Steve Blake worked in Visitor Safety in Jasper National Park for 20 years, including over 15 years as Visitor Safety Manager. He was the President of the Canadian Avalanche Association from 2005-10. He is a CAA Avalanche Professional and ACMG Mountain Guide. He began his career in the industry at Lake Louise in the mid-80s, where he worked as a ski patroller and was part of the avalanche forecasting team. He joined the Jasper visitor safety team in 1994 and became manager five years later. In 2010, he was awarded the Medal of Bravery by the Governor General of Canada for his role in a daring rescue of two alpinists trapped on Mount Robson two years earlier.
Here is the transcript of our interview with Steve Blake:
My name is Alex Cooper and I’m here on behalf of the Canadian Avalanche Association’s Oral History Project. For the CAA’s 40th birthday we are speaking with the former Association Presidents and key staff to help preserve the CAA’s rich history through the eyes of those who worked to make the CAA a world leader in avalanche safety and professionalism today.
I’m joined here today by Steve Blake, who was President of the CAA from 2006 to 2010. He was also the Visitor Safety Manager for Jasper National Park for many years. Thank you for joining me today.
Steve: Thanks for having me Alex.
What was your first experience with the phenomenon of avalanches. Whether it was something you saw on TV or firsthand yourself?
Steve: I’d say it’s firsthand. A friend of mine and I hitchhiked out to Banff from Ontario, post-university to explore life and find adventure, and we ended up in Lake Louise. I worked at Temple Lodge, which was actually right beside the avalanche program’s main office, so I got to meet all the park wardens and avalanche techs that were doing avalanche control at that point. It just sort of became part of the day, the conversation, what was going on with avalanches.
My first overnight ski tour ever was to Egypt Lake Shelter from Sunshine, and I was with some experienced ski patrollers. We ski cut a small avalanche on our way home and that really just …. there was no involvements, but it just pointed to that this was a real phenomenon that needed care and attention in the mountains.
I’m going to jump back a bit here. I see you’re from Grimsby Ontario. Is that correct?
Yes, that is correct.
So, how does the boy from Grimsby Ontario get into skiing and then end up out west in the mountains?
I fancied myself a skier when I lived in Ontario. Sometimes I’d go six or seven times a season to the local ski hills, which are actually golf courses in the summer. It was really that post-university trip, I ended up, in the day, pre internet, we were at the Employment Office in Banff looking for jobs, this was me and Mike Wynn, who will come up later, and we ran into a guy we went to university with who worked in a pub. We were quite good friends with him and he said, “Come to Lake Louise, we’ll get you jobs in the morning”, essentially.
We took the train to Lake Louise, got off there, met a few people and applied for work and ended up working at Temple Lodge, which is in the heart of the mountains. That was really what introduced me to the whole ski mountain life and of course the avalanche world as well.
You went to Trent University and have a degree in geography and environmental science?
Yes, that’s correct. Yes, unintentional, but I established myself for some of the doors that opened for me, they were inadvertently paved with some of the things I did before I got here. That was really helpful when I got into the Visitor Safety world, or public safety as it was called at the time for the Parks Service.
What was your job at Temple Lodge?
Oh, wiping tables, flipping burgers. There was a couple of us that were pretty keen to get out and ski and because we lived there, it was awesome. We could just tell the boss, “We will clean, we will do the whole place top to bottom, starting at 4:30,” and then we would leave from lunch rush, say two, and we’d get two hours of skiing in before the lifts closed. That was my first introduction to people who worked on their skis—trail crew, ski patrol, and so on and really get introduced to the life in the ski business at that point.
So, flipping burgers to saying, “Wow, people put their ski boots on first thing in the morning for work here. That’s seems pretty cool, I should try to do that.”
How did you get into the ski world?
I won a coin toss for a position on the trail crew in Lake Louise. That put me into working on my skis and that was trial by fire. Because we’d be skiing down the summit of Lake Louise carrying big roles of slat fence, you needed to be a good skier, so my skiing progressed quite dramatically during those couple of seasons on the trail crew. Then I got into the ski patrol side of the business, and I was there in Lake Louise during the transition when the Park Wardens did avalanche control to where the ski hill took it over as an autonomous unit. So, I was part of the inaugural avalanche safety team.
Part of when the ski area took it over, I was part of the safety team that started then. Even when the wardens, there was still ski area staff that were techs on their team, but the forecaster was no longer Clair Israelson, Park Warden; the forecaster was a staff member from Lake Louise. I was part of that whole dynamic change period in the late-80s, early-90s.
So you were on patrol at Lake Louise when this change happened. Were you doing avalanche control work?
We transitioned to that. The patrollers weren’t typically involved specifically before that, and this became part of the greater snow safety program.
It was literally Clair in the orange coat, park wardens that did the avalanche control, and they had half a dozen paid ski area staff that were the techs that worked under their guidance, but they were very distinct from the ski patrol when I first started, and that all transitioned. We all became one broader snow safety team, so it was an exciting time to be in Lake Louise.
You mentioned getting into backcountry skiing during this team. How did you get started there?
Again, we lived at Temple Lodge. The one backcountry access we could get to, we could ride the one chair, the Larch chair—this is very specific now for those who know Lake Louise—but we could ride the Larch chair and hike up and ski an uncontrolled powder area called Purple Bowl, and we could time it that we would get last lift and do Purple Bowl and come back and clean bathrooms. That was the introduction. One run there was worth it.
Did you have any avalanche training at that time?
I think it was my second winter when I took my first avalanche awareness course. Fuzzy detail from back then, but it was early in my time in the mountains when I took my first course.
