Clair Israelson’s history in the Canadian avalanche industry dates to the early-70s, when he worked in visitor safety for Parks Canada. In 2001, he was hired as the Executive Director of the Canadian Avalanche Association. Following the tragic winter of 2003, he helped establish the Canadian Avalanche Centre (now Avalanche Canada), while also overseeing the growth of the CAA as a professional organization.
Here is the transcript of our interview with Clair Israelson:
Hello. This is John Woods on behalf of the Canadian Avalanche Association oral history project. As the CAA approaches its 40th birthday in 2021, we’re speaking with former association Board members and staff to help preserve this rich history through the eyes of those who worked to make the association a world leader in avalanche safety professionalism. Today, Friday, December 13th, 2019, I’m joined by Claire Israelson in Revelstoke, British Columbia. Thank you for joining with me, Clair.
Claire Israelson: You’re welcome.
I’d like to start, Clair, by asking you about how you became interested in this whole field of avalanches and avalanche safety.
I got hired by the National Park Service in 1971 and discovered, to my amazement, that they were looking for people to work in avalanche safety programmes that were evolving and starting to develop at the ski resorts in the Rockies. And so, I spent the winter of 1971/72, which was a landmark avalanche season working for the National Park Service, out of Yoho Park monitoring and controlling avalanches that affect the highway and the railway. And, it was like a light went on. It was like, here’s this fascinating work in some of the most interesting conditions on Earth, I’m getting paid to go out and go skiing and ski touring and collecting snow data and trying to do some kind of analysis on it, at a time when not much was known about snow and avalanches. and there certainly weren’t very many technical standards to be applied. So, I fell into it because I got hired as a national park seasonal warden and they kept me on for the winter to work in the avalanche programmes.
So I take it you’re a skier, a backcountry skier before this.
I was a downhill skier, ski resort skier. Ski-touring was something I’d never done until I got to the National Park Service. It opened a whole new world to me.
So you go right back to that earliest time of the Parks Canada development when things were already going on in Rogers Pass, but it was beyond that.
Things were going on a Rogers Pass because of the construction of the Trans-Canada Highway and Rogers Pass quickly became the lead operation for avalanche protection in Parks Canada. The rest of the operators of the ski resorts and Jasper and Banff, tried to adopt as much of the technical material as possible from Rogers Pass. Some of it was applicable. Some of it wasn’t because the Rogers Pass was focussed more on highway and railway protection, but we took what we could use and adopted it as best we can for our uses and so that’s how I got started–thrown into it over my head, green kid from this city. I thought I’d hit the jackpot.
So the big avalanche paths at the top of Kicking Horse Pass were your territory?
Yep.
When did you see your first avalanche?
Oh, that winter is 71-72 because it was the one in 100-year snow winter. And so, we’d go heli bombing and see these massive avalanches taking out 200-year old timber and covering highways and railways and taking out buildings. And, it caught my attention!
Well, that’s really trial-by-fire isn’t it, because that particular winter was ‘The Big One.’2
It was ‘The Big One’. We haven’t seen one like it since.
Some get there.
But not quite.
What a remarkable time to be getting into the field (of avalanche protection).
And knowing absolutely nothing. Just, you know, we were hired because we could ski a little bit and knew nothing about avalanche forecasting, knew nothing about even data collection. All of that had to be learned. It was a fabulous time to be thrown in over your head!
Were there any close calls for yourself personally with avalanches?
Not at that point in my career. At that point in my career I was terrified. I’d just hide. Stay in safe places and usually be under the supervision of somebody else who knew more.
You were in the controlled releases.
Yeah, you bet.
Other than being in the helicopter?
I wasn’t even in the helicopter. I was blocking traffic on the highway. Somebody with more seniority than me was in the helicopter throwing the bombs at that time.
Can you take us back then? You’re working in the Kicking Horse Pass area for national parks stationed in Yoho, can you tell us about your interest in joining with others in the Canadian Avalanche Association that goes beyond your (day-to-day) job?
Well, in 71-72, I was a seasonal warden and this was termed winter employment. A year later I was hired full-time to work in Banff, as a fulltime national park warden and it was noted that I had an aptitude for the mountain safety and avalanche-related work.
