Dr. Bruce Jamieson is a leading Canadian avalanche researcher. He began his career in the avalanche industry at Fernie Alpine Resort in 1980 and was involved in the early years of the Canadian Avalanche Association. He went on to the University of Calgary, where he first completed a masters degree and then earned his PhD in 1995. He went on to become a professor of Civil Engineering, focusing on avalanches. He became the NSERC Research Chair in Snow Avalanche Risk Control, and led the University of Calgary’s Applied Snow and Avalanche Research Group from 2004–2014. Bruce has been involved with the CAA almost since the beginning, and was President from 1992-95. He has also consulted on many projects, written professional and recreational avalanche texts, and continues to contribute to the Canadian avalanche industry.
Here is the transcript of our interview with Bruce Jamieson:
Hi, my name is Alex Cooper and I’m here on behalf of the Canadian Avalanche Association History Project. We are interviewing key figures in the history of the CAA in order to gather their stories and capture them to tell the story of our association and the Canadian avalanche industry. Today, with me is Bruce Jamieson, who is a leading avalanche researcher, former CAA president, and has made immense contributions to the Canadian avalanche industry over his many decades long career.
Thank you very much Bruce for taking the time.
Bruce: Well, I’m keen on this history project and I’m glad to be here.
I’m going to start with my first question I’d like to open up with. When was the first time you became aware of the phenomenon of avalanches, whether it was seeing one in person or just seeing it on TV, or just reading about them?
In around 1976, when I moved to Western Canada, I was ski touring every chance I got and doing a bunch of trips and courses with the Alpine Club. And so certainly there was lots of encounters and talk about avalanches. In one of these trips I did the Eight Pass Route with Willy Pfisterer. The Eight Pass Route is famous for its big avalanche terrain, so we were picking Willy’s brain throughout that trip. So I’d be on lots of ski touring and trips with the Alpine Club in the latter half of the 1970s.
Where are you from originally?
I grew up in Ottawa and then I went to my undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo in math, computer science, and physics. So, I didn’t start in engineering.
Did you grow up skiing near Ottawa somewhere?
Oh yeah. I grew up skiing mostly at Camp Fortune and did some ski racing in high school. I did four-way, where we did slalom, giant slalom, jumping and cross-country. I showed some promise in cross-country but not in the others.
What brought you out west?
The mountains. I did some trips out west in around 1973 and 1974 in the summers. Whenever I had a few weeks off, I would head west to the mountains and started hiking and caught the mountain bug. And so then, soon after I graduated in 1975, I was still doing a little bit of computer programming as contract work, but I was spending all the time I could in the mountains of western Canada.
You got a job out west, is that after graduating university?
Um, yeah. I started work for various Outward Bound schools. I guess maybe the first was the Outward Bound School in BC. Then I worked in the States for outdoor schools, and in Australia. And so I was a bit of a, I don’t know, climbing, ski touring, bum for a few years, working at various schools and climbing and ski touring whenever I could and when I wasn’t working.
And then, about 1978, I did a professional Level 1 avalanche course in Colorado, which was similar to a Canadian Avalanche Association Level 1. After bouncing around internationally a lot, I returned to Western Canada in 1980 and applied to Big White and Fernie to work in their avalanche forecasting and mitigation programs. I went to the first interview in Fernie and got a job offer and moved there and started working in December 1980.
What inspired you to take that avalanche course?
We were certainly doing a little bit of teaching at the outdoor schools. We were teaching a little bit of avalanche avoidance and also rescue with the winter courses at the Northwest Outward Bound School in Washington. And so that’s what motivated me to take the course, the Level 1 one equivalent, prior to my job at Fernie. I certainly had the interest, I had this multi-day course. I think it was about five days.
When you when you took that, was that to help with your teaching roles, or your educator roles with Outward Bound?
Yeah.
Were you thinking, “Oh, maybe I can make a career in this industry at the time as an avalanche professional?”
My career was all about avoiding air-conditioned offices and working in the outdoors as much as I could. But avalanches were just a small part of it. I mean, I was quite a keen climber. I wasn’t very good at it, but I was certainly enthusiastic about it.
So, you went to Fernie in 1980. My understanding is there was a lot of changes going on with Fernie’s avalanche control and like all mountain safety program around that time. Tell me like what was it like there, joining that resort?
Well, it was wonderful. I mean, it was just, I guess a year-and-a-half after the avalanche had taken out a couple of towers of the Grizz chairlift and that changed the program. They went from two avalanche people on the team to four, and also had some good procedures developing. They were developing some good procedures. They had some good experience with Dave Aikens, who’d worked at Rogers Pass and Robin Siggers and Scotty Aitken. So ,there was a good experience on the team, but it was
still pretty new. We were learning lots. It was really an experience and it was big avalanche terrain. The first couple years Dave Aikens was the head forecaster in charge of the program and he was wonderful.
We were designated forecasters maybe a few days in our second year. By the third year, I was certainly designated forecaster for some biggish storms, with lots of control teams moving around. We used volunteer ski patrol for some of our ski-cutting teams. Yeah, it was a wonderful experience.
What did it mean to be a forecaster at that time? What did the job entail? What were you doing?
Well, quite early in the morning—we would get the weather forecast the night before and then quite early in the morning, we had to phone around 5 a.m. to get the team together and make a decision whether it was going to be a control morning. We had a good idea the night before, but we would get some weather information, poke our nose outside and make a final decision whether it was going to be a control morning or not. And then we’d phone around and confirm around 5 a.m. and people would grab a quick breakfast and head up to the ski hill.
We would start the lifts and ride up the lifts. And one person would go to the study plot to do the morning readings and the others on the control team would go up to the Avalauncher and prepare the charges. When the person came back from the study plot, we would begin our shoot. That was mostly over before the lifts opened.
A few times, we had to delay the lift opening, but usually we could get a few parts of the upper ski area open before the lifts opened. And sometimes not. In a really big storm, it could stay closed sometimes for the entire day, but usually we could supplement the early morning control with the Avalauncher, or with the control routes and ski cutting, with explosive hand charges and get a good part of the ski area open by early morning, mid-day. And a few times we didn’t get much open at all when it was a really big storm that just kept on snowing. We would have much of the upper mountain closed for the entire day, but that was a rare occurrence.
Of course, Fernie was a much smaller ski area back then than it is today, correct?
