Alan Dennis spent 50 years working in the snow and avalanche industries. He worked at ski resorts, mining camps, highway operations, film sets and more in Canada, New Zealand, Scotland, and South America. He was an early member of the Canadian Avalanche Association and was the Coordinator and Executive Director from 1991-98.
Interview by John Woods on Dec. 13, 2019.
John Woods: 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 are speaking with former association board members and staff to help preserve the CAA’s rich history through the eyes of those who worked to make the association a world leader in avalanche safety professionalism. Today, Friday, December 13, 2019, I’m joined by Alan Dennis in Revelstoke, British Columbia.
Thanks for joining me, Alan.
Alan Dennis Good to be here, thank you for inviting me. I feel honoured. I’m not sure I was ever actually a board member, but I was certainly very involved.
We included executive directors.
We would like to step back from the CAA for a moment and ask you about how you become interested in snow avalanches in the first place?
Well, I was born in 1948 in Malta, which seems like an unlikely place for any avalanches to happen. But my dad was in the navy and we travelled to the U.K., America, back to the U.K., eastern Canada, western Canada, finally settled in Vancouver when I was 10. And, I really just thought about snow on Grouse Mountain and kind of became a beginner skier.
After high school, I traveled the World, followed the ‘Asian Hippie Trail.’ Got back to Canada after three years away and ended up doing an Outward Bound course. And, that was February 1972, which you’ll also remember was the biggest snow season. ’71-72 was the biggest on record, certainly since Rogers Pass opened, and since then as well. It was a huge winter snow season. And, I was doing a winter course of Outward Bound, the second Outward Bound winter course. And, I became an instructor, student-assistant instructor. And, after a couple of years, I left…
Excuse me Alan, but where was that course held?
Keremeos. Keremeos Outward Bound is where Canadian Outward Bound started and just celebrated its 50th birthday. If the CAAs on its 40th, Outward Bound is a little bit older in Canada.
And then, one of the fellow instructors asked me to help out on an avalanche project. Before that, we’d done some limited-knowledge of avalanches ski touring, not realizing anything about them. Dragging a cord around, I think, attached to our waist and having a shovel mainly to prepare a tent site. But very little knowledge about avalanches until going and working on the Granduc Mine in northern B.C. in the fall of ’77. I’d done some ski traverses before that. At the time the Granduc Mine Road, in the private industry, was somewhat of a landmark operation, in that it was set up following that Granduc disaster in 1965 and had the full suite of kinds of avalanche control methods—artillery, heli-bombing—which may have well been the first heli-bombing approved or licenced in Canada, when Monty Atwater came up following the accident ’65.
From the states?
From the states. Monty Atwater coming from the U.S., and there was a Rogers Pass program was obviously going then, but it (Granduc) was a disaster[3]. They needed to bring in people very quickly and Monty Atwater, Norm Wilson, and others came up to set up a program for the Granduc Road. And, they introduced Avalaunchers, which were in their infancy as well. And so, that’s really how my avalanche career started.
And then I kind of became a bit of an avalanche gypsy working in different operations in New Zealand, Argentina, Scotland, and other parts of British Columbia, and came to work for the CAA in 1991.
Back to the early years for moment. You learn to ski, obviously, in Canada and then you did the Keremeos course.
I think some people might wonder if I actually ever learned to ski. But I skied at Grouse Mountain. They had the Sun[4] in Vancouver, my parents were immigrants. And my Dad came to Canada, really starting at the bottom of this little labourer profile. And there wasn’t a lot of money around, but there was the Vancouver Sun newspaper free ski lessons at Grouse Mountain. And, my sister and I went there and somewhat learned to ski and getting tangled up in rope tows and things like that.
And then, going away and going on a three-year trip around the world in the hottest places on earth. There was no skiing. I didn’t see snow again for a long time until coming back to going on an Outward Bound course.
But, then you moved up to the Granduc Mine area, which, of course, had a huge disaster as you know. What was your role exactly there?
There were—all these different terms weren’t there: avalanche forecaster, avalanche technician—but we were called ‘snow controllers.’ Sounds a little bit sort of a Canutan term, doesn’t it?
The control was to bring down avalanches and very proactive, almost limited forecasting. If it snowed, you blast it. That was sort of the forecasting program, just keep the road open for a mine project. And that evolved to things like starting to do snow profiles and going to Rogers Pass and doing an avalanche course, learning from the masters at the S.R.A.W.S. group
S.R.A.W.S. being Snow Research and Avalanche Warning Section?
I’m not sure what it’s called now.
So, at Granduc, what size of team did you have there? Who all was there?