The peer group that I landed with, many of them had been there longer than me so they were mentoring me along just by their enthusiasm and saying, “We need to take this course”, so I probably got in there earlier than I might have otherwise, just by virtue of the folks I was hanging with.
So you are on Lake Louise ski patrol during this time when it transitioned to taking over the
avalanche forecasting. Reading your bio you eventually became an avalanche forecaster at Lake Louise. How did you grow into that role?
Well again, it was early in the curve, so I was part of the forecasting team. I was never the capital “F” forecaster. I had forecasting duties through my career, but I don’t want to overstate it though. I was never the boss so to speak, I was the senior lead hand if you will. Taking a Level 2 program at that point and being involved in daily avalanche forecasting was definitely solidifying my interest in pursuing a career in the mountains.
Your pay started to become reasonable, and you could see that there were opportunities outside the ski area realm for avalanche forecasting. It’s a real discipline and that was becoming clear to me at that time.
What interested you most about avalanche work?
It’s outdoor work; it is an extension of what I studied in university. Studying geography, atmosphere weather and climate weather was one of the programs I took. I just didn’t study snow science, but just the weather, the natural systems were all part of my history educationally. Then, seeing these jobs, working on skis, doing this kind of work, throwing bombs—again somehow it just made sense to me that this is something that I find very interesting, very enticing and it seemed very real too.
I mentioned my first brush with an avalanche was we ski cut a small slide as a group coming out of Egypt Lake, but I remember it was a bartender or someone in our circle of friends that was killed in an avalanche near Bow Summit at the time. That wasn’t close to me, but it made it more real. You’d speak to this again as a legitimate profession and, whereas when I was flipping burgers and sneaking the last lift in, or even ski patrolling, which is a true vocation, they were great, but it seemed like to get into the avalanche discipline was to take life on skis to the next level of commitment, to learning to being a professional, to growing, to providing a service of safety to the greater public—a lot of the things that seemed to answer the call for me.
For sure. Through your time, you spent some time at Lake Louise and then eventually you joined the Warden Service. Why did you make that transition or shift to that line of work?
When I was flipping burgers, it was the guys in the orange coats, the public safety uniform, which still persists. It was like “Wow! That’s a cool job!” And I just started to learn more about it. That was the first time I lived in a national park, so there was a whole eye opening there. To see the mountain rescue program, summer program, you’d see the wildlife management program. This all fit right in the wheel house of my formal education, but also in my interest, so I got to know these guys enough to request ride-alongs in the summer to learn about that job.
My first warden posting, and I’ve mentioned Clair once, but I’ll mention Clair again—I got a letter in my mailbox, an envelope in my mailbox at Lake Louise, with the warden recruitment poster and it just had a sticky note on it, and it said, “In case you’re interested, Clair.”
I’d applied before and got screened out. I was still very new to the whole scene of applying for those kind of jobs, for one, not having that much practical background. This one I got days before the competition closed and I applied, and I ended up getting posted in Jasper on that. So, a six month summer season in Jasper and six months in Lake Louise. That was a pretty glory-day situation for me.
You ended up full-time in Jasper?
That’s right. So, I got married and had kids. I should do it in the right order—had kids, got married, then got a full-time job in Jasper. Jasper was a nice community and it seemed like a great place for my wife and I to raise our children. I got into a warden position that was in the public safety field, so doing avalanche forecasting for the national park on the public bulletin side and the highway program. So that just made sense, bopping back and forth as a family man was getting little tougher to juggle at that point.
Was your home in Jasper at that point, is that where you made your home?
Yes, we were still officially in Lake Louise and Jasper was kind of the satellite office so to speak, but it became obvious that Jasper was …. Parks Canada, were going to offer me a little bit more opportunity and it seemed like a better foundation to move forward.
I mentioned in our preamble, after I left being President (of the CAA), I only left because I was done, because I was timed out. I was still really enjoying the whole thing. When I left Lake Louise as a forecaster and ski patroller there, senior player, it wasn’t like, “I’m done.” It was more like, “Man, I love this job!” I think this next one is going to give me a little bit more of a long term, but I left sadly because it was a great place to work, we had a great team, and a great group of people to grow with, to learn from. Jasper made sense for a lot of reasons.
That Visitor Safety job seems really interesting with a mixture of avalanche forecasting and avalanche control work and then mountain rescue. I don’t know what else you got up to, it seems like enough.
Yes, one of the opportunities that came with that is I got to train through the whole ACMG program and became a Mountain Guide in conjunction with my time in Jasper as well, and that opened a lot of doors, and created a lot of opportunity for me to ascend through the ranks, to leading the mountain safety program in Jasper for a decade and a half, or whatever it turned out to be, 15 years.
Was being a guide something you wanted to do or was that something you did for the sake of your job in Jasper with Visitor Safety?
That’s an interesting question. Being a guide, I would say initially was secondary but a lot of the people that I was sort of peering with and that were my early mentors, they all had that on their radar. I was looking more the mountain rescue Parks Canada way to go, rather than being a heli-ski guide or so on. But I started doing that, I got introduced to some—I got to climb and train with Tim Auger a lot, and I got to work with Sylvia Forest, and I got to work with Clair again and his brother Gerry—all these mountain guides who were Parks guys. It all made so much sense to go down that path. Parks Canada is a great organization, and it has bureaucratic realities that make it hard for a lot of mountain guides to do that. So, interestingly for me, I was probably reasonably suited to be a bureaucrat, but what allowed me to have the legs in that program was I could take a week off in winter, for example, and go guiding, work for a small company, and just be out doing essential mountain stuff.