I know two big bowls we had—the Lizard Bowl and we had the Cedar Bowl. We had just the one Avalauncher in those days, but lots of control routes and it was big avalanche terrain. We were four people and sometimes three, and spread thin and making good use of the CSPS volunteer ski
patrol. We had a select team there who did some ski cutting and so it worked.
How long were you at Fernie for?
Five years. Five winters.
Was that until you went to do your master’s degree?
Yes. I went to Calgary after that and was not sure what I was going to do. I was rather, you know, lost for a while. Then they started the Nakiska ski area, which wasn’t open to the public yet, but they were putting together a mountain safety crew and there were lots of VIPs and race coaches coming to sniff over the race course. So I worked on the mountain safety crew and I was doing a qualifying year for my master’s. I did a whole bunch of courses so I could get into engineering. I just did the one season at Nakiska before it opened to the public. That was just before the Olympics.
And then I started with my master’s. I wasn’t sure where to start. I knocked on doors in physics first and they sent me to environmental design. I knocked on doors there and they said, “Why don’t you try civil engineering?” I knocked on a couple doors in civil engineering and eventually found Colin Johnston, who became my supervisor for my master’s and my PhD.
Do a master’s and do research into snow and avalanches?
Well, I saw it as being very outdoorsy, and my wife and I had moved to Calgary, mostly for her job. I was looking for something to do in the big city that would still get me outdoors quite a bit. It seemed like graduate studies in snow avalanches would do that.
Oh yeah. Was there something you sensed about doing avalanche work in person, having this experience as a ski patroller and forecaster, that led you to say, “Hey, I want to learn more about how avalanches happen and do this research?”
Oh yeah, I had lots of questions and I already had some, I don’t know, rapport and exchanges with Peter Schaerer from when he was coming to the Fernie ski area for a visit. Seemed like a day a year. That was great. That really tweaked my interest in the science behind avalanches. So graduate work studying snow avalanches seemed like, when I was city bound, it seemed like a good thing to do.
My understanding was you had to complete your engineering degree first to get into master’s work.
I took a bunch of qualifying courses and they were going fairly well. There’s a little story here. I applied for a research grant, which was really unusual for a student who didn’t even have a master’s to write a research grant. But Colin Johnston really encouraged me to tackle everything, including writing a research grant application. I applied for it and I got it. I was only partway through this long list of courses they were requiring me to take. I gave a copy of this acceptance letter to the departmental secretary because I was very, very proud of it. And within half an hour the department had chased me down and said I didn’t have to take any more courses. I’d been accepted into the master’s program. He really pivoted on the fact that I had written a successful research grant application.
And what was your proposal for your master’s thesis?
That was to measure the tensile strength of snow. Snow slabs specifically.
And how much did you know going into that? How much did you know about that topic?
Umm. Not a lot. I knew Howard Conway from New Zealand had developed a field method and collected some data on it. I thought that was a great, and so did my supervisor. Colin Johnston thought it was a promising idea and it was going to get me out of the office into the field a lot. I was going to learn a bunch and Colin was really strong on experimental methods, so it was a really good fit there.
So, your master’s work took about 1.5, two years. From what I understand. You completed that and then moved into a PhD?
Umm, no. Actually, I worked as a research associate for three years in between the master’s and PhD. Along the way there, there was an avalanche conference in Edmonton and I gave a presentation there, I guess it was on the tensile strength of snow. And after my presentation, Mike Wiegele came up to Colin Johnston and I and said we should do avalanche research together. That opened all kinds of doors. So then there was another research grant, which I wrote with, well, I wrote the first draft of with Mike Wiegele’s operations manager at the time and then Colin Johnston made it so successful. We applied for that and got some funding for that to do more studies and started work in Blue River.
I forgot to ask, you said you do your master’s on the tensile strength of snow. What did you learn about that subject while doing your master’s especially? And then, how did that inspire your work going forward?
Well one, the experimental methods was really key, and how to conduct that. Peter Schaerer would pop in a few times during that first winter and gave me lots of coaching. “No, that won’t work, try this.” We had great exchanges there with Peter Schaerer. The tensile strength was promising for the propagation distance, how wide avalanches were. And so we sort of transitioned from lots of measurements of tensile strength to relating those measurements at or near avalanche slopes to how wide avalanches were.
Who else was doing avalanche research in Canada that time? Peter Schaerer and Dave Mcclung would have been at the National Research Council. Was anybody else doing master’s or PhD work in this field in the 80s?
I don’t think so. No.
As a research associate, what were you looking into? What did your research involve?
So, there was the slab properties and, I’m not sure exactly when, but it transitioned from slab properties and how wide avalanches were to started focusing on the weak layer and trying to forecast when avalanches occurred as opposed to how wide they would be. We did a lot of shear frame tests and rutschblock tests in those early years, but we certainly shifted the focus from the slab properties to the weak layer properties.
Talking to a lot of other old-timers—I’ll call them—it sounds like when they first started doing avalanche control work in Canada, especially at ski resorts in the 70s, people had a rough idea of when avalanches would happen, but the whys and hows were less understood. Was that part of your reason for getting into this, or part of your interest?
Yes, absolutely, why. Working at Fernie, we saw lots of important changes. When it was storm snow avalanches—and there were a lot of storm snow avalanches—we would see. A lot of times in the morning we’d start out ski cutting and just everything would go. It didn’t matter whether you put your skis here or here or here. You would trigger an avalanche and then a few hours later you had to be on the steepest slope to get an avalanche and then the ski cutting would just shut off. You couldn’t get an avalanche anymore. You couldn’t buy an avalanche with a bag of ANFO.
A lot of the instability was very short term. The timing was really important. What was going on? Why were those changes? Why were we going from wild instability to stability within a matter of hours? What were those changes? I was fascinated by that.
And, I guess maybe why? Why do some instabilities stick around so much longer?
Yes.
How well was that understood?
Well, we had this notion of old snow instabilities being difficult, but then I did an analysis of avalanche accidents and we looked at the weak layers and they were almost all what we have now started to call
Persistent, but at that time they were just called old snow instabilities. And so I did a short paper with Colin Johnston and talked about persistent and non-persistent. When we saw most of the accidents involved persistent weak layers. That hadn’t been emphasized a whole lot before that, so we added that emphasis. Particularly when we looked at avalanches where the decision maker was an avalanche professional, there were very few storms snow avalanches. The professionals were not being surprised, at least to the point of resulting in fatal accidents, by storm snow avalanches. The surprises, the unexpected, the avalanches where people got hurt and killed were predominantly persistent weak layers, and that really shaped the focus for future research projects.