Oh, well, that first winter, they had a history of a well-known… Eric Lomas was there. He was one of the original ACMG guides. Herb Bleuer was there for a while. New Zealanders Geoff Wayatt and Bruce Jenkinson. And there were well-known New Zealand alpinists, Himalayan climbers. The mining world, it wasn’t popular with the avalanche patch and probably the avalanche people weren’t very popular with the miners either because we were considered to be an extra expense to getting the ore out of the mountain.
But, Robin Mounsey, he was the first person who hired me, and he ran the program there. There were five of us on our rotating six days on, two days off, and working a rotating cycle of afternoons, days, and graveyards. And every third week you’d see daylight. And two of those weeks, you were working in the dark, patrolling the road and blasting as required, usually on your own. That’s case-charging on the side of the road, which is putting 25 or 50 kilos on the outside shoulder of the road and then driving away and working with the snow clearing equipment to work down the road through the avalanche zones and keep the road 24-hour access for fuel going up and ore going down, crew changes in buses of 40 people on this very dramatic road, in places some 200 metres above, very steep, above a glacier, the Salmon Glacier. And that was a wonderful apprenticeship.
And the mine shut down and I didn’t have to move very far because at the time the highway into Stewart was becoming more used. And the Bear Pass also has a huge chunk of avalanche terrain. So, at the end of the mine, I moved over and became the first avalanche technician, as they were then called. Moved from being a ‘snow controller’ to an ‘avalanche technician.’ Same job, basically, but, a much different approach, working for B.C. Highways as their system had been set up in ’74. I think I started working for them in about 1984 or ’85.
So that was the first two steps of avalanche (safety) I worked on.
So you were apprenticing as you described, and the crew you worked with had more experience, or some of them, than you?
We were pretty motley crew of not formally-trained avalanche workers by any means. But I think that we had worked through with other people who had been on the Granduc Road. So it is very much a mentoring, immediate care with your mentors, and Robin had picked up from his predecessors. He’d been there two winters before. I think he’d actually asked me to work the year before, but I was in Dawson City enjoying it there and waited for another year before I came down to Stewart. It was a trial by fire, kind for a group of us who were really an ex-Outward Bound group of five.
Oh, Norm Wilson, came up and did training with us on the artillery and doing snow profiles. We did keep something called a time profile, which I think is still one of the real fundamental tools for forecasting. It’s a monthly chart showing all the conditions on one glance. Nowadays, it’s all on screens and you can’t do all that stuff on one screen. So, we were using the profile. That was also one that was being used by highways. It was a paper, monthly, time profile. And it’s a fantastic tool, I think. Anywhere, wherever I worked, I always brought that along as one of the tools.
What connections did you have in those days in Granduc to anybody else (in the avalanche profession)?
No one. We were really out there. No one (else). We’d kind of heard about, I think, the Canadian group of people. We’d heard of Rogers Pass, obviously. There was avalanche control we knew of going on in Whistler and in the Rocky Mountain parks.
There was no communications, email, those kinds of exchanges weren’t going on. And we had a program that had been running successfully from what was now many years–12, 15 years. So, I think it started then we heard about meetings in Robson Square, for example, which was an international gathering. I think that was certainly my first exposure to realizing there was a big international world out there doing this stuff and reading good books like ‘Avalanche,’ which is a story about the 1952 or 1954 Austria disasters in the villages there. Reading books by people, by André Roch, and reading some of the literature—early days U.S. Forest Service Avalanche Handbook.
Yeah, we were very, very isolated there.
So now you mentioned this meeting in Vancouver. About what year was that?
I think ’79-80, in the fall, Robson Square. It was a big gathering. There must have been 500 people there. It’s pre-International Snow Science Workshop, but I think it might have been a bit of a seed for people thinking then that this is a good gathering. André Roch was there. And I always remember being in awe of someone like that. And Peter Schaerer and I think Geoff Freer were the main organizers of that event. There was certainly a National Research Council book I think. It could be down in the archive (CAA, Revelstoke).
It had all the attendees: (Ed) LaChapelle, the American John Montaigne, Ron Perla, I think, was there. It was a great event. And I think that was the beginning of the seed of thinking this an interesting business I’d like to be involved in.
How did you find out about that meeting, do you remember?
That’s a good question.
You were way up in Granduc Mine that’s a long way from Vancouver.
I’ve no idea. I think a couple of us might have been there from Granduc. I don’t know. I just somehow took it on perhaps, maybe a bit more than some of the others. And what else is going on with this patch? And among the group I was working with there, they had other activities and interests. Robin got very involved with the movie business, and a couple of others went in different directions and became an orchardist. So, I don’t know, for some reason it sort of caught my imagination and interest.
Stuck and continues to stick and continues for a long time!
I suppose it could add up to probably 50 actually active working winters between Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemispheres.
So, you moved over to the Bear Pass BC Highway operation and that was in in the 80s?