It was very refreshing to me, the guiding opportunities that came out of that. I needed to be a guide to hold my job for Parks, but I needed to be a guide to want to stay with Parks because it just kept the whole mountain lifestyle just so much fresher than strictly to do it, to view it through a Parks lens. I’m not downplaying it, but I think that was one of the reasons that I was able to have the longevity in there. That was a full reset for me when I got to go out and do a week of summer guiding or a week of winter guiding. That’s essential mountain time.
Yes, go out and ski some powder with guests for a week. I saw you were ski guiding. Did you heli-ski? What aspects did you do?
I was cat-skiing and heli-skiing and working in different places. I was a bit of a vagabond there for a few years for sure. Ski touring, hut-based stuff, doing summer guiding. All that rounded out this sort of kept me close to my roots in the mountains, but also it supported and helped me keep my enthusiasm up for the Parks work.
When did you start getting involved with the CAA?
I was a keen attendee of the meetings. I always thought the CAA, their Spring Conference was an exceptional venue for exchange of ideas. I did a couple of talks in the early 2000s before I got on the Board and they were very satisfying to me, just to be up there talking, exchanging ideas. I did one called, “Considering Considerable,” which was sort of a fun talk. I took credit, I suppose, as the author, but I was more the spokesman for all the interesting conversations that we had over beers every night of every annual meeting or conference week, talking about this theory, talking about this thinking, this philosophy, this view. So, I tried to pull some of that together for the Considering Considerable talk.
I did a fairly raw talk on the top 10 reasons why you don’t want to have a workplace fatality due to avalanches, which was all related to Mike Wynn.
Again, that was important work for me at the time. I was the program manager at the time. He was the guy I hitchhiked up to Banff with in the first place, to tie the ribbon together, and then he died and I was the boss, so that was very hard for me on many levels. So, from the CAA perspective, to be able to talk to our people, my people, and lay out there the seriousness of this work as a reminder, that was really important to me to do that at the time, and valuable for me. And I think it was well received by the membership at the time as well. I suppose delivering a couple of poignant and well-placed addresses like that to the group, someone got an idea that I should be part of the Board, and that led to that.
I was going to ask about the Mike Wynn avalanche, especially now knowing that he was a friend of yours. I was going to bring that up later, but maybe we can talk a bit about that incident and how it impacted you. It was January 2002 and maybe you can take it a bit and say what happened and the fall out.
Again, Mike and I basically thumbed our way to Banff, got jobs. We worked at Temple Lodge together. He was a Park Warden, we met at university, and as we studied together. He became a Park Warden in the Prairies, and I went back to Ontario after our first winter in Lake Louise.
He kind of forged the way to getting me into Parks in the warden world specifically, but we had a forecasting…
His story is we had a forecasting team out doing snow study work around the Parker Ridge area and they were caught by an avalanche that came from quite high through the trees and buried or caught all three people. The one that was partially buried got the second person uncovered, saved their life because he was not fully buried, but his head was covered up. Then they got to work and got Mike out, and he survived for several hours before succumbing to his injuries. He had a two-year-old son at the time, and kind of as heart wrenching as an incident can be, to lose someone that close to you.
He was just… I was away one summer-I’m totally digressing—but I was away from Parks one summer, the summer he started in Jasper. I was on some work assignment so, I wasn’t there when he showed up, but I facilitated, arranged him coming to Jasper.
When I got there, I was just blown away that he knew more people, had better friends in the Parks Service in three months, than I had for being there for 10 years. He was just that kind of guy. That accident, it had a high degree of impact on Parks Canada, from an internal perspective. From a worker safety perspective, there was a new Canada Labour Code, which was the nationally focused labour laws that had a lot of teeth. So, there was so much uncertainty what the outcomes would be.
I was putting all our cards on the table for the investigation. I was putting all my efforts into caring for our staff, and Mike’s family and so on, in terms of critical incident stress management—the follow-up and everything that needed to take place. That purpose was really helpful for me at the time, and I can tell you now that I under-emphasized the impact on me, and that did have some spin-off, negative spin-off impact on me down the road, but it redoubled my commitment to enhancing avalanche safety at the same time.
I know Mike got tons of joy from being outside and the activities we did together over the years, paddling the Nahanni when he was a Park Warden there, the ski tours we did, the canoe trips, the mountain biking, endless sources of joy being out in nature. I just knew that he wouldn’t want that to be written off for his family, for anyone. That message of, “Be in nature, do cool things,” had to persist and so the avalanche safety part just became again, super important for me to maintain and to keep that message alive in his memory, but for our greater good.
What would you say were the big changes that happened afterwards, within Parks and even within the broader industry?
It was followed soon after by the Strathcona-Tweedsmuir avalanche in Rogers Pass so some of the things probably get quite blended together in terms of the broader avalanche awareness and safety picture. But by all means, Parks Canada definitely refocused or focused its hiring practices around specific levels of certification. The ACMG credentials that I talked about having, they became entrenched in sort of policy rather than nice-to-haves for many of these positions.
There was also the Al (Evenchick) and Al (Munro) avalanche that happened—two men killed in a B.C. highways avalanche—and so a lot of the occupational health and safety changes that were emergent, I would say from that one, became very solidified in practice following Mike’s death. Check-ins, and types of terrain you go to, and the types of teams you go with, and the radio comms, and the checks and balances even before you undertake field work. It really became more formalized following that. We started avalanche safety plans.
Again, this was all happening in reasonably quick succession, but the need for avalanche safety plans from WorksafeBC, that’s a worker safety initiative, and I think again, the Rogers Pass accident, and the two Als and the Mike accident, these were all leading us up to kind of converting avalanche profession, to a profession. Really tightening it up in terms of how we do that work. Kind of take it out of strictly a gut and a black art, but turning it into formalized, structured approach to doing the work. These were not the sole events that converted us to that approach, but they were definitely catalysts that helped accelerate moving the whole profession along, I guess.