I had an interest and they were looking for people just like me who would be willing to do this kind of work because all the rest of the crew were old folks who were from the Second World War who were retiring. And they had no interest in skiing. They had no interest in forecasting avalanches. They had no interest in doing much other than trying to stay comfortable in their trucks. That just wasn’t what they were what they’d hired on for. And so, the National Park Service had to hire a whole new crew of young guys coming in who would be interested and willing to take on this kind of work because they realized that it was coming, that those programmes had to take off and had to be done properly. And so, there was Keith Everts and Tim Auger and myself and a few others who kind of got pushed into this avalanche related work. And we were thrilled to do it. We thought it was the best job in the world. And as we started being assigned responsibilities, I got assigned responsibility for the Lake Louise Ski Area and the highways and railway through Kicking Horse Pass and up to Banff-Jasper Highway avalanche control there. I got thrown into that after only a couple of years of experience reading a thermometer and had a desperate need to try and learn more from as many people as I could. And that’s where my interest in sort of collaborating with other people came from. And that was the role that the Avalanche Association came to serve when it was incorporated in 1981.
How did you make that connection into this fledgling Canadian Avalanche Association?
Well, we were a pretty small group. You know, we all knew Peter Schaerer from his work at Rogers Pass and with the National Research Council. Peter was kind of the glue that held us all together. He’d make a little tour every winter and come by and visit every one and try and offer encouragement and technical hints here and there about how we might do things better or to a more standardized mechanism. We had Willi Pfisterer from Jasper Park, who was a public safety specialist there, whose winter skills were exceptional and he would take us out and teach us winter travel safety and, you know, all of that kind of operational moving around skill, safety skills. And so, we were being mentored by these older folks in the industry but there were only a few of them.
And those of us who were kind of being pushed into the frontlines came to know each other through those connections that we made through Willi and Peter and to a few other folks. And we just simply maintained those connections and started asking each other: when you’re faced with this kind of a problem, what do you do? How do you do this? How do you do that? We would travel to each other’s operations and try and learn what we could from exchanges.
And it kind of started creating this community that expanded outside of the National Park Service itself and came to involve people who were involved in highways operations. BC was getting into the game then in the mid-70s. So, it involved people in BC Highways, it involved some of the people involved in heli-skiing. There weren’t many people who are making their living then ski-touring, but the combination of the National Park Service ski resorts, outside of the National Park Service across BC, the highway people, the guiding community, we all started creating this informal network of people who had similar issues and were looking for a second opinion.
How did that lead to your involvement with what would eventually become the CAA in the larger sphere?
So, in 1980, Peter Schaerer and Willi Pfisterer convened a meeting in Banff of stakeholders who would become the founding members of the Canadian Avalanche Association.
And that was basically an investigative meeting to see what the common issues were, what the commonalities were, and what kind of role an avalanche association might serve in Canada to facilitate future well-being, future growth, technical standards and that kind of thing. And at that meeting, we decided that we should form an association. Some draft bylaws were created by Peter Schaerer that went on to be incorporated as a not-for-profit society in BC called the Canadian Avalanche Association.
So, that meeting in Banff then, that was one step ahead of the incorporation of the association formally, in a legal sense?
Yep.
And then you became members of that association.
We all became members of it, so the first meeting was held in Vancouver, I think in the spring of 1981. I’ll have to check that.3 And basically, the goals of the association were outlined and talked about and some basic mechanics set in place about annual dues and that kind of thing. You know, the usual kind of structural stuff. And the key Board members of the association at the time were of course Peter Schaerer, Geoff Freer, who played a very major role in support of the CAA through its early years, Willi Pfisterer and Fred Schleiss4. And then there was attendance from a broad cross-section of the ski areas, highways, guiding community, the main people involved in avalanche protection at the time. Pretty much all the operations were represented because everybody saw that there was going to be a need for this kind of technical communication and standards development and that kind of stuff.
So you’re right in on the ground-floor…?
Yep. I was there, I was there for the first meeting.
And your experience then, correct me if I’ve got this summary incorrect, your experience was because you were isolated, you folks decided you need to have a mechanism to work together, communicate together–an association would facilitate that.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And that was the vision that Peter had when the idea first had been talked about and it had been talked about for a long time for at least five years previously. There had been discussion within our community about the value of some kind of formalized association to represent the cross-section of avalanche-related, avalanche protection in western Canada.
So then you became a member?
I became a member. Yeah.
Before we pass over the ’70s early 80s, there were some avalanche courses being offered?
There were avalanche courses that were being offered. They were primarily fronted originally by the National Research Council through Peter Schaerer and supported by Willi Pfisterer from Parks Canada. And so, the two of them were offering some basic training opportunities back in the early 70s. And it became too much for them and training the quote unquote ‘the public’ from either provincial agencies or from ski resorts or other work, wasn’t really seen to be in their domain, to be in their jurisdiction.
And sometime during that late 70s, they became associated with BCIT5 and there was a fellow there named Gary Walton6, who (was)…the guy that basically put the CAA training courses on a professional track.
He worked for something out of BCIT called Extension Services, and their time, or their mandate at the time, was to take training to industry rather than bring industry to Burnaby.