’82, the mine shut down. It went through a couple of owners. It went through a winter when it was closed and used by a movie company. That was good movie drama, of course, when they needed a road and they needed support on snow safety and some of their other filming. And then ’86 was my last winter on Bear Pass. I was seven years in Stewart. So, four of them are on the mine road and three of them, I think, were with BC Highways. And what did I do after that? I went to New Zealand.
Before we go to New Zealand, do you remember the first time you ever saw an avalanche?
Only in a book. I suppose the first was probably the Granduc. Well, on the Outward Bound course, it was one of those immense snow packs that after storms cycles was pretty stable. And also, we couldn’t get anywhere out of the Similkameen Valley [check this] so it was hard to get around, to get into any avalanche terrain. But I think probably the Granduc Road certainly, I saw a lot of avalanches very quickly when I started working there.
When you’re doing the control program?
Yeah.
So you go to the meeting in Vancouver, that just immediately preceded the establishment of the Canadian Avalanche Association. If I’m correct, is that right?
Yes.
So then how did you make the connection for involvement with the CAA?
There was some sort of a newsletter or that the Canadian Avalanche Association or this group. There’d been a meeting in Banff before ’82, I think.
But in May of ’82, as a kind of the first intake for members from areas outside the corridor, the triangle of Whistler, Canmore, Jasper, and we, the outsiders, wondered if I qualified to be a member of the CAA. All I’ve done is blowing things up here in Stewart. [laughs] But I was accepted as a member in May of ’82.
It might have been at the first AGM (of the CAA). And at that time, …Peter (Schaerer) was probably the first president. And then, he handed over, sort of by time limitation to, I think Fred (Schleiss), for a couple of years and then Chris Stethem. That would have to be in the archive, it’s not all in my head.
But you’re now a member of the organization. So you’re receiving some communication from them?
Yeah, certainly.
You’re still way up in Bear Pass?
Yeah. The Avalanche News was going out. Actually, one of the other groups on the team, Liz Horne, wonderful workmate, in my second or third year there on the mine project, she had a subscription. I think it was free, but it was distributed by highways and she had a copy. So then, yeah, there we were hearing about other meetings. Learning where we could learn more. It was a resource to find out more. Because I was at the time going in the summers, I was going to the Yukon and had a rafting business and was prospecting. And the prospecting totally keeled over in the summer of ’83. And I thought, what am I going to do this summer? I thought, well, go to New Zealand. I worked in the ski area, Porters Heights, which also has an illustrious avalanche history in New Zealand, and I had a winter there.
And the day I was leaving that, ski patrol avalanche-technician—I think we were called avalanche safety officer—I was leaving New Zealand to go back to Canada, back to Granduc and the winter program and in B.C., there was a headline in the newspapers saying the road foreman on the Milford Road had been killed in an avalanche. I perhaps felt a little bit like an ambulance chaser, but I thought, well, wonder what’s going on there. And I wrote to them. We exchanged correspondence through that northern winter. And then that spring, our spring, northern spring of ’84, I went to New Zealand and I worked on the Milford Road for seven to eight years and started an avalanche program.
The avalanche program was really all in the head of the road foreman that was killed. And so they needed to take a different approach. And I was really hired to kind of help establish a program on the Milford Road. So, then I did this mix between New Zealand and Canada for a number of years.
So, you’d be (in) winter all year round if you’d want to.
I figure I always had two springs per year. Two springs was a good deal.
So, at that time, you’re a member (of the CAA), but you’re not on the Board or in any other position working for them. Can you tell us about the next number of years?
I was always working, as we talked about earlier. The Granduc was right out there and outside the mainstream of where anything was going on in the avalanche world. And similar with Milford Road, although I was just really taking my BC Highways training to try and apply it to that situation. I was just a member (of the CAA), so I was never very active in any kinds of committees or roles. It just was that I was in the wrong place as well as probably not a very good committee person, that might be a good reason.
But then in ’91—I’d been on the Milford Road from ’83 to ’91—I was looking for a change in something different and there was an ad in Avalanche News. Good old Avalanche News came up with an ad posted by Chris Stethem looking for a coordinator for the Canadian Avalanche Association coordinating with the Canadian Avalanche Centre, which was the predecessor of what is now called Avalanche Canada. But the job was to coordinate the activities of these two organizations, which Chris had secured funding from the National Search and Rescue Secretariat for three-year start-up funding to establish this public role through the Canadian Avalanche Association and a sidebar to the Canadian Avalanche Centre. And this is my understanding of it, is that they were to be, they were very much operating together, but there were these two different names and the association (was) to represent the members (of the CAA) and the centre (CAC) to then do the public side of things with resources from the avalanche association, the skill of all the members to apply to the public thing. Because the NSS (National Search and Rescue Secretariat) is not there to support a technical professional organisation, the NSS is to provide funds to promote public safety and to set up programmes that improve public safety. The National Search and Rescue Secretariat’s mandate is to support these projects.
