Here’s your snowplow. Here’s your pizza.” We already knew our edges, so we just all took off skiing.

At a hill called Pajarito. It was open three days a week and on holidays. It’s kind of like something out of Killington [VT], where there are cuts through the trees with deep roads because that’s how they built it, getting trucks up there first. So, there were big jumps off the Jeep roads.

We jumped from New Mexico to Texas, California, then back to New Mexico. My dad loved New Mexico. The Boy Scouts was a big deal for our family. My dad was a scout leader. Eventually, I got into the Santa Fe Mountain Center. I was ditching school too much and the principal was like, “I need you to go into the program. It will be something that I think will be good for you. It’s a two-week backpacking trip in Colorado. [Is that] something you’re interested in?” I’m like, “Yeah.”

I was 14 by then. I got invited back to be a counselor’s helper, and we would go raft the Gates of Lodore into Utah, an eight-day trip. We climbed a ton of 14ers on the Collegiate Range [of Colorado] on a two-week backpacking trip. I remember the teacher saying, “Well, what are you going to do, Dean, if you’re not going to make it to class, and all you want to do is go skiing? How are you going to make a living?”

I’m like, “I’m going to make a living in the mountains.” They’re like, “You’ve got to be kidding me. There’s no such thing.”

With the Santa Fe Mountain Center, I got to see climbers make a living in the mountains. Kenny Sims was studying to be a volcano scientist and was guiding in Yosemite, teaching in Santa Fe at the Mountain Center, and then guiding all over the world. He was the first guy that made me think that discipline was important and that you could make a living at something you’d like to do. He’d wake me up at 5 a.m. and say, “Hey, let’s go climbing before the other kids get up.” He would solo these 200-foot lines, then he’d set a rope and bring me up, and we’d climb a couple things before morning. He opened my eyes.

With five kids, my parents couldn’t afford that. I was tree skiing and mogul skiing and hiking every cliff I could find. Then a Warren Miller film opened my eyes. It was like, “Holy moly, here’s this guy, Scot Schmidt, jumping off these big cliffs in Squaw [Valley, CA]—that’s what I’m going to do.” I told my dad, “I’m going to take a year off before college and go to Utah and work at a ski resort and load chairs.” I came back afterward and said, “Dad, I don’t think I’d make it through the first year of college with what I want to do in the outdoors. I’m going to make the U.S. Ski Team.” He said, “You got to be kidding me. Tennis, golf—anything but skiing.”

But I made the team. It took me three or four years competing USSA moguls, and he was proud. He talked to me a lot more again. He said, “Time to put some business behind your ability. Get a desk.”

By then I was living in Telluride and Summit County. I’d live in a van and work construction in the summer, save up, and ski all winter. When I got to Telluride [in 1991], the posse that was going into the backcountry was so tight. They had a terrain-management protocol and a niche group of around 30 people. Half of them were pro skiers, but super down to earth, great people. The other half were just rastas and they took me under their wing. They were like, “Kid, you love skiing. It’s obvious. You could probably make it.”

They taught me so much. Scott Kennett was one of the guys—he skied in the [Greg] Stump films. One day he goes, “Hey Deano, you ever heard about this contest in Valdez, AK?” He gave me a Xerox copy of his application. I submitted a couple first descents I’d done in Colorado and some photos of big jumps, and I got invited. Michael Cozad owned the Tsaina Lodge and was part of the first crew in Valdez. They had this crazy idea to host the World Extreme Championships. I called him up and asked, “So, what’s it like up there?”

“Well, I’m standing at 2,300 feet [of elevation],” he said. “I got about 17 feet of snow in the yard. That doubles every thousand feet going up the mountains.”

I’m like, “Wow, bigger mountains.” They’re five, six, seven thousand feet right out of the ocean. I’m starting to get a grasp of the scale. “How big is the mountain range you live in?”

“Oh, it’s about 260 miles long. It’s all glaciated everywhere you look.”

I’m like, “Wow, sounds like 50 to 100 feet of snow up in the high country. All right, I’m coming,”

I was on the U.S. Ski Team at the time, so I was already traveling and competing a lot around the world. The day after Nationals in 1991, I was flying up here [to Valdez]. I landed and got really scared. I was like, “Wait a minute. I’m in way over my head. I’ve been in glaciated mountains before, but this is a whole other level.”