You also mentioned about the critical incident stress management, and your own PTSD, if that’s the right term. How cognizant were you of that fall out. People talk about that a lot today, and there are a lot more programs today, but is that something you thought about a lot afterwards?
Oh yes. The word I twigged on was how cognizant was I of that is very interesting. I was absolutely intellectually aware of what was going on and what needed to be done. It took me a long time—I will say 12 or 15 years—to understand, to take it from just the intellectual part to connecting the emotional layer and turning that into one factor. Because for Parks Canada we did lots of critical incident stress management training. I was instructing on that and peering that and leading that and bringing in paid psychologists and advising others on it. It became a sub-speciality of mine, but it was a cognitive specialty for me. Excellent coordinator, excellent trainer, excellent purveyor of information, but it took me a long time to personally reconcile the head and heart, the gap between those two items. That had a long legacy and I still, to tip my hat to Mike, he taught me lots of lessons when he was alive, but he still teaches me lessons today.
Thanks for sharing this. I’m sure a lot of people will listen to this and take it to heart and reflect on their own experiences.
I think moving on back to your role at the CAA which is where we were before we started talking about that, you took over as President from John Hetherington who was President for a year in 2004-2005, and then you came on when he decided to move into a different role. How did you get asked to be the President?
Bill Mark was the President before John, and he and Clair were doing—Bill was in the role of leading the CAA through the development, starting the CAC, had all the recommendations post the Strathcona-Tweedsmuir accident. Bill was an excellent leader, and the year that I said I would be on the Board, I wasn’t able to make the meeting and Rupert Wedgwood, who was my second in command in Jasper was going. I said, “If they ask me to run, tell them yes, but I just prefer not to be elected President at a meeting I’m not even going to be at.” So he came back and he said, “You’re going to be the Treasurer.”
John Hetherington, and I shouldn’t tell his story, but he stepped up to be President because there was a vacancy. But after the first year, Bill came to the two of us and said, “John has all the ilk to be the best Treasurer that we’ve seen, and I don’t want to do this self-deprecating part, but Steve you do not have an ilk, but you would be a better President. Not a better president, but you would be a good President.”
That was one of the behind-the-scenes decisions that the three of us made. I think that was one of the coolest and most selfless things for John to do and say, “That makes perfect sense.” The strategy behind it and the selflessness was super inspiring. That’s part of why I was so committed to the organization in the first place, because people felt like that and behaved like that. It was excellent.
I talked to John a few months ago and he told how he had stepped in as President, but he felt he was better suited because with his background in budgets and that stuff for the Treasurer role. It’s good to see you step up and fill that void, to take it on.
That’s a pretty—tumultuous probably isn’t the right word, but there was a lot going on around then with the start of the Canadian Avalanche Centre. You are running as President of both the CAA and CAC at the same time, and there are two Boards that share members, two sets of staff, and I think Clair was probably the Executive Director for both organizations.
He was.
What was it like managing, or not so much managing but overseeing all that?
It was very interesting, and I think the CAC, Avalanche Canada’s previous name, was new at the time because the CAA used to have a public safety mandate as well and an education program too, so in some ways it wasn’t different, but in some ways, it was definitely becoming much more complicated. We did this thing dubbed the Senators’ Summit at the time to help reconcile that thinking, because we had… The Canadian Avalanche Foundation was formed, I don’t know the year, but probably in the late-90s, and that was intended to be a charitable organization. They could fundraise legitimately, at arm’s length from the CAA, keep everything nice and clean reputation-wise and public-perception-wise.
At the time of the CAA/CAC and our training schools, it was all seen as maybe we are feathering our own nest a little bit here, so that was the whole purpose of the Senators’ Summit, to bring the collective wisdom of our organization together with a professional facilitator to try and get to the bottom of: Do we fit? Should we be closer? Should we be farther? Should we be distinct? At the time—and I know we evolved away from it, and that’s perfect, because we evolve—but at the time the message came fairly clearly that through the eyes of the public, there is one group of avalanche people, avalanche professionals in Canada. They run the CAA and CAC, and they administer the training program. That’s appropriate.
So having that, and that’s when we also came up with, and it wasn’t part of the Senators’ Summit, but to be a leader in avalanche safety became our vision. And as much as sometimes those vision statements can be too big or not specific enough, that statement just helped us guide things so much when we had these Boards looking at things through different lenses.
I know at the time we weren’t cross-purpose; we were collectively looking forward at how to do things in a leadership way that would be world worthy. To be working with those teams, it was more inspiring than it was challenging at the time. And again, I was not on the Board when Avalanche Canada became its own entity, it always was legally its own entity. I think it served us well through the next era, but at the time we were all so dedicated and enthusiastic with our own interests.
I think the public bulletin stuff is super awesome and I want to put energy to that. That’s CAC. I think working on our internal standards for professionalism and developing the—answering Worksafe BC’s call for enhanced professionalism, avalanche planner process and things like that.
Others would just say that’s my jam, I see the benefits, so again, around the table we were all able to, just to move us along nice and steadily through that challenging time.
When I look through the notes—and I really want to focus more on the CAA side, even though they are so intertwined, this is for the CAA History Project—one thing that I noted in the Summer 2006 issue of, it was still called Avalanche News at the time, the Active Member category had been approved, and I understand by talking to John it took a couple of tries to get that approved by membership. The Active Member category—do you remember why that was introduced and why you had felt that was important to have that extra category?