And I don’t know if you’ve had this background before, but Paul Anhorn was the National Research Council officer, a field officer based in Revelstoke, and he died in very tragic circumstances by suicide, and I think that there was a political will because the National Research Council program was being shut down. Paul was an integral part of that avalanche section, that it focussed the fact that, yeah, we still need to make a commitment to avalanche safety in Canada and that we can’t just abandon this very important part of Canada’s transportation and recreation infrastructure. And so that funding, that proposal was put together by Chris (Stethem) and the (CAA) board at the time—Chris very much being the lead person on it. And he, I think it was $130,000 that was to do three years. And after that we were to be on our own. And that was it. We were to be totally self-sufficient.
We had the Canadian Avalanche Association. And now we’ve got a related organization, the association focused on the professional members. Whereas the Canadian Avalanche Centre, as it was called that time, is focussed on outreach to the recreational (public). [Alan agrees throughout].
Mainly through providing avalanche bulletins for the public outside of the national parks, that was sort of the primary new goal. The new goal was provided because the only places where avalanche information for the public was through national parks in the Rockies and through a couple—Whistler Blackcomb and Lake Louise through the Parks were doing avalanche information for the public—and it was seen that there was a need to have some organization take that on and provide that information to the public. It was a QUANGO[5], the mix of the CAA and the CAC was a quasi-autonomous-nongovernment-organization. We were neither fish nor fowl, and it was it was a tricky one because on the one hand, you’re representing the members and the professional members, but also you’re there to represent the public and not always they’re totally compatible. But the public information could only be done through the CAA because there was InfoEx and the training schools, and they were the two early building blocks. The schools being the first, Canadian Avalanche Association training schools, now called Industry Training Program, that enabled the knowledge base to provide information to the public.
And the InfoEx could only exist because of the school system, the school system providing the common language, the common skills, the common techniques, the common standards and guidelines to provide the resource for the InfoEx to start, and that’s a history of its own, is the InfoEx project.
You were the Executive Director, and the initial one of the Canadian Avalanche Centre, is that correct?
I was not the Executive Director. I was the Coordinator. My title was a Coordinator of the CAA and the CAC. And they were operating together, but somewhat independently.
But, things like the books and the accounting. I can’t remember that part of it. We don’t want to go into that too much. But no, we did. For the National Search and Rescue Secretariat there was very clear sort of forensic-level bookkeeping required to maintain, that showed the value of how their funds were being used.
So that was a big, big part of the two organizations under one umbrella. And now it’s basically, I think, two umbrellas.
So you mentioned InfoEx. What was InfoEx? When did you first interface with InfoEx?
When I came to Revelstoke and started working for the CAA. It has a very interesting history. I think 1990-91 was the first winter there was a trial and it came into being through court cases. And I think there are a couple of judgments where in the process of the court case it was realized that there are different operations basically over the hill from one another, but they weren’t exchanging their information and they should be.
And I don’t know sort of what legal status that took on. But it was realized, yeah, we can’t have these perhaps competing ski hill, mechanized ski-operations just being confidential and keeping their information to themselves. But there were, of course, concerns about, one’s exposure. If you did give out your information, what might happen to that? So InfoEx was started to exchange information between all the different types of operations: highways, resources, mining, etcetera, forestry, mechanized-skiing, and the government programmes in national parks, so that all these varied types of operations would exchange their information. And that was a huge breakthrough in its time, when there was a certain resistance from people about the concerns of how their data might get used. So there are issues of their exposure from the point of view of liability and trust.
And so, InfoEx, in that first winter of 1990-91, a great character, Kel Fenwick, who was a Whistler patroller, but also very much a computer geek. And he had a great vision of how this thing could work. But, unfortunately, computers and the skills of most field workers weren’t able to. It didn’t work. So, there was quite a pot of money spent on that, to try and set up an automated InfoEx system, some of which is still a challenge now, I think for, the IT people. But it’s obviously huge now and it’s been very, very successful. But it certainly had some very tough teething, growth components to get it operational. And not all people came on board right away.
The daily exchange was just the technical part, handwritten faxes, and they were going into remote locations with fax machines that were working at slower speeds. And you’d just get a great smudged piece of paper and time lines, and mountains zones to coastal time zone. There are a lot of challenges, and Chris Whalley, in the second winter, he was piecing this thing together, basically every night. I think I was doing two nights a week and Chris Whalley was doing eight nights a week. [Alan laughs] And Inge Anhorn, we were the three of us, were the only employees at the time. Inge and Chris were both on the sort of contract and I was the only real full-time, so-called permanent, possibly permanent, employee. But Chris Whalley, he was a perfectionist and what a hell of a job for a perfectionist to be put in where things were really pieced together on the night-by-night basis, to make this work for everyone. Some people getting faxes, some people wanting. How else did it go? I think it might have been read into. Faxing, I think, was meant to be the main thing. Computers, maybe? A few people were trying to get it on email.