It was a really cool event, better than any big World Cup or NorAm. A thousand people showed up. They all had their planes, their snow machines and their RVs. That’s how Alaskans are. They treated us like kings. “Oh, stay in our home. Here, use my truck. Help yourself to the smoked salmon. Have you met my daughter yet?”

Schmidt was a judge along with [Mike] Hattrup and [Glen] Plake. [Doug] Coombs got first. I got second. Doug and I knew it was going to be something big. His trophy was five feet tall, mine was four feet tall. Everything’s big in Alaska.

After that, everybody wanted to sponsor us. I wasn’t just a ski bum anymore. The U.S. Ski Team was giving me a hard time for competing at the Worlds. It was a pro/amateur sanction, and they said, “Nope, you can’t do it anymore,” because it was getting more exposure than they were.

Snowboarding was taking over and the ski industry jumped on [Alaska]—every cover of every magazine was Valdez, every full page, every double page, like two articles per magazine. Warren Miller [Entertainment], Stump, and Matchstick [Productions], which was getting born at the time, were all up there. The Hatchetts were there with Standard Films. It was the beginning.

It took me three years, but by the fourth year I became number one in the nation. I’d won Nationals right before coming to Valdez. I was in heaven. I was 26 years old, older than a lot of the guys on the team. My heart was in the big mountains, but the Olympics were important to me, and that was my mission. So, in ’92, I was in Canada at an event in Kananaskis Valley [AB]. I’d blown my ACL the year prior, my knee was sore, and the doctor was trying to give me drugs. I was landing my triples on one leg, and I was just like, “Man, I’m going to hurt my other knee.”

I looked over my shoulder. Most of the people on the team had painted their faces blue. I was like, “What am I doing, traveling around with all these cheerleaders? This is a joke. I’ve got a course that’s dyed blue. Half my fellow athletes on the team are little rich kids that probably aren’t going to give anything back to the sport. I’m not going to risk my whole career and my love of skiing on one run at this event to get to the Olympics.”

So, I said to my coach, “Hey Donny, I’m done. This has been great, I appreciate everything. The discipline’s been amazing, but I’m going back to skiing.”

I wanted to focus more on big mountains and making it last. I didn’t want to bank my whole career on one run at the Olympics. That was a hard decision. I flew home and rested for a week, then skied my home mountain for about a month. Then I went to Europe with RAP Films and stayed to film with Matchstick. I was in Europe for two months. Then I came up here [to Valdez] and filmed for Warren Miller and Matchstick.

I was doing like five films a year, taking way too much risk, doing sketchy first descents. But the whole Valdez thing was real. I was serious about it, and I was documenting everything in my guidebook—flight times and regions and storm cycles and how the snow would flow into the microclimates.

I had a huge file by the time ’94 rolled around. I decided to start a guide service. It was going to be more about mountaineering and touring, which seemed more realistic. Then two guys approached me. One owned snowcats and the other guy owned a fuel company. “We want to be your partners,” they said. I’m like, “Well, that’s all the incentive I need.”

I went back to Santa Fe and drew up a business plan and an operating plan and a safety plan and a brochure and everything. These guys couldn’t even send me the specs on their equipment or insurance. They didn’t do any work at all, so I threw my hands up and said, “This isn’t realistic. I need help from somebody else to pull this off.”

Then I went to South America to compete in the first-ever South American extreme contest in Las Leñas [Argentina]. My first day, I climbed the whole resort solo. It gave me time to think. Halfway up, it hit me: “What do you mean you can’t do it? You’ve already done it. You already have people that want to book trips with you.”

I already had guides asking to work with me, had a helicopter lined up. Once I got home, I went after it. Coombs and I were pretty classic. We started our companies in the same parking lot, sharing the same helicopter, and it was a pretty good gig. It was a gentleman’s program.

ABA, the Valdez airstrip. It was a junk show—there were broken bottles everywhere and everyone was smoking weed. All the big extreme skiers and film crews would be there, so they were our clients. We’d ask, “What do you guys want to ski?” And they’d only want to pay for super-high-level stuff.