And so Gary found all kinds of money to invite those of us who were, quote-unquote, kind of the ‘leaders’ of the time, together to train us as instructors and so introduce the concepts of having learning objectives for a course and particular goals for a particular lesson and how those goals might be presented and the theory of learning.
And so every fall there’d be a whole bunch of us, that was basically the who’s-who of the avalanche industry that would gather at some location, often Creston, for a week of instructor training that was funded by BCIT and taught by instructors from BCIT.
And that kind of set the level of professionalism for the training courses offered through BCIT. BCIT was the umbrella under which the training courses were offered. The instructors were people from the industry who were deemed to have appropriate expertise to be instructors.
These instructors from the industry then would be CAA members, largely if not totally?
Right.
CAA members were providing the expertise? BCIT was providing this methodology?
The structure and methodology.
That’s really, really interesting.
And it worked fabulously until BCIT changed their strategic objective around this kind of what they called ‘extension services’ and said ‘no, actually you know, these guys are doing okay now on their own. We’re going to change our focus and do something different.’ And so that funding dried up.
So where are we now in years?
Early 80s… The ink had just nicely dried on the papers of incorporation (for the CAA), and BCIT was telling us ‘we’re getting out of this, somebody else is going to have to do it.’ And after a few…feeble starts and stops with other academic institutions, a decision was made sometime in the mid-80s that the CAA would take on the training courses as a standalone registered private training institute.
CAA training schools had to come then to fill the gap.
So your audience for those early schools, your students, who were they?
They were folks who were being hired to be ski patrollers at areas that had avalanche risk. They were park wardens. They were BC highways avalanche technicians, lots of guides, guiding was taking off big time, heli-skiing was booming and all of the employers realized that it was in their best interest to have some specialized training for this avalanche work that they were being–actually not because they wanted to get into it, (but) because they had to get into it either for social or economic reasons. They had to have quality programmes and that means that there had to be some mechanism for good training programmes for their staff.
In those early days, how did you communicate with each other?
Well, in the early days, it was by phone and face-to-face. FAX 7hadn’t been invented yet. Computers hadn’t been invented yet, so there was no email. And so, we would phone, we’d talk to each other face-to-face. And that was one of the reasons that these get togethers, either the instructor training sessions that were held through BCIT and later through the CAA, all of these became opportunities for exchange between people who were looking at different sides of this very complicated problem, were trying to figure out how they could best do their individual jobs when they went back home again. And so, it was this fabulous place where you could meet everybody you wanted to talk to at one place and have a beer.
And those early days, where were they being held Claire?
The instructor’s meetings would be held in various locations depending on the year, but the instructor training was often held in Creston simply because we had access to Kootenay Pass as a site to work from, and then occasionally they’d be held in places like … it seems to me that some were held in Banff, it seems to me that some were held in Whistler, it seemed to me that Rogers Pass might have been a venue for some of these meetings as well, at the hotel there. But I’d have to go back and check.
So the details we can look up. But it’s interesting that what I’m hearing is the members, the CAA came together and the early members many times became the instructors, that evolution, the network that was being created.
Yeah. And so, the training schools were one of the first real deliverables the CAA came through with, and remains a key function of what the CAA is today.
In the mid-80s, computers came on the scene and showed up in national parks.
They did. It was pretty primitive.
Right. But I assume in the evolution, of course, of communications…
Communication changed, first with the FAX. I mean, back in the 70s, there was a heli-skiing accident out of Golden (BC). Seven people were killed8. There was an inquest. The inquest recommended that the industry operators should find a way to talk to each other, to share their observations and conclusions, to avoid being blindsided by a condition that a neighbour had recognized but they may not have yet. But we didn’t have the technology to do it. We had to wait until the FAX got invented.
And once the FAX got invented, then the CAA could start to serve as this basis for, or the core, the coordination centre, for what has become known InfoEx…
So the earliest mechanism was the FAX for this information-sharing of, I take it conditions, events, incidents?
Yes.
So that gave you an electronic way [to]…
It gave us an electronic way to communicate with the operations in the field. So, there was someone hired who is the InfoEx technician and he sat here in a little office in Revelstoke. Everybody would FAX in their observations at the end of the workday. This person (the InfoEx technician) would have to then transpose them, retype them into a proper format. Correct spelling and syntax errors and that kind of stuff. And pump it all out again so that everybody had it waiting for them when they went to work at 5:00 or 6:00 the next morning.
So this FAX would go to all the members of the association?
It would go to all of all the subscribers to InfoEx.
So that term InfoEx, that was present then in those earliest days?
We somehow found that label fairly early in the development of it.