So the information would be posted by the various member organizations that are on InfoEx by fax into Revelstoke here, to your office here, right?
Yes, all that shiny, slippery fax paper.
So this would fill the office up…
Rolls a day.
That’s why in the evening, you had to work…
To get it out. Can’t remember the schedule, exactly. I think it I think it had to be out by 7 or 8 Pacific Time so that people could see it. Late in their evening, certainly by very early in the morning for their decision-making and looking at what was happening with their neighbours. It was a summary of weather, weather and snowpack fundamentally, the two main components. And a lot of commentary about stability and what people had seen in the snowpack and occurrences. What’s the situation today and tonight? What we saw today and tonight and today and this afternoon.
So was Environment Canada then part of this, the meteorological service?
That was more a component for the public side of things and putting together a public avalanche bulletin. I think the weather part of it, each operation had their own (weather observations). I mean, a lot of them (the professional operations) were using Environment Canada and there are a couple of key people there, their names I can’t remember just now, and they were phoning in. We’d be phoning in and talking to a forecaster. There was public stuff available. Many of them (professional avalanche forecasters) have very different (ideas of) what they wanted. Some guys wanted a tephigram[6] and other people didn’t, and some guys wanted some specific satellite surface-mapping and other people had preferred ways for doing their weather forecasting.
So InfoEx was not, as I recall, so much of weather forecasting tool. It was strictly weather and the existing weather, and that 24-hour readings was the weather component in InfoEx. That may well be changed now, so I’m talking through history. And for the public side of things, I was talking to a weather forecaster.
So then how did those bulletins go out? The bulletins that you produced could go back to the professional community by a return fax. But how did they get to the public?
Alan Dennis Well, I’ll just step back just for a moment. We couldn’t do public avalanche bulletins without InfoEx. We required InfoEx to put together a public bulletin. I think we were doing four regions, the Coast, the Rockies, maybe two sections north and south Columbia, I think. And there was also concerns with how InfoEx was going to be used for the public. And very legitimate concerns, that if I am writing an avalanche bulletin and saying something from a certain operation, they may feel exposed by how that is being used by someone who doesn’t know what you’re talking about or the next person in the public who may not have the skills. He had to take that technical language to put it into a public format without identifying individual operations.
And so that was also a part of building up trust and a relationship. I was this guy that came into the CAA from New Zealand and Granduc. I didn’t know anyone in the main valley here—that was something that built over time. So that part of the public bulletin was wholly dependent on InfoEx. And that’s a big commitment of money from those people. Those people who contributed into InfoEx, paid a subscription, they’ve also paid a lot of money to get those observations every day. People had gone out there to work, and then that resource was being sent out to the public. So, it was probably unique in the small global world of the avalanche patch. It was quite unique space to build this thing through the CAA.
So, you were right up at the focus or the hub of taking the technical world that’s coming into you, serving them, but at the same time taking and producing a product, with all the potential constraints, but also wanting to be useful, out in the bulletin and that would go to public, that would then be the public (synthesis of the information)…
And you don’t know the level of the experience of that user in the public. Are you talking to someone who’s been ski-touring for 20 years and been out there lots or are you talking to someone who’s never done a basic avalanche safety course? …And, we had very limited time/space constraint on what could go up because it was also going out by faxing and a recorded message was spoken into the phone. I think twice, or three times a week, we did avalanche bulletins and I’d start very early in the morning and have it on the air, I think by an earlyish hour in the morning. And now all those time slots have changed. But we were doing it twice a week, so we’re doing, I think, on Thursday for the weekend and then on Monday for the week. I think we were doing it twice a week. But now it’s a daily, kind of real-time, evolving thing.
So there you are then producing this public bulletin at different times of the week. What years now are we talking about when you arrived? You were right at the start of that program?
Yes, through September 1991. And then I worked at the Canadian Avalanche Association until the spring of ’98, so seven years. I seem to have seven year cycles.
A lot of late nights?
Well, Chris Whalley, Evan Manners, who came after him, they did Trojan’s work to keep things ticking over on a technical level. And on a practical level, in many different ways. They were huge. So yeah, I was a coordinator, but there was for a longtime, Phil Hein was the chairman. At the same time the schools were running, there were different issues with organizing the courses. I think we’d have, what, 250 students a year or something like that per winter.
Which kind of student are we talking about?
This is the professional side, which all started with BCIT, Peter Schaerer, Gary Walton—that’s a pretty well-known piece of history there. But, it then came under the umbrella of the operations of the CAA/CAC. Now, I think that is a part of the CAA still, as is InfoEx, and whereas the public thing is all Avalanche Canada.