Every day had a feeling of just hoping to make it back to the road alive. Doug and I were very competitive, but we were never rude to one another. We shared the same heli, so if you couldn’t get your clients together in time, one of us would take off in the helicopter, and you wouldn’t see it until it needed fuel. Let’s say someone forgot their transceiver—by the time they’d get their transceiver, I’d be walking over to the helicopter and Doug would be grinning in the front windshield waving bye-bye. Then the heli wouldn’t come back until it needed fuel at 1 p.m. He knew that if you sent the ship back for fuel, they would load my group. Then I would go to whatever place I wanted to go and he’d be stuck out there until sunset. That’s how we did it that first year with Alaska West Air. Then they upped our price in the middle of the season, and Doug and I both said, “Well, that will be the end of us working with them.”

That’s when I went south. I came down toward 19 Mile, and I was more into doing the Books, and the Tusk and all that, and Doug was doing more Thompson Pass and the Cleave Glacier region. It was a pretty good setup. He and I both knew whoever was going to have the best safety record and whoever had the best protocols was going to win the permits, so we competed at protocol. We both began working with Era Helicopters. They had 90 helicopters in the state at the time because oil production was maxing out. Soon, he and I were running three to four helicopters, sometimes even five, because they had such a huge fleet.

Was it still mostly industry folks or were you starting to get people showing up like, “I want to do what I saw in the movies”?

The core tram riders started showing up, the guys from Jackson [Hole, WY] and Snowbird [UT]. They were becoming more your “real” client, so to speak, and they just wanted to ski nice, big, steep runs. We became aggressive about opening new regions, going further out there.

We were scared to death flying with this original pilot named Chet Simmons. He didn’t have much protocol. You could never rely on anything; it was super inconsistent. You could be stuck out in the mountains until the sun went down—“Oh, I forgot you were out here, sorry about that.”

Then we finally graduated into a Bell long-ranger [helicopter] with this guy Jim Dale, and he was amazing. He would sail around the world in the off-season and talk about not wearing clothes for 40 days straight. He was the nicest, coolest guy ever, and we’d just guide our brains out. At the end of each season, Emily [Coombs], Doug and I would go out into the mountains and ski together with Jim. The ptarmigan would be going nuts in May and the whole wilderness would be chirping and making noise. There were bears everywhere.

Well, first descents were a big deal to him. He loved them as much as we did. So he put me on top of Happy Top to do the first descent. It’s one of the big ones in the range. He wouldn’t give up after 15 or 20 attempts to land. We kept getting wind sheared and almost falling off the mountain. It was super scary because he ran pontoons, which displaces the power of your aircraft—they’re also super slippery. We never had to weigh our group, you’d always max out on fuel or be above gross weight. We’d always come in at full power. So, you come in and, all of a sudden, you lose the ability to hover, to land soft enough, to land the peak, and then he’d pull off as hard as he could. You’d fall off the mountain for a thousand feet until the aircraft had enough airspeed and the blade would start flying again. He was so macho that he wouldn’t give up ever, so even if you’d be crying and begging him that you’re over it, that you don’t want the first descent, he’d keep trying to land.

So finally, after the 20th try, I got out. Then he comes buzzing over my head as I’m trying to get my skis on. He was inches above me and he’s got his 9-millimeter out the window, and he’s capping bullets. It was 6 p.m. at night and I was on my own. I skied it, then toured eight miles back to the road.

Yeah. Before you got in, he’d say, “Hi, I’m Chet Simmons. You’ve probably seen me in the movies. All you need to know about this helicopter is that if anybody makes a mistake, everybody dies but me. Got it? Get in.” And that was our briefing. It was short-lived. He finally ended up having an accident on Mt. Spur.

But it was the Wild West. Sublime was playing live in the bar, the Offspring, Pennywise, the Beastie Boys. It was incredible. Skiing was dying, snowboarding was taking over. They were looking for new heroes in the sport because all there was left was [Alberto] Tomba, Plake and Schmidt. Suddenly it was like, “Wow, the average weekend warrior can relate to these guys. They’re just powder skiers.”

I was getting paid to take risk on one side, then getting paid to keep people safe on the other side. But I got this nickname of “Commander” from Matchstick Productions because I was always the guide [with them]. I would handle half the logistics on trips and pick the locations, and they’d be like, “All right Dean, make sure it’s safe and this and that.”