You moved into a PhD and that’s was with the support of Mike Wiegele to get the funding to do that?
Yes. And then very quickly, CMH expressed interest. Colani (Bezzola) was our contact there. I think it was after one year with Mike Wiegele, it then became Mike Wiegele and CMH at the Bobbie Burns. So then I was bouncing back and forth and we started to hire staff and get a field team going both in the Bobbie Burns and at Mike Wiegele’s in Blue River.
What were they interested in?
They were interested in research and in giving back. I mean, they knew that the avalanche problem had so many questions and there were certainly some high-profile accidents that were I think moving people to support research. Once we worked with the operation, they got interested in the research topic, but I think at the outset, they just wanted to help out and contribute to avalanche research in the general sense.
What was your pitch for your PhD thesis when you when you made your proposal to the university?
The proposal, which was to NSERC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, was for better forecasting of persistent slabs and a variety of field-based techniques to do that.
You’ll probably need to correct me here, but my understanding is you spent a lot of time looking at different snowpack tests, rutschblock tests in particular, it sounds like, and shear frame tests. Maybe you could just explain a little bit about your work on those and the research you put into those different tests.
Those were the two main tests. Uh, both the rutschblock test and the shear frame. There were some stability indices for the shear frame that we made some improvements to, but those were the two big things that shaped my PhD work, was to come up with hopefully better ways to forecast based on field tests like the rustchblock and the shear frame.
And what did you come up with?
Well, the rutschblock was a useful forecasting tool. Later, the practitioners were telling us it was awfully slow and that was certainly a factor in its limitations. But we got lower rutschblock scores when avalanches were happening and before avalanches were happening, and we were quite interested in, you know, could you do it at a central location like a study plot or study slope, and then how far out was that applicable? It turns out not to be applicable over any particular distance, but slopes of the similar aspect tended to, we got better correlations when you looked at slopes over a similar aspect than you did over two kilometers or five kilometers or anything like that. The same for the stability indices based on shear frames.
But I have to say that the results were, well, we got better correlations. It seemed like they were better forecasting, but it was mostly for fairly easy-to-forecast avalanches. So I sometimes think some of the work we developed were really kind of slow laborious ways of finding out whether avalanches were likely that were slower than what practitioners and forecasters already had.
Nevertheless, there was some really important learning. There was collaboration with the operations and I think what was really, really important is that that this rapport between research and the forecasters and practitioners at the operations was really strong. I mean we were sitting in on the morning and evening meetings of these guiding operations and we were talking about the snowpack and what we saw and what we observed and what trends were happening. And that was good on so
many counts. It was good for the research technicians and what was soon the graduate [students] and it was, I think, really good for the operations as well to have this exchange of ideas. And they were wonderful in terms of saying, “Well, that’s useful, but this is what you do over here. This is not useful. I know that you’re telling me something I already know.” So that really helped refine the projects that came along in later years.
That’s great. I want to jump back a little bit in time because I know you became President of the CAA while you were working on your PhD. But I want to first know how you first got involved with the CAA. You got started at Fernie in 1980, right around when the CAA had their first meeting. Were you there or not?
So, it’d be in ‘81 or ‘82, I think probably ’82, I joined the CAA and went to the first meeting. And I can remember some really lively discussions about the objective of a test profile and whether it should be written down or not between Chris Stethem and Fred Schleiss. And there were also debates about how avalanches released between Ron Perla and Dave Mcclung. Those early meetings are just burnt into my memory, but that would be around ‘82-83.
So you remember about those discussions. What else do you remember about the CAA in those early years, about its formation and how it was run?
It functioned really well and there wasn’t any baggage whatsoever. I was also a member of another association for some ambulance work in Alberta and the CAA just functioned so much better. There was so much more camaraderie and common interest in that. Right up at the highest levels, you could talk about snow and whatever. It wasn’t just a bunch of managers talking. It was the actual practitioners, the people out there with their heads and hands in the snow, were getting together to talk about how to do their work better. And so really constructive, really positive. Lots of camaraderie.
How were you involved in those days?
Well, initially as a participant. I think I joined the Technical Committee maybe around 1985-86, somewhere around there.
The Technical Committee. What did that committee do? What were the terms of reference?
Supposedly, we advised the Board of Directors on technical matters. I think we were looking for technical matters, particularly as it retains to OGRS, but there were lots of other things that would come up and we would express an opinion. We were involved in at various levels in the
revisions to OGRS, sometimes just in the supervisory reviewing role, and other times in the early years we were writing parts of it and putting together a team to do the next revisions of OGRS.
And you’re also teaching courses at this point? Were you teaching recreational or professional courses, or both, in the 80s.
I started to teach recreational courses when I was in Fernie, maybe my third year there, in 1983 or so. And then I taught my first professional course in, I think, 1992 with Peter Schaerer and Bob Sayer were the other two instructors in Blue River in 1992.
What was a recreational course like in 1983? who was managing them? Who set the curriculum? I think there was like a ski patrol curriculum, or something like that.
Somewhere around 1985, the CAA had Clair Israelson and Chris Stethem develop two course outlines and syllabus and some pages that could be photocopied onto transparencies because we were using transparencies in those days. So there was a sort of an introductory avalanche awareness course outline or syllabus and also an advanced one. The CAA, the Alpine Club, the Canadian Ski Patrol System all contributed to that, at least organizationally. Chris and Clair did the main content behind that.
I think the CAA was worried about liability and kept some distance. The actual syllabi were distributed by the Alpine Club of Canada, and there were, in a sense, almost no qualifications to get. Before they would mail you out the advanced syllabus, you had to send them a resume and that was it in terms of instructor qualifications. You had to impress someone at the Alpine Club of Canada office with your resume.
OK, so being a ski patroller for a few years, plus your other background in outdoor pursuits, got you in? What do you remember about what the curriculum, the syllabus, contained? What were you teaching people?
Well, there was too much on crystals for sure. But that was true, I think, around the world at the time. There was far too much emphasis on crystals. But there was some good stuff on terrain, there was good stuff on materials and safety measures. Interesting enough, there was ski cutting in the courses. In the advanced course, there was a little section on ski cutting and how to interpret the results of ski cutting. There were all these overheads, and there were suggestions about classroom time and field time. That was all part of it.
Yeah. I’m just curious how the courses have evolved over the years. It’s interesting to hear this shift away from snow crystals and snow studies to now, it’s very focused on terrain. But it’s interesting to hear what what a course was like in the mid 80s.