So the training there, the public part, did that start during your years?
The training schools just went from Selkirk College and then came to the Canadian Avalanche Association and then we had to set up a what is it called a private education school certificate. We had to get it to give us the authority to be a training school. That was quite a big step.
The schools and the InfoEx, the building blocks for the public side of things, and then all the outreach programs going on to try and to connect more with different groups.
I want to just make sure I’m clear, Alan. We have the Canadian Avalanche Association interfacing with professional members. InfoEx is the heart of the communications. There are also technical schools for practitioners of avalanche control and safety, and they’re run by the CAA. And along comes the Canadian Avalanche Centre that becomes ultimately, Avalanche Canada. But there’s training schools for the public. When did they emerge?
It was after my time. There was just the beginnings of it, I think in the late ’90s. And now the avalanche safety training, the AST[7] courses, are, I think, kind of licenced and through Avalanche Canada. So, when I was working there, it was the recreational, RAC—that’s right, Recreational Avalanche Courses—were being run through the CAA and the CAC when I left in late ’98. Yeah, right. And they were just sort of building the program
Somewhat the beauties of the Canadian model is that there are a number of people doing things in different places. Whether it’s in Whistler, in Jasper, or Prince George, it was good to get them all teaching the same thing, all teaching to the same standard and the same syllabus and the same course outline. So that was an effort, another project funded by National Search and Rescue Secretariat, because that was a very direct public benefit in that you could provide a syllabus and a course outline that would be used the same wherever you did the course, and that then people are talking the same language and then they may go on to take the professional courses, the technical courses, and they’ve got the basic same building blocks of language and techniques to become ski patrol, ski guides, go into engineering courses at the university.
Or be recreational skiers.
Or keep it as a recreational interest.
This is the public side of those courses.
At that time, then during the ’90s, a lot of the ’90s, you were here in Revelstoke.
Yes.
And your mandate included both sides of the fence—the CAA and the Canadian Avalanche Centre, which becomes Avalanche Canada
Right. Yes.
So, we have the training programs for both groups, professional and the public, and we now have the communications continuing for professionals, but there have been then programs to promote public awareness and skills in travel and avalanche training. It’s a bit complicated because, like government organizations, this organization has changed its names over time. If you listen at some time in the future (it could be confusing).
So you’re acting as the coordinator then for both programmes to 1998 and then you go off and do other things at that point?
Yes. So after ’98, I had very little connection with the CAA except this was a lovely place to live in Revelstoke. So, I kept living here but I ended up on different jobs in different places, seasonal things. I think I’d done my time. I don’t think I was a very good avalanche bureaucrat. So, I didn’t continue in any role as a committee member or a board member after I did my time. But I think (a significant achievement we made) over those years that I was there was, I think, helping with this other group of people—I’ve mentioned some of their names. The foundation for what there is now, and we were very busy building blocks. There were these very separate things and some of them were in their kind of infancy, particularly InfoEx, and over seven years it grew. Growing pains, of course, but I think that was a significant achievement of the CAA from ’91 to ’98. This building block that somewhat stabilized, I mean. The funding never did. That only stabilized about six months ago[8], after 30 years. But, that was a big part of the time, my time there in ’91 to ’98.
You said you did other things, did any of those things include avalanche work?
Of yeah.
Can you tell us a little bit about that? So you continue to be a member is what I’m getting at.
Yes. I continue to be a member. I did shorter term projects in Argentina. A mine project with Alcan in Kemano, Kitimat. That was a big project.
And it’s been interesting to see, for example, that one, where Alcan at the time—they don’t exist anymore, they are now Rio Tinto—but they developed a huge reservoir there in the ’50s to provide power for aluminum plant in Kitimat, and in the early ’90s, they wanted to increase the capacity of this power plant by doing another tunnel and drawing down the reservoir.
And they got halfway through doing the tunnel up this valley access called the Horetzky Valley, which is really sort of boutique avalanche country, kind of like five kilometres, totally non-stop, big-big snowfields, big, huge starting zones. And we were three people in 1990-91, two people on, 21 days on, 10 days off rotation, and it got shut down. But it just got reignited here with Rio Tinto taking it on. But their plan is they only want to double the tunnel. They don’t want to draw down the reservoir anymore. They just need to replace a tunnel that was done in the 1950s with cut and blast, and is very rough and inefficient and is losing a lot of efficiency the way it is now. So, there’s another program started up here in the past two winters. And it’s been really interesting because…
And you’re part of that programme?
I was in 1990 and ’91, I was very much so, yeah. I was hired to help set up an avalanche program.
And we had artillery and helicopter bombing and that was it. And we had avalanche paths that came right down onto the camp and the adit where they were drilling the tunnel. So it was a very, very challenging project. And we got through two winters and then they got shut down. We were also under the concern of not having any artillery shells. There’s been a long history of difficulties with getting artillery ammunition unless you are the army at Roger Pass.