But the guide thing was first in my head at 14. Then the athletic thing was more based off a need for discipline in life to get to that level where I could make it a career.

No, I learned from hands-on experience. In Telluride, I learned about snowpack, and Europe was good for glacier time and skiing big couloirs, for getting better at selecting safe zones.

In the late ’90s, things became a lot more professional up here in Valdez. Can you explain that?

We were losing four friends a season, basically. I was questioning my career: “How much longer should I do this? How long can I do this?”

We were getting serious about our businesses, going after permits. In ’96, Bryan Blixhavn of Era Helicopters heard that I did seismic work when I was younger, in Utah. I’d been the flagger for the helis for remote flight operations. So, Bryan’s like, “You know something about helicopters.” I’m like, “Well, kind of. It was all snow flying in Idaho and Utah.” He’s like, “Well, then there’s Doug Coombs. He’s something else. He’s a big guide in Jackson.” I’m like, “Yeah, he definitely knows what he’s doing.”

“Well, what if we supported you guys with helicopters. What would that look like?” And we’re like, “That would look amazing. We’re flying underpowered helicopters and we have these crazy pilots. We would love to up the game.” We would use AStars for the World Extremes and that was awesome. Then we’d be using Bell short-rangers and long-rangers for everything else. That’s where it changed. We got access to 20 helicopters. Bryan went to research all the Canadian heliski operations. He asked about their safety plans, their marketing, their demographics. Then he said, “You know which market to go after, right? It’s not going to be these extreme skiers, although the films are worth a lot.”

He let us train our own pilots, run our own operations plans. They ran a super-tight ship. You could have eaten an egg off the floor at the air hangar. They’d fit six helicopters in the hangar and park four out front. We’d have a couple up at Tsaina Valley, a couple at 19 Mile. There were helis everywhere.

I ran much bigger numbers than I do now. I took way more risk back then because we’d run up to 15 guides with five helicopters on a given day. We’d come back to guide debriefing and be like, “You were where? Don’t you remember that big hazard around the corner?” Things like that would come up.

They had to have a level-two avalanche certification and a Wilderness First Responder or above medical training. We did that right from the beginning. Probably the best meeting we had was with [Canadian heliski pioneer] Mike Wiegele. He told us what to expect over the next 20 years, and what we should look at doing to go after that correct market. He was amazing. I called every other heli operator in Canada and the U.S., and it would be like, “I’ll tell you what people told me. Nothing.” Then they’d hang up on you. But Wiegele was super cool. Between Era Helicopters’ support and Wiegele’s advice, the market started to become expert skiers, weekend warrior types, not just pro skiers and extreme skiers and ski bums. That was kind of it.

Then a bunch of other people showed up and brought some riffraff to town, a lot of fly-by-night operations. One guy hid my name and Doug’s name in the meta tags on his website so he’d pop up in searches for our operations. Alaska West Air, after Chet’s crash, changed their name to ABA, then they went through four or five owners. Things started changing a lot. It started getting more competitive.

Doug and I were still chasing the permits. I ended up winning the U.S. Forest Service permit, which gave me exclusive access to all this terrain to the southeast, and it was a bummer because it affected our friendship. I only won it by a few points. The whole time I was trying to convince the USFS and Doug to just split it. There was plenty of terrain. We’d have a better safety program by sharing information. We’d have better communication systems. We’d share the cost of that. We’d share the cost of rescue caches and stuff like that. The USFS was entertaining it. But Doug and I were probably too competitive. Doug wrote some emails or had some phone calls saying the precedent has been set in the lower 48: one forest, one operator.

So, they put it out as a competitive process to be given to one operator. Doug threw his hands up and was like, “I’m over this.” He went to Europe and I came to town with my operations at that point. I was sick of doing remote bases and heating helicopters out in the middle of nowhere. The Tsaina [Lodge] was falling over—it got condemned and closed up. Scott Raynor bought Coombs’ business, and in his first or second year filed Chapter 11. The pluses I took out of all that change were realizing that protocol and safety record were ultimately important, as well as providing a product that no one else has really provided around the world.