There were a few reasons for that. I think we wanted the organization to be a bit more inclusive, the Association, and we had a whole tier of players out there dedicated to the avalanche profession that didn’t satisfy the Professional Member criteria. The thinking of Avalanche Planner was also starting to be introduced. What’s the next level? So we started thinking that tiered membership would be good, gives us a bigger voice, gives us a membership pool, and a product of that is dues and fees to feed the cash flow of an evolving organization.
And a lot of it fed, now this is CAC side of things, because we were very intermeshed at the time, but the Recreational Avalanche Program, we really were trying to make it accessible and as successful as possible, and that instructor pool was small. If you had to be an Avalanche Professional to teach the entry level avalanche awareness courses—the RAC courses at the time, the AST now—we were not going to meet demands. We didn’t have snowmobile instructors that were Professional Members at the time, so creating a recognized membership level that came with qualifications helped that. That was one of the motivators too; that’s a bigger instructor pool. There’s always the push-pull when you are trying to teach people—what’s enough, what’s too much. But at the time, we needed more. But the sweet spot is the philosophical position, an educational position. I’m not sure that we’ll ever know, but for sure we knew there was a deficit in the instructor pool, so that was a big motivator for having a recognized level of a credential to teach that wasn’t specifically an avalanche professional.
Also, it becomes a stepping stone to becoming a Professional Member. Is that part of it?
Yes, that’s right. Yes, you’re a member, you’re part of the team. You attend the workshops, the meetings, you peer, you mentor, you get exposed to this group, and we become a more inclusive organization, we have a bigger pool. There’s a lot of great thinking and great energy and involvement that having a broader membership brings. That was also part of the thinking at the time.
The other big thing I see—lots was happening then—but the big thing that seems to dominate the publications then is Worksafe BC comes out with regulations for working in avalanche terrain and who’s qualified to do that work. That seemed to be a dominant issue. What is a professional avalanche worker? Who’s qualified? It was a couple of years before it was sorted. When do you remember seeing their first draft of what they put forward to you?
It was like a bomb dropped on us. Not that we were concerned that we needed to up the game, but we weren’t sure how to do that and it was there, it was the regulation. It wasn’t like, “Oh, here’s what we’re blue-skying down the road.” It was like, “Here’s where we are.”
If I remember correctly, we did some participation, some lobbying, some involvement in the consultations to try and steer things, but a lot of it was not negotiable. Some of the timeframes, maybe we were able to help influence, but that precipitated the Level 3 program and us trying to figure out what a Qualified Avalanche Planner would look like.
It took us into, “Here’s the regulation that positions us on the map,” something that we were trying to achieve for a long time, this recognition of being qualified people. But now it was like, “What does that mean, and what does that come around with?”
The CPD program, it didn’t start there, I’m going through vague recollections.
The CPD program had been around since the late 90s.
Yes, but it became sort of doubly important and it got a revamp at that time as well. It was a tricky one. It was very consuming, and this is where we were very fortunate to have someone like Clair as the Executive Director who worked in those regulatory circles from his time with Parks Canada. He was able to really be effective dealing with Worksafe BC and bring that back to us and put it into meaningful steps and processes that we needed to take to get us there.
To give background to the listeners, the heart of the issue is Worksafe BC, the initial draft said that a qualified professional had to oversee avalanche work and the heart of that is, that would be an engineer or a geo-tech or something like that, a geologist. Whereas you guys were making the case that, no, we have all these skilled professionals who spent decades, years working in avalanche work. That they might not be engineers, but they should be qualified to supervise avalanche programs.
Thank you for adding that because it all blurs together for me. Yes, that was the thing, there were going to be Avalanche Professionals out there, but they were all engineers. I don’t want to be too cheeky, but there were six of them. That was not going to meet the industry’s need for this leadership. And six, I’m being cheeky, there were several in our organization and they were leaders as well, and I think they were also quite vocal, those that were engineers and Avalanche Professionals, saying this isn’t going to work for the industry.
One of the interesting things that I saw what came out of this was development of standards for different roles; assistant avalanche technician, avalanche technicians, forecasters, and initially it was called avalanche program planner which I think evolved into the Qualified Avalanche Planner. That was a new title or designation that emerged out of this.
Yes. And again that was us trying to retrofit our organization, some of the levels of experience and the roles we had in the industry, try to retrofit and label them to fit into a regulatory picture. So a lot of it in many ways, it was nothing new for the profession, but we had to really articulate why it was profession. And so some of those stratifications of the technician versus forecaster versus planner, planner administrator almost, they needed to be teased out of a general grouping of professionals in a way that spoke to regulators. So that was a big part of us just trying to—I thought of it as retrofitting at the time because we had membership of immense experience and competence, but how do you, in absence of your engineer stamp, how do we make that claim? We did some cartwheels trying to get that figured out.
It seems like it was very important work to get done, especially when you have regulators. We talked about some of the worker fatalities that happened earlier in the decade, so to get in with the regulators and demonstrate the expertise and skills that exist amongst avalanche professionals.
It seemed to me that it was more of a catalyst. That put us into a higher gear around moving towards the professionalism, the credentials part. It was the direction we were navigating to, so in some ways it was a shocking timeline and an introduction of something by an external regulator that really, probably safe to say caught us off guard. But again, this is where we wanted to go, this is where we knew we needed to go anyways, so it just really amped up the pressure to do it soon and do it right.
That move towards professionalism, that’s been an ongoing thing through all my interviews I’ve done, and research for this series. The shift, the increased professionalism is something that is still ongoing, the competency-based program has been introduced, the latest phase I guess, and it’ll be interesting to see where it keeps going.