What artillery were you using?
105 mm recoilless[9].
But anyway, two winters ago I did go out there just for a few days. And now Greg Johnson has designed and built a 200 metre berm that’s seven metres high to protect the adit. He’s got 11 Gazex up on the mountain above these critical zones, above the camp, and the work site, and at eight people on a rotation. So, it’s a very different world in the sense of health and safety, efficiency, and it’s really neat to see. And I think he has a great team of people working up there. If I was famous, I’d say I went there in a little cameo role, but I just went when Greg asked me to go.
Greg Johnson would have been part of the Canadian Avalanche Association and have InfoEx and he was definitely connected?
Of course, we didn’t have InfoEx in 1990 and ’91, those two winters. I was doing New Zealand at the same time, I think, and I came up did the Alcan thing and then I started working in Revelstoke. So, I had a couple of other really interesting ones (jobs) like that.
So you continue to be a member of the CAA, post Revelstoke years?
I think Chris Stethem—and I don’t know what kind of an enlightened moment—but at an AGM, when I was finished working at the CAA, he put all the membership on the spot by standing from the floor and nominating me for Honorary Membership. Chris Stethem says that no one can really say no. So, I’ve been a member ever since.
If we could just look back then, what comes to mind in terms of the whole history of the CAA and its related organizations, what do you think the significant points of the development would be?
Well, I think I maybe said that a little bit about these fundamental building blocks of the schools, the InfoEx, and now public safety. The past can’t be changed. But history is super important in seeing a way forward. Seeing the way forward, I don’t want to not answer your question. I don’t know if I can answer it any better, but is to say: ‘Well, what of the future?’
I think a really fundamental challenge that they are dealing with—and I’ve just described a little bit about that experience at the Alcan Project, nearly 30 years apart—is the difference in approach. And I think the CAA, and I think they are, as I read The Avalanche Journal now, as it comes out two and three times a year, is this issue of professionalism. I think the fundamental challenge is seeing a way through for the engineering and the increasing sort of oversight of government, of safety issues, of efficiency issues, and seeing a way through for the engineering side of things to still be able to work closely with the field worker side of things. And I include really near everyone else, whether they’re ski guides, snow controllers, avalanche controllers, avalanche technicians, avalanche forecasters, that whole group of the field side of things, and the side of the professional engineers, of which, of course, through Bruce Jamieson’s program, Dave McClung’s program—you can’t do anything now without an engineer signing off on stuff. Safety plans, hazard assessment plans, terrain mapping—they used to be done with a 2H pencil and a topo map. That’s not how it works anymore.
I think that’s a real fundamental challenge for the CAA over the next few years is just how to make those two groups. I like to think of the idea of a guild, but it’s medieval and it was a nice but it can’t happen now. But a guild, I don’t know if they were tradespeople, but they weren’t the doctors and lawyers and the professionals. There is a group in between, the guild, and it was a very, very strict thing. If you wanted to be a watchmaker or a clockmaker in a guild, you got an apprenticeship. If you failed the exam, that was it. You were never going to be a member of that guild. So, it was a very rigorous process. And I’m wondering if in the CAA there is a room for kind of a guild. That is probably the wrong word nowadays. But you were asking me more about the past, I’ve gone into the future.
And then the public side of things is, you can’t solve every problem with money. But certainly that problem has been partially solved for a little while now with the public side of things. It’s a challenge. Of course, how to spend that money to be getting the most effective use of that money. But I think on that public side of things, the demands of the public change.
I also—I’m sitting very much in the old man’s seat here—I do sometimes think there’s too much data now and I don’t know how much data our brains can really take in. InfoEx is a huge thing every night, and I can’t begin to take it all in. So, you have to kind of focus on, what’s your real critical point here? And I don’t know if it was a way to separate that stuff out. I mean, I got a good example of that recently. Working with these wonderful people up on the Alcan Project, there’s apps and spreadsheets and screens and you can scroll through all these screens.
We had a white monthly chart of paper, the time profile, and it worked. There’s also issues of a strategic mindset and the analytical and the intuitive. And I think there are a couple of factors that we sometimes forget about is luck and experience.
And, where do you say, experience. As you get older, you’ve been exposed for longer, so has your risk increased? Or is your risk reduced because you’ve got more knowledge? And so, I think that’s an important factor in this experience idea. We say someone’s got a lot of experience, but maybe their numbers are, the lottery games coming up on them a little bit. And then there’s the luck factor. I’ve been hugely lucky on a few occasions. Hugely, hugely lucky. I’ve had a friend swept away right beside me and I’ve done really stupid things and I’ve been very, very lucky in the avalanche patch with some things.
So I don’t know how else to answer that question.