When we won the permit, I realized that we won it based on our safety record. Why don’t we minimize our risk a little bit? Why don’t we quit running so many helis and so many groups, and this will minimize our risk? If we went out to the Pencil Glacier, we would leave at 7 or 8 a.m., come home at 6 p.m., and barely get six runs. We just didn’t have it very well refined. We realized if we’re going to go to the best, safest microclimates in the range, it was time to streamline our logistics. By doing that, it’s just limiting the number of people you’re willing to take out in the mountains and the number of helicopters you want to run. I always say if you put a helicopter on the ground, that’s two guys working 16-hour days. Put another helicopter on the ground, that’s two more guys working 16-hour days. So, we’ve just been running two to three, sometimes four, helicopters for private or film jobs, but in the perfect world, I love just running one to two ships.

Nowadays, it seems like we’re more of an assault team. I call it “remote mechanized guided aircraft operations” rather than heliskiing. We want to go remote and avoid doing a standard circuit like most companies do. We would rather hit an area the size of the Teton Range, and have four or five groups share that whole area. The cool thing is it could snow four feet in one spot and, not far away, it’s just two feet. We really wanted to offer a product that was a little bit different than most companies, but we weren’t even thinking about it in an entrepreneurial sense at the time. It was more like, “Well, these microclimates are serious here. How can we make the most of them?”

We realized that setting up multiple staging areas gave us the ability to always bring our safety equipment closer to our region along with our radio communications. That safety net was everything because back in the day, we’d leave Thompson Pass and fly to the Books, then the Valley of the Tusk, then the Library and beyond. Then we’d be out beyond our means with no communication systems, no safety caches; fuel would be an hour and a half away. When we won the USFS permit, we had to get our logistics figured out and have those safety nets.

In 1999, maybe. With the powder skiers showing up, we started sharing the idea that even the most moderate terrain here is just as exciting as the big ski terrain, because it’s got all these features and halfpipes and hips. If a guy wants to ski a 50- or 60-degree slope that’s only 300 feet long, he can. Even your average advanced skier could do it. We started getting the advanced intermediate, the advanced skier and the experts.

The whole time we knew we needed to implement backcountry protocol. It’s more about not relying on this mechanized equipment. It’s more thinking about how everyone in the group plays a role in the outcome of the day, and everyone needs to learn that from the first briefing. Everyone needs to know more about the helicopter than just where the fire extinguisher and the pilot live. Then we started identifying the valleys and canyons and the places we knew we could ski clients to the road safely if weather came in suddenly, and not put the pilot in a situation where he felt he had to get people out of the field.

We started to organize our regions based on understanding the wind corridors, which is critical. Thompson Pass is the worst. The Valdez Glacier is the second worst, and then the Marshall is the third worst, and the fourth is Mineral Creek. From there, we work out how much snow you’re going to get in a region, or how far the storms are going to penetrate, or where you’re going to have tension in the range from wind and where you’re not going to have it.

The refinement of terrain was more based on figuring out the combination of how the storms come in, then tapping into high pressures letting loose from the interior. You can’t just be like, “Helicopter, mountain, here we go.”

After 25 years up here, do you feel like you know the nooks and crannies of where you’re flying?

We know a lot about the regions, the byways and highways for helicopters, the valley that can take you out of the mountains, the lowest canyons. But we’re still pioneering new runs and new routes and new landing zones. We have about 3,000 landing zones now, and we’ll do two to three runs off each. Even on this trip we did a few runs with you guys that had never been landed and skied. If we just go a little bit further east, we’ve barely tapped into that. We go even a little bit west or southeast of there, it all needs to be pioneered. We’re at a place now where we’re probably going back to the same zones a little too much. Maybe it’s time to start naming new regions at this point. We cut our teeth in the terrain north of town and it’s the most dangerous terrain, but the south and east has the best snow, the best conditions, the most interconnected part of the range.

We use a top-down form of terrain management. It’s all about whether the route provides you with the ability to have safe zones to regroup, to reassess the slope with hasty pits, to see further down the fall lines, to look at backup lines in case you don’t like something. It’s about trying to maintain visual and verbal [communication] with your clients or your backcountry partners. If you have one or the other [forms of communication], you’re in there. If you have both, you’re king. You have a much higher margin of safety when people are making better decisions by combining everyone in the group’s knowledge, skills or concerns.