Yes, I would add that it’s an interesting use of language too. Professionalism has always been top shelf. It’s the recognition and the articulation of that in a way. The engineer has a stamp, so that’s like a symbol of professionalism. We didn’t have that in the avalanche profession, in the CAA. The players like high-end professionals, never a question. So, it wasn’t doubting our own people and their capacity, but it was, how do we articulate that in a meaningful way, and in turn compel our members to meet or exceed these expectations and maintain them? The CPD, which started a decade earlier became critical at this point in demonstrating where you’re at as a professional.
Another thing that I read that came out of this was the avalanche safety plan became a requirement for workplaces that worked in avalanche terrain or were in avalanche terrain. I thought that was an interesting development where this all ended up.
Yes, that could also be called an Operational Safety Plan, your OSH plan, your Occupational Health and Safety Plan, that was very specific to avalanches. Where the avalanche planner title came in, was, “Who says that our organization is doing stuff up to the standards? Who can sign off on a plan?” So that where it became a planner. That became the link between the title, the pinnacle of your credentials being someone who could endorse another work places work practices around avalanche safety.
It became a big deal, and all of our process at the time, because you were being extremely specific about avalanche safety elements. I think most places now that have an avalanche safety plan, which is still a requirement, will be more woven into a broader occupational health and safety program, which is a good place for it. These things don’t exist in isolation from one another. At the time, it was, “We want to convert you from working at this level to this level, to convert you to work through this level, and you do it at this planning process and someone with this credential is going to sign off on it.” That’s a big ask, but it wasn’t a casual request. It was a directive, so we tried to step up.
That was the Worksafe BC regulations, which were the biggest issue you were dealing with, and I guess the Canadian Avalanche Centre and funding for that was ongoing. What else do you recall as other key things that were happening during your term as President?
One of the ones which was really interesting was the Avaluator was published and being integrated into our avalanche safety training for the public. It got a high degree of academic scrutiny by several players in Canada and elsewhere, and that was a really complicating or challenging time for us too. To be accused, sort of, in peer-reviewed journals that we were conducting experiments on live human subjects without their consent, by using incomplete data for the Avaluator. That was the claim, so that really also—I use the expression—put us through some cartwheels. That was really hard to get at, get our head wrapped around.
We had a collaborator on that who was an independent researcher from the U.S., and in Canada, because our funding sources often came from the government, our data was always open source. “You need to show us your data.” “OK.”
One of our key collaborators was a scientist from United States and his data was very proprietary because that was his livelihood. We had this real push to pull of transparency and openness, and I won’t fault either, but the government gives you money to do research, and your findings are totally public, but if you fund your own research, well you have a little more interest to keep it yours because that allows you to fund research and you generate your livelihood out of your results and so on. I just remember that was a super complicated time as well, and stressful. Again, I talked earlier—we’ve lost friends and loved ones and we’re dedicated to this task of enhancing avalanche safety, and then a group of academics just trying to fully dismantle some of your prized work and calling you unethical and so on. It was a pretty heavy burden at the time.
How did you resolve that?
Basically, we carried on. We hired independent scientists to evaluate our methods. We reacted to it. Academics are different culture than I’m use to because I think crying foul for someone’s conclusions is maybe part of their culture, but it was definitely odd for us. We hired some professional people to review what we had put together to make sure that it met the public interest, and we were able to confidently move forward, and it just created stress and work and head scratching as how to solve those problems.
The Avaluator is still used in recreational avalanche courses today, so I guess what you did worked.
Yes.
So, while you were President Clair Israelson resigned. Interesting to know that he was one of the people you looked up to when you started out west in your career. Then eventually you became his boss, per se. When Clair stepped down how did you manage that?
Yes, when I started in Lake Louise, Clair was the head of the avalanche program. He was a key member in the CAA, a key instructor in the CAA. He was one of the gurus at the time and well noted for that. To get my tip for the job opening that brought me a whole career with Parks Canada.
It was different coming in to be Clair’s boss. He still mentored me in that role quite a bit because he was the Executive Director, so I was designated by the membership to be his boss so to speak. The Board had one staff member basically, and that is the Executive Director and he looked after staff below that.
It was a really good positive time, we had all these challenges and having Clair in the seat, he was very capable at managing that. I think what was happening when he decided that he was at the end of his tenure, the toll of being called out with the Avaluator, the toll of trying to rush through—not rush through—but really expedite avalanche safety plans, avalanche planners. Not everyone in the membership would see things that way. We were doing the best with the resources and our brains and our teams could bring us, but it doesn’t mean it was without feedback and criticism. Just after those hectic years, that’s when Clair just decided, “I think I might like to be a ski guide again.”
It was a tough time. He was, again, super professional. He took some time to do some contemplation about how he wanted to move forward, put Ian in acting behind him, and then when he made his final decision, we respected that and moved on from there.
And then Ian Tomm was hired or promoted I guess to replace Clair.
Yes, and that was good because he was a senior player and so he was ready, and because he had acted, backfilled behind Clair when he took some leave, he was ready to start and at that stage. We just thought that was better than going to an open recruitment process because we were running full-speed, so needed someone that could catch up with that pace pretty quick and Ian was the guy that was positioned to do that.
So, your term as President finished in 2010. Did you time out or did you step down? I wasn’t sure.
I timed out, I probably had, because I was on the Board as the Secretary/Treasurer before that, so my time on the Board was up. I think you could be President at the time for five years, or on the Board for five years. It seemed like I’d only been there for four, but I had my previous Board year which was counting against me. I timed out, I left, I was happy still, sort of fulfilled by the work and still enjoying it. I was amazed how I was able to step away, because it was a very big part of those years for me in terms of my whole life. Lots of hours, lots of thought, lots of heart went into that time.