The introductory course had, I think, about six hours in the classroom and one day in the field. And the six hours in the classroom could be done over two or three evenings, or it could be done in one day and then we went into the field for the other day.
What about yourself? What kind of formal avalanche education did you get? You mentioned the Level 1 you took, but did you do the Level 2 course at some point when that was available?
Yes, around 1983, I did the Level 2.
And who would have taught that?
So that was Peter Schaerer, Chris Stethem, Paul Anhorn, and Ron Perla came in to give a guest lecture, too.
You’re involved with the CAA. You’re on the technical committee. You became President in 1992 or ‘93.
Yes, ‘92.
How did you end up becoming President? How did you end up in that role?
I guess I was asked. I remember Chris Stethem coming up to me and asking if I would run. I’m famously poor at saying no to things and so I agreed, even though I was quite busy with my PhD. But, nevertheless Chris asked me and I said yes.
Because it looks like you weren’t on the board before that point.
That’s correct.
How were you involved? You were on the technical committee, but were you involved in other ways in the operations or the management?
Well, I was a regular at the meetings by that point. I was on the Technical Committee. I can’t recall, I might have been on another committee but I don’t recall.
You become president in 1992. This is right after the Canadian Avalanche Centre had been formed that year, or maybe just gone through its first year. I was wondering, could you talk about having this new body the Canadian Avalanche Centre, which focused on InfoEx, public bulletins, and training schools. I hope I got that right. Chris (Stethem) gave me a copy of the initial proposal. I was a bit worried I got that wrong there. You’re taking over as President with this new Canadian Avalanche Centre. Maybe talk about challenges or how you managed that development.
Well, we had Alan Dennis as a really strong–he was initially called the Canadian Avalanche Centre Coordinator and then we changed his title to Canadian Avalanche Centre manager, and I think around 1995 his title changed to Executive Director. He had some part-time staff to help him with the InfoEx. Phil Hein was hired as the first coordinator of the—I think the first winter of the Canadian Avalanche Centre, Alan Dennis was coordinating the schools, which was way, way too much for one person. So Phil Hein was hired to coordinate that, and people were hired for the InfoEx, which was heavily reliant on faxes, and handwritten faxes at those. They weren’t typed faxes. A lot of the early ones were handwritten faxes and they had to be transcribed. There was a real period of growth there, but it all started with Chris Stethem and the successful application to the National Search and Rescue Secretariat in 1991.
You inherited that then I guess and helped see it through the first few years, the early years?
Yeah. There was lots of growth along the way. And not surprisingly, there were lots of bumps along the way. The avalanche danger scale reared its head. The European countries had agreed on a five-level scale, and so we felt we should look at that. There was some dissatisfaction with the four-level hazard scale we had. We put together a team and there was Alan Dennis, one or two people from Parks Canada, there was someone from Kananaskis Country and they all formed a committee to develop to see whether we could use the European scale as it was, and what needed to change. And so that’s what happened.
The notable bumps on that thing is that we didn’t communicate well with the U.S. folks. The other thing is that the size of avalanche magnitude got left out of the scale and so that was a problem for quite a while, before that got resolved and included.
The other bump was the word ‘considerable.’ That was a huge challenge. We had these highly intuitive words like low, moderate, high and extreme, and then considerable just wasn’t intuitive. It kind of fit in the middle but it wasn’t as intuitive as the other words.
When we started to improve our communication with the U.S. folks, quite a few of the forecast centres had a problem with the word considerable and that went on for years afterwards. Some of the U.S. forecasting operations called it moderate-to-high. Level three was called moderate-to-high by some forecast centres. The ruffled feathers over the word ‘considerable’ went on for quite a while.
I feel it’s still a bit of an issue, the word ‘considerable.’ I feel if you surveyed you know 100 and forecasters and professionals you’d probably get about half of them who probably think it could be better but don’t know what the better word is.
That’s right.
Yeah. You mentioned the four-level scale or hazard scale before that. What was that?
So, there was a four-level hazard scale, and that actually had size and likelihood in it. Then we developed a five-level scale that had likelihood but not size in it. That was used, I’m not sure the origin, but it was used by most forecasting, operations and professional operations, as well as the limited public. When I was at Fernie, we used the four-level hazard scale for our forecasts. That’s all I remember about it.
So, you developed the danger scale and I guess was that developed. Did the bulletin start going out before the danger scale was changed?
So the professional operations were using stability—they had a preference for stability—whereas the limited publication—and it really was limited was—some of it used stability. The Europeans started the five-level danger scale. We had this little committee of the Canadian Avalanche Association look at that, and they decided that was the way to go. So they recommended that the Canadian Avalanche Association adopt this five-level danger scale and tweak the words from the Europeans. That became adopted and used for public communication. But for a while there was both stability being used and this four-level hazard scale being used.
It’s interesting that the five-level scale like, it’s been changed of course, but it’s still the five level scale with the same main words. So it’s lasted 20-something years.
Yes, almost 30.
Were you directly involved in that? Were you part of the committee?
No. Alan Dennis, I think led that. And I think Clair Israelson was involved. Someone from Kananaskis Country, perhaps it was George Field.
As President of the CAA what did you see your main responsibilities or role was in the organization?
Well, we didn’t have clearly defined roles. We didn’t understand the distinction between operations and governance. I remember years after I retired and Steve Blake was President, he got up and talked about the distinction between operations and governance, and I was gobsmacked. I had never thought of that during my years. There were lots of things that were surprising us and I think we were quite reactionary. There was some foresight, but we were reacting to things like the training for the recreational instructors, the danger scale. We were just responding to changes as they came about and by others, and feeling that as the CAA, we should do something. I really wish we’d had this nice clear distinction between governance and operations at the time, but we didn’t.
Was it somewhat of a working board? Were you involved in the operations as well?
Yeah, we were. The purchases, the things that Alan Dennis wanted to buy, he would put that in, the board would discuss whether that was a good expenditure or not. Some fairly small expenditures as well had to go by the Board, as well as the things like hiring the staff for the InfoEX and hiring the coordinator for the schools. That was a big thing for the board.
Obviously, the Canadian Avalanche Centre, that marked obviously a big step in terms of becoming—all of a sudden you have staff, you have an office, you’ve got programs like the InfoEX that you’ve got to run. I mean the InfoEX must have been interesting in getting that off the ground and getting more organizations, more businesses on board with that, contributing information.