We call it apex skiing. We take runs that give you the ability to have those high points, ridges and hips. It’s not just about skier ability. [Snowboarder] Craig Kelly, for instance, was really smart, looking down the slope, and riding off features that gave him the ability to control speed in a more natural way, gave him the ability to see further down the fall line. People would say, “How does he do that?” Well, it’s like 10 percent ability. The guy was just really good at putting himself in the right place to see the mountain three dimensionally.

We’re focusing more on trying to work from structure to structure where snow hooks up better—apex terrain, where snow slides and sloughs away from you. I think top-down terrain management protocols are the future. I think people are wasting their time on too much snow science, relying on safety equipment, being overly confident with the certifications and airbags and transceivers. You can’t ignore trauma and asphyxiation in an avalanche—no matter what you’re using, it’s serious. It’s more about avoiding the avalanche, and more about minimizing [the risk of] putting yourself in the heart of the avalanche by diagonally skiing slopes, respecting every concave, convex, and that support slope and terrain trap—and being able to identify them. So instead of just going, “Oh snow science and snow pits say everything’s stable, it’s good to go,” you have to understand that snow’s too dynamic to rely on that.

The biggest thing that people need to tap into is tension, propagation. Does it matter if you have a sheer or a compression failure if you don’t have tension? It really doesn’t. And what people are being taught in most courses are sheers and failures. You can figure out what quality sheer is present, but having the tension is more important than anything. It’s what allows snow to propagate. What we’re doing a lot more is testing the little small slopes, taking natural features—maybe an isolated column, like a big mushroom holding all the season’s snow—and looking at it and going, “Well, there are all my weakest layers because I can tell the wind’s eroded those layers out, opposed to all the others.”

And then is there tension? Slam your arm into it, or kick it with a ski and see if there’s cracking or tension. It’s more about your visual observation, your physical observation, and it’s a more connected physical test to the snow than isolating a shovel-width column [in a snow pit]. People need to start messing with the snow while it’s connected to the overall slope rather than trying to isolate it so much.

Let’s talk about Valdez life. How long have you been a full-time resident of Valdez?
I’ve been here 21 years. I lived in Utah for three to four months out of the year for about four years, but other than that, I’ve been here full time. It’s a tough little town. It’s an oil town, a very transient town. It’s got a lot of money, so the schools are good and the infrastructure’s really good. We have a great airport. We have the Marine Highway, so even if you cut off the roads, you could still fly out or catch the ferry out. The Port of Valdez is really a fjord and there are 3,000 islands out in the Sound. The mountains are bigger than they look. [The Port of Valdez] is only three miles wide, but 900 feet deep, so you’re living in a place where you feel so much energy with all this water and a 12-foot tide. You can lay in your yard and feel the energy of so much glaciation carving away the mountains and the ocean doing its thing.

The freedoms are amazing. You can go five minutes from your house, and you’re in the food chain and your senses are super alive. When I moved to Utah for a few months out of the year, I couldn’t sleep. It was so weird. In Valdez, there are so many more things that can hurt or kill you, or just make you use your skills more. In Utah, dodging traffic to go to Starbucks in the morning or going up Little Cottonwood Canyon in all that traffic was the most exciting thing I did. The mountains were fun, but there wasn’t much wildlife, there weren’t enough natural features remaining in the mountains. Everything had been touched a little too much, bombed too much, or groomed too much.

I got on snow safety in Utah and started hucking bombs in the morning and all of a sudden, I was healed. I just needed something to challenge me and make my senses more alive. And that’s what you get here. You don’t just go into the woods here and take a nap by a tree. You climb up a steep enough spot or go through a thick enough area of brush and you’re sitting in a place that maybe no one’s ever been to, and you see the wildlife. They’re so curious about you. You’re dealing with untouched things and animals that haven’t changed their habits because they haven’t been interrupted by humans.

The town itself is evolving, but it hasn’t changed much. It runs on a $70 million budget for about 4,000 people. They built this cruise ship dock, but honestly there’s not been one cruise ship to it. This town has always been a greedy town. It was the first interior route into Alaska, so they haven’t needed the most skilled entrepreneur running this place. You sit here and look at what they spent $70 million on this last year. You see some new street lamp posts. And who are all these guys leaving town with all this money?