Yes, balancing that with being Visitor Safety Manager in Jasper and then also doing guiding work on the side. That does seem like a lot of demand. You had family at home, so I imagine you probably wanted more time at home.
Yes, that was probably bittersweet for them. That’s self-deprecating. Every time I made the move to be less busy, I think that was a positive benefit for my personal life for sure.
I want to talk to you about the Mount Robson rescue and the honor you received for that. It just seemed like quite the dramatic achievement, an impressive achievement, and a great honor. Maybe it’s a good thing to end on something with a happy ending, or a happier ending. So, what’s the story that led up with that rescue on Mount Robson in 2008.
So, there was these two climbers—I forgot the story—I think they met on the bulletin board at MEC and got connected. They wanted to do the North Face of Mount Robson, spring ascent. They got two thirds of the way up and bad weather set in. They probably open bivvied for at least one night, kind of getting spin drifted, pretty hammered there. They decided to jettison a fair bit of gear, thinking getting to the top would have their problem solved. There’s no easy way up Robson and there is no easy way down.
By the time they got to the summit, they were pretty spent, so they ended up snow caving and spending about a week on the summit. By now, we knew that they were there and overdue, but we were hampered by… It was just awful spring weather, rain and snow up high. We weren’t able to get anywhere. I think it was the Sunday morning and we’d seen on the weather radar this little slice of blue crossing the region, so we had a couple hours of clear skies and we got to Robson and headed up in the helicopter.
We—I’m not trying to be defeatist—but we started out at the bottom looking around for avalanche debris, the first signs that they may have been swept off because there was so much new snow. And then we got some view. We were still battling clouds and fog, but got some views up high and we were able to climb through the cloud layer, and the peak of Robson was just like a pyramid sticking out from a sea of white. So, we thought, “Okay this is good light. We will start at the top and work our way down.” Within minutes we were able to see these two guys on the south face. They were sitting on this ice feature, like a dormer on a house just sticking out from the face.
One guy was laying there, fairly incapacitated, the other guy was just standing beside him with two basically ice tools in and holding on. I saw one of them first and thought, “There’s one of them so maybe something happened to the other.” But then I said, “No, they are both there.”
This is awesome when you have been waiting around four or five days in bad weather and you see you have two live people you can try to rescue. It also ups the ante, because now you have everything to lose. So, we set up for the helicopter long-line system and I had a very clear idea I guess of how I wanted this to go. I knew they were both wearing climbing harnesses and I talked to the pilot and said, “I think if I just go and clip them both in on two lanyards and we just fly out, it’s a descent for you. The 407 staging area is low enough. Three people is not too heavy, so we’ll just go do that. It will take moments.”
So, we fly up there, and this is quite high, a couple hundred feet off the summit, quite high up there, fly up there, see them both. This is excellent. Come in. What I failed—when you are on the helicopter free-flying, you hear it but you’re not in a real down draft because you are forward flying—but when he came into the mountain face again, so now he’s up against the roof of the house, the downdraft is tremendous, because he’s sort of hovering, and so all of a sudden I’m in this tempest of a blizzard of the rotor wash.
The one guy beside me, I clip him into a lanyard, and the helicopter drops two or three feet. It’ss probably almost indistinguishable for the helicopter, which was hovering at 12,000 feet, but drops a bit. This guy comes flying off the dormer. He’s all clipped, so he ends up hanging next to me where he’s supposed to be. I could see, I think he probably hit his face on my helmet when he came over. I’m not skewered by his axe or crampons so I’m feeling pretty good.
Then we still have the rotor wash and down flow. I go to the next guy and clip him in and as I’m looking, now we’re down a little bit lower and they’re tied together, and the rope is now tied around the snow feature, that dormer on the side of the house. The rope is wrapped around it like a giant ballard. So, it’s like “Oh my!”
One of the last things, I had a knife as part of my personal kit, but it was under my outer layer and the last thing Garth Lemke, one of our CAA members and has been an instructor for a long time, he said, “Do you have a knife?” and I said I do, but mines a little bit buried.
So, I had his knife handy, and I cut the rope between the two of them and we flew, we just sort of drifted away, and then we’re 5,000 feet off the ground all of a sudden because we are out over Berg Lake circling around. They’re both clipped in and everything’s good.
Alex, are you a climber? Do you know when you tie in short rope style?
I’ve done a little bit but I’m not that experienced.
Sometimes, when you tie in on a short rope, you take some coils and you just tie an overhand knot because you’re tied together, so the overhand knot is a slip knot, but it only gets tighter because the person’s on the other end. But I’d cut that rope between the two people.
I couldn’t remember, because this was all happening pretty fast, if they were tied in that way, and I was just clipped into their ropes. I just had this awful vision of this rope sort of slowly unravelling because there’s just tails flapping in the breeze of this cut rope. I had this awful vision. I hope I didn’t cut the middle out of the slip knot. I had clipped them in eight ways to Sunday anyway, because you’re just not trusting one clip at this point. Plus I hooked one guy with an ice axe and held on to the other guy’s backpack thinking, “Well, if they start losing ground, at least I’m holding them,” whatever that meant. We landed, got them, they walked into the helicopter themselves and refused an ambulance ride at the bottom, so they were fine and that was a great save.
To throw in the gratuitous story. So this for me was a serious rescue and if a lot of times I dealt with lots and lots of fatalities over the years, and usually what I’d feel like mostly when you’re done, you’ve done CPR on someone, or you’ve packaged someone up that’s been killed in an accident, usually, I just want to get home and want to wash up, have a shower, kind of get clean of the whole experience.