Yes. And the technology transformation was quite interesting because it started with faxes and handwritten faxes, and when that got typed up before it went back out and whatever, there were some typos and whatever, which were quite controversial. A question arose: did you need to have a person with a CAA Level 2 to do the transcription from the fuzzy handwritten faxes? Because there were some very controversial typos, but they largely originated with these fuzzy handwritten faxes and not really with the qualifications of the person. So, we evolved to more and more operations sending in their faxes.
We had a little experimental project to go digital and exchange digitally. We hired someone to develop the software for that and that failed. It didn’t work. But the InfoEX grew and we had more and more operations and had more staff and better staff with more avalanche qualifications working on the InfoEX. That’s a great success, obviously.
One of the articles I read in the Avalanche News from back then was about sending information via modem and talking about 2400 baud modems, which you could send text in maybe a minute, but any images—they were talking about weather images and sending those out—saying those would take hours to distribute, so it just wasn’t feasible at that time. I thought it was funny just reading that fax was still the way to go. This is the early to mid-90s period.
Yes.
Was it hard, were there challenges getting different operations to get on board the InfoEx or were they pretty accepting?
There were a few operations that were quite slow, but overall the forecasters were on board, and they were asking or leveraging their operations managers and their general managers to support it. I think it was $800 or $900 a year at the time for a daily operation. A lot of operations. It was expanding quite quickly. There were a few ones that were dragging their feet and whatever. But it wasn’t because of the operations people, they were really, really keen. In some cases, it was the general managers or higher-ups that were reluctant.
It’s certainly became necessary. And there were a few court cases where exchange of information became more expected with your neighbors. So, yeah, it eventually grew and we had a really good number of subscribers, and the holdouts were fewer and fewer.
I know there was a few incidents where the recommendations after were better information sharing amongst operations, so I guess that definitely helps when you have lawyers and whatnot, coroners.
I know one, I won’t mention the names of the operations, but there were two competing ski areas and the head forecaster at one operation told his manager that the other operation was going to join the InfoEx. And the other operation told his manager the same thing. They were worried about the other competing operation having the jump on them, so they both joined the same year.
Nice. Did they coordinate that?
Yes, the forecasters were coordinating with that.
I’m looking through all your notes here. You mentioned something about avalanche work requiring supervision by a professional geophysicist or engineer. How much oversight was there? How much was government looking at the work being done by avalanche professionals at that time?
What became WorkSafe BC was overseeing the explosive use and pretty much only the explosive use. And so, when this scope of practice of engineers came up, it was a huge issue. That’s the reason the magnitude or size got left out of the danger scale, because it was questioned whether you needed to be a professional geoscientist or engineer to forecast size, where only a CAA member could forecast avalanche likelihood but not size. Unfortunate we got sidetracked there tremendously. It just dominated the board for a couple of years. I was so fortunate that Jack Bennetto, who was Vice-President at the time, and Peter Schaerer, who didn’t have role but was a Professional Engineer, he really, really helped out. We had the special general meeting in October 1993. It was such an intense issue that one of the CAA’s only special general meetings was held to try and provide some clarity to the meeting.
Eventually through the work of Jack and Peter and some key people at APEGBC, which is now Engineers and Geoscientists BC, we got to a really good point where we needed the registered professionals, the professional geoscientists and engineers, for designing mitigation structures, for hazard mapping, for occupied structures, but not for any operational forecasting, including size, including likelihood, and including supervising these programs. We did not need to have any supervision by an APEGCBC member. But that took years and that was after I finished. That was after 1995 that clarity happened.
But the hazard mapping for temporary exposure like highways and whatever, that was on the back burner and that was unclear until WorkSafe was drafting the second or third revision for 4.1.1. There were questions with, if you were doing hazard mapping for highways, did you have to be a professional engineer or geoscientist? In 2010 that was still a simmering issue.
How did you convince the engineers that members could do the operational forecasting without being an engineer?
Um. I’m not sure. I kind of handed that file over to Jack Bennetto and Peter Schaerer and there were lots of discussions that I did not attend. They met with senior people from APEGBC, and I was not part of that. But I know the issue that getting up at five in the morning to do a control route, did you have to have a professional engineer there? Did you have to have that supervised? We had this this working system of seasonal avalanche workers that were doing a good job and I think that gradually became recognized. There was growing recognition by WorkSafe BC, which is a government agency, that was recognizing the work. There was some recognition by the forestry people of the good work being done by the seasonal avalanche workers and the CAA members. Some of those details I just don’t know, because I didn’t attend those meetings.
No, that’s that’s fine. But I guess that work speaks to the professionalism of the CAA and of the members that is still ongoing work today—to constantly raise or maintain a certain level and raise the bar for CAA members to keep doing this work.
Yes. And there’s been increasing recognition by government agencies and regulators of the work of the Canadian Avalanche Association members and the professionalism of the Canadian Avalanche Association members.
The other thing you mentioned that I read about that seemed to be a big issue was explosives handling at this time and when to assemble hand charges. What I learned was, did the hand charges have to be assembled before you go out, or do they have to be assembled on site? What happened? What was the big issue going on there?
So, the Workers Compensation Board, now called Worksafe BC, some of their district supervisors felt that pre-assembly was dangerous and the charge could go off in your pack if it was pre-assembled. This applied to hand-charge routes, but curiously not to helicopters. Chris Stethem took the lead on that and it actually blossomed, I think, when he was President, but it continued until, I think, my first year as President. When it was going on, he played a very key role in in resolving that. But WorkSafeBC wanted a recommendation from the explosives manufacturers, and the explosive manufacturers wanted the recommendations from some credible research. So, Chris found out that there was an explosive lab in Ottawa that could test explosives with the caps inside the hand charges and do impact tests.
Trying to get the funding, they got all kinds of individuals to chip in money. The avalanche workers, the spouses of the avalanche workers, were all contributing because they really thought it’d be safer. They knew it would be safer if they pre-primed their explosives. Eventually they got the money together and they hired the National Research Council in Ottawa to do this explosive test. The probability of impact—they looked at a hard object hitting the charge with a cap inside— the probability was 10 to the minus 13. It was just extremely rare. And when you consider whatever padding a pack involves, and hitting an object like a tree or whatever with a pack with a primed explosive inside, it just wasn’t credible. So that recommendation, that finding from the National Research Council explosive group went to the explosive manufacturers, and the explosive manufacturers accepted that. Then WorkSafe BC allowed charges to be pre-primed after that.
That was a big victory for the CAA and for avalanche workers.