Recently they’re like, “Dean, what do you mean about this tram idea? What are you talking about renewable resources?” Oil’s declining. Towns like Valdez will do fine, but other towns in the state are going to crash hard. For the first time there’s the opportunity for renewable resources, for people to come and take pictures of this beauty, make some tracks in the snow. You don’t have to drill and blast it and haul it away to make money.

You walk into the post office here, and you’re like, “Why aren’t people high-fiving and hugging like they are in Telluride?” And you’re like, “Oh, it’s because most people live here just to make money on oil, save it all, retire and leave.” So now it’s just starting to change.

When the kids were going to start school, my wife and I had to decide where to live: Utah, Colorado, or Alaska? My son was like, “Dad, the fish aren’t very big in Utah and Colorado.” Then my daughter was like, “I’m named after a glacier. I’m an Alaskan girl.” Our big malamute hated the heat. He would howl and face dead north for four hours every day. And my wife was like, “You know, the school [in Utah] is $12,000 per student. Let’s get our kids back to Alaska.”

And we seem to do better up here with business too, so we jumped into it. And I think instead of reading about history, you make history here. Everything you touch is previously untouched in the mountains. My kids are going to be good at creating their own legacy and creating a little piece of history. They can open horizons for other people and their kids and their families. There’s a lot of opportunity.

My wife’s name is Karen and my son’s name is Wyatt Kodiak Cummings. He loves his middle name. You say, “Hey boy, what’s your name?” and he’ll answer, “Wyatt Kodiak Cummings.” He’s 14 now. My daughter Tesslina is named after the Tazlina Glacier, but she’s a Tess instead of a Taz. My little girl Brooke’s four now. She’s Brooke Alaska Cummings.

Karen and I met in Aspen when we were already in our 30s. We both knew what we wanted—we wanted to start a family. She came to Alaska, I picked her up in Anchorage and it took us two and a half days to get home. It was raining in the interior and Thompson Pass was closed, so we had to sleep in the truck on the backside of the pass. It snowed 17 feet in town that week, and I was like, “Well, this will probably be the end of this little relationship.” And she says, “That was the most amazing snow I have ever seen.” We got around 32 feet of snow in the mountains that week.

Then Wyatt came into our life, which was amazing. Tesslina had some pretty heavy health issues, and we got her through that. We did homeopathic stuff because Western medicine was going to kill her, and it obviously wasn’t working. Then Brooke came into our life, and it was super awesome to have a baby in the house again.

It’s the balance of life and wildness and being able to harvest from it, too. Having all these fish and moose makes for a pretty great lifestyle. I want to see the town evolve from being more transient. I want to get this tram built so people can move here and live here because they love snow and mountains and the healthier lifestyle the mountains provide.

Maybe. This dock is key to the whole thing. My tram site’s only a mile away, and this property above us is where we would put some homes, a village over there by Mineral Creek. I’ve been working on it for six or seven years now. The tram is designed as far as the cables and the steel, and we just finished the feasibility study. But here we are, living in this town and the whole town has its back to the ocean. This is the only part of town that really faces the ocean. If I can get this project done, it’ll turn the town to the ocean and people will be more in tune with their surroundings.

You could have 12,000 people living in this area, and you could open up some of the high alpine to allow people to get out and experience a lifestyle beyond the local Safeway, restaurants and bars. I’d like to see a European mentality here. This extreme weather we deal with, and these steeper mountains and deeper snowpack and more glaciated mountains offer the opportunity to learn some great skills.

Our access has evolved immensely. We’re taking advantage of better road systems, better plowing systems, better access points to get into the wilderness. We’re going deeper, and the technology has evolved our techniques so much more. We’re skiing bigger and faster in more complicated terrain. With terrain management, the steep life protocols, and top-down terrain-management protocols, I think we have a lot to offer the world to help people go to the next level in their skiing and riding and mountaineering and whatever they’re into. That’s something I love to share. I don’t take it for granted that I get to learn a lot of skills up here that a lot of places wouldn’t allow me to learn. I want to share it with the world.

The Ski Journal - Volume Eleven, Issue Three

The Dean Cummings Protocol

How do you know when a ski guide walks into a bar?

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