In this case, we won so to speak, it was a great rescue, but I still felt I think I just got away with something, and I really just need to go home and have a shower and clean this experience off of me. I was home and talking to my wife, who was working in Hinton that evening, just telling her what went on. But then my rescue phone went off again and there’s this couple in Jasper that had got cliffed out on a day hike. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon and dispatch is able to put the phone through to me. “We’re on Mount Morrow,” which is like literally a 45-minute hike from the valley bottom to the top, “And we’re on this ledge and we haven’t had food or water since noon.”
And all I could think of was, “Well maybe we should come back next Wednesday and see how you’re doing.” But we went and did the most benign rescue of my career that afternoon.
That just provided me with a nice balance of thinking everything is balanced in the universe. So quite an ordeal, someone observed it in the end, the pilot deserved some recognition, and applied for that, and it was a great honor to be recognized that way by the Governor General.
It was a Medal of Bravery. That’s quite the story as well. Having that one … obviously you’ve dealt with a lot of rescues, or I should say recoveries. Obviously, they are different situations that don’t have that happy ending route where you take them home and watch them drive away by themselves.
Yes, all frostbitten and haggard, and we’ll drive ourselves to the hospital. That’s not great judgment but at this point our work here is done.
I think, I have two questions left, but before I ask those two questions, we’re asking everybody, I just want to see if there’s anything you want to talk about that I might have missed, related to your career in the avalanche industry.
There is one story. I was involved for six years, five years as President. We talked about the highlights and the challenges and how we surmounted them, but I do remember one story, or one situation and I guess I feel compelled to tell it.
I led and signed off and presented to the membership a document in the mid-2000s that was like an ethics thing that said, “We as members are ethically bound to support the Association, and not do anything to undermine it and not get into competition with the Association” and so on. It was just…
I bring it up because it was almost like an anti-competition interpretation of our bylaws that said you can’t work against the interests of the organization, and I did it so well meaning and so earnestly to protect the best interest of the Association, which is your assigned duty as President. It was one… The push back was really quite interesting because it was right around the era of the notion of open-sourcing was where collaboration was going to be optimized in the world.
I bragged earlier that we’d always be open-source with our data when we did research and stuff because we were usually government funded, and it was part of our obligation. But in this case, I was really trying to hold the organization in such high regard, and we had to all protect its interest. And I was pleased that we were able to remove that, to withdraw that whole policy piece, but it was an interesting conundrum at the time. It was a swing and a miss. It was well intentioned—let’s just be clear that we can’t be in competition with ourselves, with the organization of who we are members—and then it’s like, “But this is where innovation and creativity, we ought to not stifle that.” It did take me awhile to get my head around that. I was pleased to undo some of my own misguided policy as well as a highlight.
The membership pushed back respectively, appropriately, and in some ways my misguidedness wasn’t what our members… I was pleased that we as a Board were able to rethink things earnestly and say, “That’s probably right, we are probably barking up the wrong tree here.” That was a funny little, I don’t know of anyone, I’m sure some will remember because they are the ones who wrote me, to say, “I think you’re misguided.” But that’s a memory I have anyway and I thought I would share with the history record.
Okay thanks for adding that one in. I didn’t know about that so that’s great to hear. A little humility is great. In your opinion what are the most significant achievements of the CAA over the years?
You sent me that one, so I ought to have prepared better for it. I think the CAA, if I was to say what the achievement is, the ultimate achievement is, is the drive for professionalism. We’ve had to reach milestones through Worksafe, through CPD, through membership categories but like I said earlier, that drive for professionalism always existed and the inclusivity, you know, that we could collaborate with academics, and highway avalanche forecasters, and foresters and engineers and ski area folks all at the annual general meeting and conference, and just share ideas and be truly dedicated as a community to enhancing avalanche safety in Canada, I think is the measurement. All of the regulatory and administrative hurdles were real, but they were surmounted by that drive for professionalism, cultural professionalism, not for administrative reasons. Just part of who we are and why we want to do good work and work together to do it.
Great. Okay, you said after you were President you stepped back from the CAA but just to wrap things up, looking towards the future what challenges do you see the CAA will face and how do you think the CAA can meet the challenges?
They’re going to meet the challenges the same way I just waxed on about, because the people behind it are just so top shelf and so dedicated to making sure it all works. In terms of the challenges, I don’t know what the key challenges are going to be. They all seem to be evolutionary challenges. We went from an organization where the Board of Directors were the working people, they put pen to paper, to where we grew to where we needed an Executive Director to administer that and now we have staff.
It’s one of those milestones that comes with all kinds of challenges. I suppose I haven’t been sitting at the table to be pondering what the next challenge we need to meet, but I’m confident we will meet or exceed expectations when it comes, again, because of the people and the approach we bring to addressing these challenges.
Thanks so much Steve. We’ve talked for over an hour and a half, so I think it is a good time to let you go. I really appreciate your time, your stories and your perspective on the CAA and the Industry and everything you’ve done so thank you very much.
I couldn’t list all the people I would shout out who were on the Board with me who were thinkers and advisors at the time. If anything happened good when I was President it’s because of the membership and the Board of Directors and the staff, Clair and Ian that made that all happen and I was just the herder of cats that helped pull it together, but I would thank everyone that I got the pleasure and honor to work with. And to you today, Alex, this is awesome, and I’m glad we are doing this project, it’s excellent and I’m happy to be part of it.
End tape (1:25:02)
Transcribed by Susan Hairsine July 25, 2023
Transcribed by Susan Hairsine, August 22, 2023
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