Yes, and the partnerships were really good. I think we had improved relationships with WorkSafe BC as a result of that, with the National Research Council of Canada. Other people were watching that, other organizations, and so it was good both on the level that we came to a good solution to the pre-priming issue, but also in terms of the recognition by the CAA as a credible body to deal with issues like that and to provide a professional response.
What were some of the other issues that came up during your term? You were President for two or three years.
It was three years.
There was the fatality with the experimental avalanche projectile at Whistler. Again, Chris Stethem as past-President took the lead on that and sort of finished it up. But there was an experimental projectile and they actually had a government grant to develop experimental projectiles. The credentials of the developer were falsified, and the explosive went off in the breach of the Avalauncher and someone was killed and another senior avalanche worker had hearing loss as a result of it. Chris took the lead on that, but, again, the CAA participated in the hearings. There was a Coroner’s inquest over that. There were some good recommendations that came out of that. And again, the CAA was seen as a constructive professional participant in dealing with issues like that.
I guess throughout all this, the CAA is only 10–12 years old at this point. So it’s still a pretty young organization. Was there a lot of desire to establish, or still the need to establish credibility of the association at this point?
Yes. I think so. Our credibility was ‘Who are these guys?’ So there were a number of issues where the CAA was playing a key role. I think on the public side, both with the public bulletin and what became qualifications for recreational avalanche instructors and the improved content for the recreational courses. All that public side and recreational side helped improve the credibility of the CAA. And when they deal with professional issues regarding avalanche work, that really helped that we had a profile with the public bulletin, with recreational avalanche safety. It tremendously helped. And it helped with fundraising as well. There was a series of NSS (National Search & Rescue Secretariat) applications. The role of the CAA with public avalanche work and recreational issues really helped with that.
At the same time, we were having lively debates—and this includes my time as President—with the public and recreational forecasting, was this really the role of the CAA and we were giving the InfoEx to the public forecasters who were initially CAA employees. There were lots of discussions over that: we should be a professional association, we shouldn’t be involved in this, and was it costing any money and so on. Later on, there was a good clarification of that and a dollar value attached to the InfoEx, but it was a big issue during my time as President.
I’m pulling up my notes here, but I read there was some questions about, was the CAA losing money because of the public services? I have in my notes, that in June 1993, it was presented that the public operation, that the CAA lost money because it was spending money on public bulletins and those public services. Was a need there to find ways to cover those expenses, those costs?
Yes. Could you increase membership costs? Which came up at a couple of meetings. And whether it was a fit for the public bulletins and related issues to be taking the time of Canadian Avalanche Association employees. That was certainly a hot issue during my time as President. And at the same time, for these NSS applications, for these, conversations with government agencies, the CAA’s role in public avalanche safety was huge. It was tremendously beneficial to the CAA’s credibility with government agencies.
Before moving on from the CAA stuff, is there anything else CAA related from your time as President that you would like to bring up?
There were the qualifications for avalanche instructors, and, again, this was another reactive issue. There were a few organizations that were starting—the Canadian Ski Patrol System and there was a group, I think it was the Alpine Club in Edmonton—they started to develop qualifications for avalanche instructors. The CAA was reacting to that. Again, we became concerned that different organizations had different qualifications and that the CAA, which would produce these syllabi for these courses, should have a role there. That was after my time, but they did in fact develop them. You had to have a Level 1 for the introductory course and I think it was a Level 2 for the advanced recreational course. That came after my time, but it was certainly a simmering issue during my years as President.
And who worked on that issue and developing those standards?
That was after 1995, when I stepped back from the board, so I really don’t remember.
So you did three years on the board while you were working on your PhD, correct?
Yes. That was a terrible idea and I was really burnt out and became depressed. About 2.5 years in, I told the board I needed help and that I needed to step back from a lot of these demands. Jack Bennetto, as Vice-President stepped up. For about four months, I took a back seat. Jack was the primary contact between the Canadian Avalanche Centre staff and the board. And then, about two months before I stepped down, I was feeling better and started to step back into the role as President. But then I had made the decision that I was going to step down in May 1995.
Yeah. Between all the work you’re doing for your PhD, balancing different research areas, field teams—it sounds overwhelming.
Yes. I was definitely overloaded and bad at saying no. So it was a was a really good decision. The previous President had stood for five years, but it was time for me to step down after three years.
What year did you complete your PhD?
The same year?
Yep.
From there, what was your next step after that?
Well, the research program, which became known as ASARC, continued to grow. We had the two main operations—Mike Wiegele’s in Blue River and Bobbie Burns. And then, in 1997, we essentially moved from the Bobby Burns to Rogers Pass and began work there. The only easy way to get into Bobbie Burns was on the Saturday exchange days, whereas in Rogers Pass, we could come and go. Any day of the week our staff could come and go, so that was certainly an advantage for the field staff and for me.
So ASARC continued to grow, was quite big. We had some partnerships, we did some work at the highways operations and other national parks. I was a road warrior and took on too much. I was doing some more teaching for the Canadian Avalanche Association, and after 1995 also started to do some consulting work, mostly with Chris Stethem & Associates.
What kind of consulting work were you doing?
Mostly hazard mapping. I had a really wonderful apprenticeship with Peter Schaerer and Chris Stethem. I worked on a number of projects with Chris Stethem & Associates, but directly with Peter Schaerer. At some point, after assisting Peter on a number of projects, it was decided I should take the lead and Peter would review my work. And there were two, maybe three projects where I had done all the field work, collected all the data, and I was so busy I couldn’t write the final report. And so, in spite of the initial plan that I would write the final report and Peter would review it, Peter stepped up and wrote the final report, but based on my field work, because I was just overloaded.
That’s a pretty good collaboration, though. And to have somebody like Peter…
It was a wonderful collaboration. I just learned so much from him in those years.
Yeah, that’s great. You know, to get into everything ASARC did in over 20, well, I guess ASARC was formally around for about a decade, but you had a research program for close to 20 years it sounds like, if not a bit more. Is that right?
Around 16 years. Well, if you took my years as a research technician—20 years.
I mean to get into everything, all the work ASARC did, that would take too long. But maybe if you just want to talk about some of your highlights or what you feel the biggest contributions of that program, of having that research school were, especially to the industry?
Well, there was the really amazing collaboration with the operations. That really stands out to me. The fact that we were sitting in on meetings morning and evening and the operational people were keeping us on track to keep things really applied. So, there were a whole variety of topics and contributions and with snowpack instability tests for many years. I guess the propagation saw test was one of those. The compression test was an earlier one that had widespread adoption.
