It has been 20 years since an avalanche killed three young men in Utah County.
The avalanche hit a group of five snowboarders in the mountains just west of Sundance Ski Resort on Dec. 26, 2003. J.D. Settle and Matt Long were rescued, but their friends 18-year-old Adam Merz and 20-year-olds Michael Hebert and Rod Newbury died.
In the years since, advocacy groups have made efforts to improve avalanche safety. The “Know Before You Go” initiative was created in 2004 by the Utah Avalanche Center as a direct result of the 2003 slide to help teach school-aged Utahns how to be safe in the mountains.
Scott House has worked as a guide in the backcountry for the past 15 years and teaches avalanche safety courses. He said better equipment has improved safety.
“Our avalanche airbags, our beacons, our shovels, our probes. All that technology has advanced substantially,” he added.
These days, nice ski jackets often include a reflector for a specific type of radar signal that rescue teams can use to locate people who might be trapped under snow.
Still, House said newer equipment is useless if people don’t bring it with them or have the proper training to use it.
“If we're recreating in the backcountry, we are going to encounter avalanches or situations that require sharp skills in our training to come into play,” he said. “Hopefully, when we encounter those situations, we've practiced enough.”
Jamie and Laura Astle’s then 19-year-old son Bryce died in an avalanche in 2015, along with his friend Ronnie Berlack. They were both traveling with the U.S. Ski Team in Austria at the time.
Back then, Aslte said, coaches and athletes on the ski team weren’t required to have avalanche training.
“When the boys were killed there was only a handful of coaches out of 43 coaches that had any avalanche training,” said Jamie Astle.
The tragedy prompted the Astles to start the avalanche safety training organization BRASS to help make sure more people are prepared to enter the backcountry safely.
Astle agrees that there have been improvements to avalanche technology and awareness over the last decade. To start, the ubiquity of smartphones has made it much easier to get information about avalanche conditions.
The Utah Avalanche Center has an app, for example, that sends out conditions so “you wake up by 7 in the morning and you have the day's avalanche report,” he said.
While these reports can be helpful, the backcountry is still unpredictable.
“You’re dealing with Mother Nature, so there’s only awareness,” said Astle. “To say that there’s not going to be an avalanche … they can’t say that.”
Astle and House both stress that skiers, snowboarders and snowshoers alike shouldn’t enter the backcountry unless they’re properly trained in avalanche safety.