So busy highways, outposts in Smithers (BC) and all these places they were on this…
…the national parks, the ski resorts, the heli-ski operators…
This professional network,
Yes.
So individuals would make their observations. FAX (the observations to) InfoEx, where they’d be collated and then redistributed to all the subscribers of the service.
Yeah.
It’s interesting, the FAX machine version and the InfoEx version.
Oh, for sure.
Historically I find that really interesting.
And it’s interesting, I continued to work up at Northern Escape9 with one of the first of the InfoEx technicians. And he was just a young ski bum, he was a kid who loved to ski tour and this was a great way for him to afford to stay in Revelstoke for the winter. So, he’d ski trip for the day, come into the office late in the afternoon. Read and type, accept and type, all this stuff. Pump it back out again. Go home. Get up the next morning. And go ski touring again.
Who was that?
Owen Day. And he still works as a heli-ski guide up at Northern Escape where I was working last. But that was where we first met. He was one of the InfoEx technicians.
So you would call them the InfoEx technician? …
InfoEx tech.
So what years are we at now? Late 80s?
Late 80s.
We have Owen Day. The FAX is coming in, the compilation going out. And then what happened?
What happened is the internet.
And it quickly became apparent that the internet had tremendous benefits over a FAX machine. And with that came then the need to develop electronic standards for InfoEx, for this technical exchange. And of course, we’d had something called OGRS10 prior to that. Observation Guidelines and Recording Standards: OGRS.
OGRS had been developed to help us with our paper and pencil record-keeping and had to be slowly adapted to work for electronic communications.
So the OGRS. They were another product of the collaboration through the CAA?
Yep.
So just to make sure I have it clear: the OGRS are so everyone measures the snow correctly?
OGRS had their origins with Fred’s (Fred Schleiss) handbook out of Rogers Pass. And then it got worked on by Peter Schaerer. And then that group was expanded to include representation from the various industry sectors and has been periodically updated ever since.
And so it’s the Canadian technical standard for snow, weather and avalanche observations. How those observations get taken and how they get recorded. And that’s been one of the main benefits that the CAA is brought from day one, this technical standard for professional communication.
It’s in the common language, so when you read somebody’s report, you have in your mind’s eye, what they’re really saying because you’ve all agreed (to standard terms)?
It’s our common Latin.
So then, Owen Day, he’s there and it (InfoEx) evolves into the computer world.
It starts evolving into the computer world. And at that time, and again this is going to be late 80s, we didn’t have an executive director. There was a working Board (of Directors) and the Board came up with all the ideas and then shared out the work among the Board members. And so, it was very much a working Board at the time. When InfoEx started and the schools were starting to require some administrative support, it became apparent that this was too much for a volunteer Board. And so, under Chris Stethem, I believe under Chris’s presidency, the first Executive Director was hired. I don’t know what he was called at the time. I don’t know what his official title was, but that was just at the start of the internet. And one of the things that this new hire had to do, Chris Whaley11, I think was the first one. And so, Chris Whaley, one of his skills was he was computer literate, whatever that really meant at the time. But that was really before the Internet had much power. But it was already recognized that there needed to be a technical digital management capacity at the CAA.
So then it turns into something that people can look up on their computer screens. They come back in from the field, go to their terminal, log in, and they’re logging in because it’s not an open network, it’s a subscription network that only connects professionals to professionals. So now that it’s appearing on the computer screen…how did that transition work? [Claire Israelson confirms throughout]
The FAX machine moved to a computer. And so, there was someone named Chris Whaley. He was hired early on to help with that transition. And then there was another fellow out of Whistler and he didn’t last long, I don’t think necessarily he liked being based out of Revelstoke. And then they hired Evan Manners. And Evan Manners was a park warden out of Jasper who was a bit of a computer geek, and he really led the electronic evolution of the CAA in the early years prior to my hire there. And so, Evan was the key guy that kind of started setting up systems. I’ll never forget one of the first things he said when I hired on, he showed up at the office, he said, we have to get a computer domain name. And I said, what’s a domain name? And he said, well, it should be avalanche.ca. It’s going to cost a little bit of money, but it’ll be worth it. And I had no idea what that even meant. But clearly, he did, and we did get avalanche.ca and it’s still working well. [He was] just the kind of person you want…I didn’t have to understand it because he was great. You know, he really understood the potential for electronic data transfer and how valuable that could be for our industry.
How was the network growing in those in those days? Did everybody sign up at the start and they keep signing up, or was there more and more use of this?