Yeah. I mean, if I think of ASARC—and I admit I’m coming from not knowing much—I think of snowpack tests, different tests and how to apply them, as being something you put a lot of work into. But I’m sure that’s understating things. Could you discuss why you were so interested in that work on snowpack tests?
Well, initially I just really wanted to be outdoors and then increasingly I recognized that there was a wonderful stream of research technicians and graduate students and postdocs and whatever, and they wanted to work outdoors as well. They wanted to work in the field and collaboratively with the operations. We just got some amazing people to work on the ASARC program. But I came to recognize, I stuck my toe in theoretical matters a couple of times and realized I wasn’t very good at it. I was better at the field work, and so I stuck with the field work and became quite focused on that. That was my strength and that was what I was good at.
Leave the theoretical to the Swiss?
To others, yeah. I guess, three, maybe four graduate students worked on statistical avalanche runouts. They did summer field work and then did some statistical methods to come up with estimating avalanche runout. So there was that, which was summer work, that was one thing that was not snowpack tests that I think we have good contributions.
For sure. And when I look at the people who came through your program, so many people who are leaders in the avalanche industry today that came through. That’s quite the legacy. How do you feel about that legacy of ASARC?
I’m tremendously proud. I mean both the graduate students and the research technicians. I think the research technicians, many of whom have moved into really senior positions, haven’t been mentioned enough, but for them to have their heads and hands in the snow for a season or two. They generally had some operational experience before they started and then afterwards they went back into operations and they moved into very senior roles. I mean, lead guides, head forecasters, consultants. Both the graduate students and the research technicians, I’m intensely proud about them and try and keep in touch with them and their careers.
How many snow profiles do you think you dug over the years? Did you ever sit down and tried to count?
Yeah, it’s in the thousands. It’s certainly in the few thousand range. At one point we estimated how many metric tons of snow we shoveled, the ASARC crew had shoveled.
Is there a work you did at ASARC that you’re most proud of?
I think there are a whole bunch of things, but the one that comes to mind now is the work on crack propagation speeds, just because it changed so much. We had one of the first two graduate students was studying whumpfs and remote triggering. We set up this experiment to use a geophone recorder to measure the crack speed. We got a call from, I think it was Mark Ledwidge in Banff National Park, that there were whumpfs happening at the Bow Summit area. So the crew went there, there were three graduate students at that point, and the idea was that they would walk into a meadow on snowshoes and if it whumpfs, then go into the adjacent meadow, set up the geophones, walk into there with geophones, walk into there with snowshoes, and try and trigger the crack and measure the whumpfs, the speed of the crack for the whumpf.
For two days they struck out. They got whumpfs in the first meadow but not in the second meadow. I arrived on the third day. We did a couple of meadows in the morning and then in the afternoon, it was at the end of the whumpf cycle, we were all ready to go off in our different directions and we did one more meadow. And we got a whumpf in the one meadow. We set up the geophones and the graduate student, Tom Chalmers, walked in with his with his snowshoes and we’re all standing around this meadow and we all heard and felt the whumpf. And there was this tremendous pause while Crane Johnson kind of tiptoed up to the geophone recorders and pressed a few buttons to see if they’d recorded the crack speed. And finally, he said, “We got it. We got it!”
It was kind of like the Ghostbusters getting their first call, you know. That crack speed was around 20 meters per second. I think all the publications put crack speed at over 100 meters per second. And so that got researchers really questioning whether there was another mechanism. That mechanism was collapse or anti-crack. And so that changed the theory of how triggering from the flats and how cracks propagate. There’s a presentation coming up in a few days about that, about that change and our new understanding of how cracks propagate in general terrain at the CPD session in two days (note: this CPD session took place on Nov. 9, 2022, and is available to CAA members only).
Yeah, with Karl Birkeland and Ron Simenhois.
Yeah they’re going to talk about that.
Did that lead into the research by Johan Gaume’s team in Switzerland? I love that animation they have with the snowman dropping the snow and triggering this slab up the slope above it.
Yeah. Joachim Heierli and others, that triggered a lot of really fine theoretical work and has come out of it. It’s now our new understanding. It’s changed how we understand it. What’s really interesting, what they’re going to talk about tomorrow night, is that the crack speeds are slower across the slope than they are up and down the slope, because there’s more collapse going on in the cross-slope direction. So it’s quite fascinating the turns that’s taken.
Interesting. I can’t attend tomorrow, but I’ll have to watch that recording afterwards.
Moving on a bit, you’ve written quite a few books, both for recreationists, but also technical manuals for professionals. Which was the first book or manual you wrote?
Backcountry Avalanche Awareness, which I was using for my avalanche courses at the University of Calgary, in about 1986. I had a little set of course notes to hand out to the students and it had a staple up in the top left corner and it was just a few pages of 8.5×11. It was called Avalanche Awareness Primer. And then after a couple of years, I renamed it Backcountry Avalanche Awareness and a bunch of other schools doing avalanche awareness courses started to use it. Then Avalanche Canada formed and they used it for quite a few years. But that was certainly the first and that one, well, thanks to it being used by Avalanche Canada’s recreational and AST courses, sold over 10,000 copies.
And then you’ve also written and edited quite a few technical manuals for the CAA, for professionals.
Yes. So, both the Land Managers Guide, which we’re called editors or subject matter experts. But someone had to write it and I certainly wrote the first draft of the Land Managers Guide. And I certainly wrote sections of OGRS and was on the committee that wrote the Technical Aspects for Snow Avalanche Risk Management. And then, more recently The Planning Methods for Assessing and Mitigating Snow Avalanche Risk. I was the editor for that and the first author for the each of the chapters. And I’m really hoping in the next issue that someone else will be the first author of the chapters, so there’s a bit of a succession plan there.
How do you get involved in writing these manuals, or being part of the editing or writing team for them?
I certainly became very interested in writing—technical writing, but also non-technical writing. And keep your target audience at the forefront, and whenever you’re doing anything from a presentation to writing a technical document. I think I drove the graduate students nuts by editing all their draft papers or whatever. You know, who’s this paper for? This one’s going out to recreational people in The Avalanche News or The Avalanche Journal. That one over there is going out to the scientific community. You have to have a different writing style. That same distinction and that same insistence on many drafts and getting your fellow graduate students to review and critique, and getting me to do multiple drafts. I think I drove them nuts, but it really had beneficial effects because we had a high standard for communication and putting the target audience first.