More and more operations found themselves signing up because they didn’t want to be left out. They recognized that it was an evolving operational standard, that it was part of their social contract with their customers or clients, whatever they were, to offer high quality avalanche protection services. And this data sharing and data management capacity was part of that. And so, operators got pulled in whether they really thought it was going to make a great difference or not. They signed up because it was becoming the de facto technical standard for operations in western Canada.
Was it interactive in the sense that if one of the forecasters had a question?
No.
It wasn’t interactive in that sense?
No.
If they want to know more about something, have to do it separately?
You’d have call them and say, hey, I was reading your InfoEx feed and I saw this. What do you think it means?
But they would all know each other? So, the connections were easy. It’s wasn’t part of [InfoEx]?
We all knew each other. We’d would all meet each other at the spring meetings. We’d had these fabulous technical meetings in the springtime in Penticton [BC] and where everybody would get together and share their war stories and try and make plans for next year to do a little bit better.
So the InfoEx then took you way beyond Kicking Horse Pass in terms of what you were learning?
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
Because we realized that these avalanche patterns came across western Canada with the weather. And so we would see storm patterns and avalanche activity patterns coming from the west or the southeast or from whichever way the storm was advancing and so we would know that our neighbours in that direction would see things a little bit ahead of us and be able to give us a heads-up about what we could expect.
So in those earliest days of InfoEx, InfoEx is communicating with the professionals. What is CAA or related organizations doing with the public? ….
Public avalanche forecasts had become common in the States [USA] by the early 90s. We had started public avalanche forecasts for the National Park Services, both that Rogers Pass and through the Rockies. But those weren’t available for all of British Columbia. There was nothing available for British Columbia. When the public found out, when it became common knowledge, that the CAA was hosting this InfoEx thing, that gave them an overview of all of the operations across western Canada and where we can start to see trends developing and start to be able to make some predictions around if-this, then-that, will come by tomorrow. The public started calling the office and so one of the big things that Alan Dennis dealt with was people calling the office saying, “we know, you know what is going on in the backcountry, tell us what’s going on so we can make better choices and be safer.” And so, that’s a pretty strong moral obligation. And of course, Alan did the best he could. He started putting out bulletins, I think prior to the weekends for the southern interior, for the Selkirks for the Purcells. Eventually it spread over to the coast. And so, they started putting out these very cursory public bulletins. [They] had no real mechanism for distribution, had a very, very sparse data network compared to what’s there now. But it was a start and the public demand started on the CAA then in the late 1990s, especially for there to be a public bulletin, sponsored by the CAA.
Now that was a little bit outside of the CAA’s letters of incorporation that hadn’t been foreseen at the time as a product that would come from the CAA, but with the blessings of the Boards of the time, it started to happen. And that set us up then for asking for some funding from the BC province, which happened under Alan’s watch [Alan Dennis] and the province came up with $20,000 a year to help in the production of these public bulletins. The interesting thing that happened then was that British Columbia elected a new conservative…liberal…government, I can’t remember they’re all the same, and then they cut the funding for the $20,000 of public funding…cut by the provincial government when they took office in the fall of 2002. And I happened to be at the CAA then, and had to deal with the minister involved, Rich Coleman, about what would happen going forward in terms of public forecasts and public accident prevention programming, in the light of this reduction of this $20,000.
Of course, the history that winter was that [00:40:23]25 people died that winter…the [2.8s] winter of 2002-200312 and avalanches became a news story. Avalanches were kept in the news by this friend of ours, who is a reporter for CBC out of Kelowna, her name is Mohini Singh 13 and Mohini is one of the unsung heroes for her work in keeping avalanche forecasting and public accident prevention programming in the news through that winter in the seemingly unending stream of accidents. Now, Mo was married to one of our members and so she had the inside track and she’d call up and say ‘what would be a good storyline…’. But she kept it in the news. And by the end of that winter, after the accidents, ski-touring here out Revelstoke, after the accident with schoolkids at Rogers Pass, after at least 10 other fatalities across the province that winter, the BC government was publicly obliged to do a review around public avalanche programming and in British Columbia, and they commissioned that review headed by Ross Cloutier14, the following summer, and from that came the foundations in agreement to create what’s now Avalanche Canada.
As a related organization?
As a subsidiary organization focussed entirely on public accident prevention.
So that’s quite a wide mandate that includes more than press releases?
Absolutely. Yeah, you, bet.
So we have then this creation of Avalanche Canada, is this a decision of the Board of Directors or did specific funding becoming available to make this a reality?
It was supported by the Board of Directors and had been for years. From the time of Alan Dennis starting their first public bulletins through the CAA this had been supported by the Boards, all of the Boards of the day, as being something that was in keeping with just good public service, an obligation to the public from those working in industry who knew more.
So we have these bulletins coming out of the office in Revelstoke. So how did they get out? What was the mechanism?
FAX and eventually the Internet.
(Would they be in the form of) bulletins or press releases?
They would be in the form of just a little one-page text thing. It was all words, not nearly the beautiful communications capacities that’s there now where it’s all distilled down into pictures and graphics that are very, very complicated but simple. You know, it was very primitive, but it wasn’t terribly good as a communications vehicle, but it was the best we had and it was the best we knew what to do at the time.
People were dedicated to it?
People became to be dedicated to it… after the winter 2002-2003…that produced the funding that allowed that to happen.
So at that point then, you have the CAA and under the CAA, you have the Avalanche Canada or…?
Well, it wasn’t called Avalanche Canada then. It was incorporated as the Canadian Avalanche Centre. We wanted something that was national in scope. So, it was incorporated federally, not provincially. And it was incorporated under a concept that was developed with funding from the National Search and Rescue Secretariat. We asked them for operational funding and they said, sorry, we can’t help you with that, that is outside of our mandate. But we can hire you some good people who are specialists in corporate governance. And, so the summary of their reporting was that we should structure the Canadian Avalanche Centre as a subsidiary of the CAA for a period of time until that [the CAC] organization developed some kind of maturity in terms of Board governance, in terms of programming, in terms of staffing, just to get it up and get it through adolescence. And then the conclusion or the recommendation from this group of consultants was that at that point in time, the by-laws should be revisited and this should no longer serve as a subsidiary organization of the CAA but it should be a separate and standalone organization with a different mandate–a public service mandate rather than industry-support mandate.
What I was thinking of as Avalanche Canada you were saying was [originally called] the Canadian Avalanche Centre?
That’s how it was originally incorporated…Avalanche Canada is the mature version of the Canadian Avalanche Centre.
So let’s just go back to InfoEx now. I just want to make sure I have this clear. We have this InfoEx information going out to all the professionals for their professional work in avalanche safety. But then, there’s individuals who are looking at that (information) to create some kind of a public summary?
That was the whole concept of the original avalanche bulletins issued from Alan Dennis’s desk.
So there’s somebody that know who is looking at this information and he’s looking at a much wider geography and thinking of how to…
He’s looking at the patterns.
So one of the users is directly taking that and becomes an interface with the public.
Yes.
InfoEx continues to be…
InfoEx is the data that all of this public forecasting is based on. And still is. Without InfoEx, none of the public bulletins would be able to function as they do.
Where does the journal come from, the Canadian Avalanche Journal?
Prior to formation of the Canadian Avalanche Association. So, Geoff Freer was the newly-hired head of the snow avalanche section for BC highways. And he said, “I’ll use my situation at BC Highways to publish a newsletter for the Canadian avalanche community”. Originally, Peter Schaerer had done that, but his funding at … the National Research Council, his funding there was drying up, his chair and his position there was being terminated. He didn’t have the money to do this or the time. And so, Geoff volunteered his services to produce this thing, publish it and mail it around to everybody that was on the mailing list. And so that was from the very get go. There was a written document that came around, very primitive at the start, but would come around several times a year that would kind of summarize events and happenings and successes and challenges for the avalanche community in this nascent Canadian Avalanche Association
This is just incredibly interesting, how this all worked, over time. It was very much responsive to need, but we haven’t talked much about training. Can we just go back a little bit? We’ve got the InfoEx happening, but what was the CAA doing for professional training and how did that interface face with the public and how did that carry-on?
So the professional training had stemmed from the early earliest courses in the 70s that were put on by Peter Shearer and Willi Pfisterer. There was a demand for that training that continued to grow in national parks. Willi, held little in-house training sessions for the park wardens that I was part of and many others were as well. But there kept being this demand from outside. And so, as you mentioned earlier, the CAA training schools were established first through BCIT which put them on the map and gave them legitimacy.
And they were recognized as being very intense and very high quality with good structure taught by people who were active in the industry. And that level of professionalism continued to grow. And we looked around the world at every place else. Sort of, how did training occur? Where, who was doing something good? And if they were doing something good, we would shamelessly steal it and adapt it ourselves.
And there were some strong education committees and some strong individuals who were focussed stand in on the need for good professional-level training, for both entry level and later for a level two, now a level of three–different tiers of training within the industry…And so, people Colani Bezzola15–strong, strong member of the Education Committee, Phil Hein, among others, just a couple of names that pop to mind, but real leaders in developing and encouraging these professional-level training programmes.
And over that period of time, from the early 80s through until the early 90s, these training programmes became to be seen as an industry credential for workers, that was strongly supported by the employers.
They establish specific levels of, basically competence.
Yes.