The same happened in presentations. I was talking to Dave Gauthier recently and he was saying that it’s a fond memory of them, before they came to the CAA meetings or a fall training session for an operation, that I would insist that they do usually two sessions to present their presentation to the fellow graduate students, and we would critique it and sometimes say, “No, not ready for daylight yet. You got more work to do before that one goes out.”
You retired, at least from ASARC in 2014. Why did you end ASARC at that time?
The funding at that point for research chairs was for five-year terms. I was going to be 63 and to do another five years of that intense level of work, I wasn’t up to it. I just needed to slow down. I was told many times within the university that this field stuff, you’ve got graduate students, you got research technicians, you got post docs, you don’t need to be involved in that. But I had to be involved. It wasn’t rewarding for me to sit behind a desk and hire a few people to go out in the field. I had to be out there with my head and hands in the snow. That’s what I was good at.
So, there was that. There was the five-year thing and my belief that I wasn’t up for another five years. There was also increasing pressure within the university to tie me down at the university to undergraduate teaching. If I’d stayed on, there would have been more demands that would keep me in the winter term to be teaching undergraduate courses. That combination of factors led me to retire at age 63. ASARC kind of ended in 2014 and then I did another year half-time as a professor in civil engineering, and wrapped up a last few graduate students in 2015.
And then you started Snowline Associates after that, doing consulting.
Yes, Snowline Associates and its predecessor Snowline Technical Services had had been around, but I finally had more time for that. I worked as an associate on avalanche consulting projects, mostly with Dynamic Avalanche Consulting and Alan Jones and company in Revelstoke, and BGC Engineering. They have offices all over the place but working with a few of them. I had more time for that. I worked on a variety of consulting and hazard mapping projects and engineering projects with them for about five years. And then the last year, the sixth year it really slowed down. There were some really super-capable people who were stepping up, and I was ready to retire from consulting at that point.
So now you’ve got your video blogs that you’re still doing, with some research and presentations. The videos you put together, I enjoy watching those quite a bit. I find them really fun and interesting.
Yeah, it’s been quite a fun and there’s been some great collaborations there. And again, it’s keeping the target audience in mind. Who’s the audience here? Is it for recreational people? Is it for operational people? And trying to communicate that. I really enjoyed learning how to put together a video? I’m still amateurish and I think everyone under age 30 is better at editing videos than I am, but I really enjoy it immensely and the collaborations that have come with it. I’ve slowed down a lot on the on the videos, but I’ve got a few on the back burner right now that are moving to the front burner, with some really key collaborations I’m really looking forward to.
What are some topics that really interest you these days?
Well, the ski cutting was a fascinating one. I think that’s run its course, but that that was super fascinating, both the surveys and the results of that.
Avalanche size. I think our widespread underestimating of avalanche size is a concern. We are developing more systematic techniques for estimating avalanche size, either by saying, ‘Could the deposit fill a hockey rink?’ which is one video I’ve done and some talks I’m doing; to making better use of the other columns for avalanche length and deposit volume as it’s done in Europe, or deposit mass, as it’s done in Canada. And so those are hot topics for me.
I’m also working on some animation, starting last February, and they’ve been a lot of fun and really quite successful. I have got a lot of good feedback about the animations, even though they’re cheesy and amateurish. The feedback is really quite positive.
I now have a video project with Karl Birkeland, and hopefully I can get Ron Simenhois to comment on, just explaining our current understanding of how dry snow slab avalanches release, and reach a fairly wide audience with that one. And then I’m also talking to Simon Horton about a two-part video on surface hoar, both the formation and the modeling, and the general kind of high-level decision guidance for surface hoar.
Interesting. Before I move on to the last two questions I just want to check if there’s anything that we didn’t cover or that you wanted to bring up that I missed asking about?
Ummm, no.
The penultimate question is: what do you think has been the biggest achievement of the CAA over the years?
Oh boy. I think there’s been so many. They’re representing avalanche workers to government, to employers is huge. Developing the industry training program where it’s now a leader internationally and recognized. I think the competency-based membership is pretty important. And the InfoEx is a success. It’s just so much a part of the way we do things in its workflows. But also the bridge that originally Peter Schaerer built between researchers and operations that I hope I was a part of. I see those as being some of the big contributions, but I have a hard time picking any one of them as being the most important.
And then, looking to the future, what challenges do you see that the association will face and how do you think the CAA can meet these challenges?
Well, the CAA’s been a leader in a lot of avalanche operations and training, but there’s now so much going on elsewhere, both internationally in the States and Europe, that I really think they have to actively exchange ideas internationally. And there are a couple of years that I think the CPD sessions in the spring meetings were apparently weak on international exchange of ideas. The last year-and-a-half have been a whole lot better, but I think to be a leader, we need to actively exchange ideas internationally.
Another challenge I see is professionalism. On one hand, we have developed this really good system for training and it’s really well suited to seasonal avalanche workers. We have maybe, I don’t know 15 classroom days in there, but there are some external expectations that could change that. There’s this need from employers, from insurers, from the public, to reduce the rate of incidents with serious consequences, to get that really, really low. And how do you get really, really low with the current training program for seasonal avalanche workers? I think you get there and you keep the experience basis, but I think there may be more need for more science and understanding the phenomenon, understanding of the database decision support, understanding of the more science-based the decision support.
If you look at other organizations, that to be credible internationally or credible with the government and with employers and whatever, they’ve gone to equate—I mean engineering requires an undergraduate degree. Both in Colorado and now New Zealand, they now have one or two long-term courses that don’t shortchange the experience, but they do substantially increase the classroom learning.
There are these external expectations from the insurers, that I think there’s going to be pressure coming. And how do you do that? How do you ramp up the science and the understanding of the limitations of our models and methods at the same time our ski areas and our society need some quite affordable seasonal avalanche workers? I see that as being a huge challenge.
Alright. Anything else?
No, no, I think that’s that.
Well, thank you very much for your time, Bruce. I really enjoyed that. That was a lot of great information. I learned a lot as well.
Yeah, thanks Alex. and edit freely. I appreciate that, and it’s a great opportunity. I think the history project is really, really important and I’m glad to be a part of it. And thanks for the heads up. I had the chance to make some notes of some things I’d forgotten, because 30 years ago was a long time.
That’s a long time, 40-plus years in the industry. It’s a lot to remember.
Copyright © 2023 Avalanche Journal