So level one, level two and then eventually a level three.
Yeah, for sure. And all the while, people like Janice Johnson16, who is highly influential in the education programming. She started out working for BC highways, got bored when she hit the glass ceiling, for a woman, and went to UBC and became an expert in adult education. And so, Janice kept carrying the torch ensuring that the instructional concept, the educational theory, was being delivered at the highest level possible. And so, these became very, very widely known courses. And the next thing you know, there are people from other countries who are travelling to Canada to come and take these training programmes because they can’t get anything like that in the States or in New Zealand or in Europe or wherever else.
By the early 2000s, other countries were approaching the CAA, asking to either adopt or import our schools’ programming so that countries like New Zealand, countries like Japan and now CAA training programmes have been to Russia, they’ve been to Europe. They’ve been to South America. And we’ve had people from those countries coming here to take those programmes. So, all of these streams, the three main streams that the CAA has done, about technical standards, about communication, i.e. InfoEx, and its spin-off into the public bulletins and in terms of technical training, all of those three main core values have been there from the very outset. They were needs back in 1981 and they still are. They’ve all continued to evolve and progress and advance. And they’re all recognized around the world as being absolute leaders in that kind of avalanche safety programming. InfoEx now is being taken up in the States and in Europe. I used it when I was working down in South America as just simply a database. Wherever you are, you can log in. And so, I think that’s the real story about the CAA, is that it started very modestly with very immediate goals that were tangible. And over time, its proceeded to evolve those programmes to be recognized as being world-leaders in each of those areas…The training schools are still widely subscribed and have shown no sign of slowing down. You know, InfoEx and all of that. I mean, InfoEx was a big enough deal that a company out of Alberta volunteered a million dollars to rebuild it. And spent that money as a way of demonstrating to the oil patch what they were capable of doing with data management. And so, they said, ‘you’re a nice little not for profit, you’re doing good stuff and you don’t have the money to do all this, but we’ll will foot the bill for you to entirely re-engineering that whole dataset.”
Have other countries developed something like InfoEx, say for the United States, right across the border here from where we are?
Yeah. It’s being licensed. They’re licencing InfoEx.
Their licencing your system for their needs?
Absolutely.
Oh, that’s really interesting. They didn’t try to reinvent it?
They’re using the structure. They’re using the data management capacity of InfoEx that’s at a very high level. Why re-invent the wheel? The wheel is already there.
So around the world then?
Joe17 would be the person to talk to now about where that’s at in terms of its international reach.
And the training, just to go back here, there’s another stream, that isn’t the direct responsibility anymore of the CAA, it is (the responsibility) of Avalanche Canada…
Yeah, the AST things.
Can you tell us a little bit about that? So, we’re now talking about a non-professional recreational user.
And so back in the 80s, Chris Stethem and I decided that it would be useful to have some awareness training for nonprofessionals. And so, he and I together made up a course outline that was published through the CAA for a level one and Level 2 recreational training programme that eventually what became known RAC, Recreational Avalanche Course. And those were developed with the sole intent of just basic backcountry awareness for people who were ski tours or out-of-bounds skiers, at ski resorts and those kinds of things. Chris and I started it off, then it kind of took off. More and more CAA members started doing this is kind of a community service thing or something for the Alpine Club or, you know, outdoor groups and that kind of thing. And as the demand grew of course, the demand came for better. And so, what started out as something very basic and quite primitive evolved over time with good people behind them into what became known as the RAC18 programme. And now it’s known as the AST19 programme, once that was formerly part of a funded stream of services delivered through what was then the CAC, but now Avalanche Canada.
So just to make sure that I have this correct…when these courses we’re now talking about, people like recreational backcountry skiers can take them. So, it’s a for fee course. And they’re doing it to keep themselves safe?
Yep. Because they realize that they need to know a few things before they head into the back country.
Which is a big job as well. I take it these are very popular courses.
Thousands annually. Thousands, and that programme is now co-sponsored by Mountain Equipment Co-op. Mountain Equipment Co-op wanted to sponsor that particular trail of training. One in 10 adult Canadians is a MEC member and MEC sees their members is a primary target for that kind of awareness training to go with the new gear they bought.
So just staying to the public access courses, the instructors for those courses, they would be certified in as professionals at some level within the CAA?
Originally, it was encouraged at they be CAA members and then came some more specific training and I think now there’s actually a little stamp you get that says that you’ve been through the instructor training and that you’re a certified instructor for these AST courses.
So, there is this standard that needs to be met. I’m not sure exactly what it is now. I’ve kind of been out of that for a little bit now.
But it’s very likely that the instructors for the public courses are both members of the CAA and also have one of the levels of professionalism through the CAA?
Yes.
So the CAA is still supporting it, but it’s now a brother or sister organization rather than an organization that it runs.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Now, we can’t forget the crossover here, also with the guide association20. The guide association was around before the CAA. It predates it.
This is different from being a member of the Canadian Alpine Club, there’s a guide association?
There is the mountain guide association. The Association of Canadian Mountain Guides that came into being in the early 1960s-1963 I’m guessing, from what I remember, ACMG also has a strong professional interest in avalanche safety and decisions of its members.
And so you also need to understand there’s been this strong support from the ACMG in support of the CAA. As a mechanism for an industry-wide approach for avalanche safety across western Canada.
So they’ve been a supportive partner or not directly linked in terms of…
Not duplicating services, but having input into the evolution of services.
Because of course, travel in the winter as a guide, avalanche skills are critical…
They’re huge and right there and the whole heli-ski industry which is a major employer.
To be a fully certified winter mountain guide, then from the Guides Association, you have to have a certain level of training?
A CAA professional membership.
That’s really interesting, that goes right back. It goes way back because there are a lot of the people you’re talking about, that would’ve been members of both.
Absolutely…The two have worked in complementary roles over the years.
So, that’s a very interesting story…just really fascinating the way you laid them out, Clair. I was going to ask you what the most significant achievements were for the CAA, but you just outlined the three main areas but would you like us to summarize what you’d say.
The three main areas for success have been technical training and education, the school’s, technical standards, the development of OGRS and the electronic data-management capacity that goes with that and communications within the industry, having this ability to know the people so that you can pick up the phone and call them and say, hey, you know, are you seeing this or are you seeing that or I’ve got a problem, have you got any ideas on how I might deal with it? And so, those were kind of the focus areas when the association was first envisioned by Peter and that core group way back in the 80s, the late 70s.
And that hasn’t really changed. It’s kind of stayed there. The public services stuff has now spun off to Avalanche Canada, as it should. And they’re doing a fabulous job although funding, I think, will always be a problem.
That might lead to another question that I want to ask you as we go through this, and that is, what challenges do you see the CAA, and we’ll throw in Avalanche Canada as well, what challenges will be facing them in future years?
I think for the CAA, the next big challenge is around professional credentialing. As society moves higher into the mountains across British Columbia, the risk from avalanches increases as use increases. And, relatively recently, WorkSafe BC has tried to write regulations around avalanche safety plans for operations. There’s a parallel effort going on within the CAA to develop competencies for the various types of avalanche work that is done in Western Canada and to promote those as a professional credential. Like geoscience. I think there are strong parallels to the avalanche community, where eventually there will be an equivalent of an engineer or an engineering degree that evolves with the specialty in avalanche protection. Now, we have some of that already and they’re fully qualified engineers but there are some areas that aren’t about engineering that are looking for the recognition of a more professional credential than just simply a professional membership. Where there would be some kind of college of professional practice.
So, just to paraphrase here, there’s more and more activity…so the stakes and the exposure and the risk is increasing. I guess everywhere where there’s increasing people in the back country, more people on the highway…
It’s the social licence for more standards, more professional credentials, for the people who are making life and death decisions on behalf of others.
One other thing Claire, I’d like to ask you. You’ve been a (CAA) member for a long time. What about other roles, like the formal roles, have you been a member of the Board?
I was a member of the Board back in the early 90s. I was hired as Executive Director. I think in 2000 through 2008, I served in that role…
Were you in Revelstoke?
Yes.
And then (you were) were on the Board prior to that and you continue to be a member?
Of course. I’m retired now. I don’t have to keep up my CPD21 points anymore I can let those lapse.
You can look at InfoEx?
I can look at InfoEx!
Is there anything else Claire that you think you’d like to add?
Of all of the organizations that I’ve seen and been involved with nationally and internationally in a bunch of developmental stuff related to mountain safety, it’s been the most altruistic organization that I’ve come across. The ethical standards and the level of community-first and my particular interest will fall secondary to that, but what’s best for our community, and taking those high-minded principled positions, I think is something that just sets the CAA apart from other organizations that have been part of. And I find that really quite exceptional. And it’s an intergenerational thing. It’s become a trademark kind of what the CAA stands for, is the kind of, do the right thing over the long term. So, good governance. Highly engaged membership and a relevance, you know, if it wasn’t needed, it wouldn’t be here. But employers need it, the workers need it. The members need it. And the association is doing great things and exporting internationally the best of our programming. So, I think it’s a pretty amazing achievement considering how small, and old boys ballcap it was, when we first started out.
That’s great, I really appreciate you taking the time and energy and putting up with all my questions.
Well, you’re very welcome.
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