I think you have answered it very well, Alan.
But luck is, that’s immeasurable. You can’t put that into a formula. You can’t put experience, I don’t think, into a formula. I’m going out next week to Sorcerer Hut with Bruce Jamieson and Steve Conger on a friend’s week. I want to talk about some of these things. Roger Atkin’s Strategic Mindset is a huge advance. The heuristics—that word has are gone out of fashion a little bit now—these things are hard to measure.
And I think that when you look back at the way that Peter Schaerer and Hans Gmoser have been in the mountains all their lives, and their intuitive part was a huge factor in their safety and long lives. And it changed. It had to change because you had people coming in who didn’t have that lifetime in the mountains.
I was born in Malta. I didn’t have four generations of mountain-guiding family in my background. They (the professional avalanche community) had to come up with InfoEx. That was why, in a sense, you had to get people who’d grown up in Kingston, Ontario[10], to see what the world is like out in the mountains, and the extraordinary, varied backgrounds that people come (with).
So that brought it in the analytical side of things. Then, OK, we’re going to want to analyze. You’re a scientist. You see this in the science world as of your specialty.
But I almost think saying there’s a little bit too much now of the analytical and the spreadsheets, the apps, and sometimes you got to just put that stuff down. You’ve made a decision. And unless there’s some Class A data reason not to go, then, you’ve made a decision. You’ve got to get some work done and not say, well, “Did you see that app in the last half-hour?” Well no, I didn’t, but we made a decision this morning. And, it’s unfortunately time for the intuitive and the experience and hopefully a bit of luck, to come into play here. You kind of make your luck as, that sort of buzzword.
I don’t know if that helps wrap things up here.
That’s really interesting. What I’m thinking when you are going through this, is how quite a few professions are facing much the same thing for different, totally different contexts. We now have so much data.
So, how does a doctor decide nowadays?
That’s right. There’s always a personal factor in this technical world. How are we going to see a way through it, as you as you put it? I think those are exactly what we appreciate you sharing with us, because that’s what only your position at this point in your career gives you a chance to look back.
I’m happy to be in the dinosaur category. [laughs]
I don’t want to end on you being a dinosaur! But certainly, thank you very much. Unless you had something else you want to add.
What did I like best about working the avalanche industry? The people. OK. And what did I like least? Was fundraising. I did feel extraordinarily lucky not only in those jobs, to get those different jobs I had around the world, really.
I think the funny stories are for the bar somewhere, we talked about the intuitive, analytical and technical. I’ve never been on a rescue. I’ve been on some searches. There was a good point here about how the Canadian approach is different. I think it goes back, in a way, to the Swiss model, the WSL[11]. That was probably where the first time-profiles were done, at the Swiss institute in Davos. And so, we’ve all inherited these things from different places. And I think Canada has been fortunate that we plucked, cherry-picked, from the U.S., from Austria, and with Peter coming over here, Peter Shearer, we’ve cherry-picked. That’s what Canada has done well, I think. And I suppose that is different. The Swiss had a Swiss way of doing it. It had some great applications for Canada.
I think it can’t be stated enough, I can’t say enough about the National Search and Rescue Secretariat basically saved the CAA. CAC wouldn’t exist as Avalanche Canada now, of their various projects. Karl Klassen did a wonderful video—it becomes outdated as soon as it’s sort of finished being on the editing floor—but he did an avalanche safety video for public use in the mid-90s, and that was a great step forward. We really broke down some barriers there, I think with the NSS, who’d been really burnt with some other video projects where there was all sorts of money spent and nothing came out of the editing floor.
He got some awards for that. I was just the bean counter and probably a pain in the neck for him. He did a great job of that, but that was a really important educational tool at the time.
I think now public safety is much more in the mainstream. I hear it on CBC. I hear David French giving a little extract from something he’s read about the avalanche conditions. You didn’t see that in the early-90s. I’d like to think that my part of it in the early ’90s wasn’t that, but it was building towards that.
New avalanche control techniques? There’s Gazex, Wyssen, artillery. This (3) might be the last standing one in Canada. I think now, isn’t it?
You are referring to the direct action control and Rogers Pass with the 105 mm Howitzer?
I think that’s the last, probably, in North America.
That’s great Alan. We haven’t had a big freight train come by! I thought one was coming, we are just above the tracks in Revelstoke. One of the worries we had in making the interview was that a big freight would come.
I want to thank you very much, thank you for your energy.
I hope there’s something useful there.
Absolutely.
Transcribed by Susan Hairsine
Copyright © 2023 Canadian Avalanche Association
Footnotes:
[1] The CAA and CAC
[2] United States of America
[3] Feb 18, 1965 – 27 fatalities at the Granduc Mine
[4] Vancouver Sun newspaper
[5] QUANGO = Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organization.
[6] Technical meteorological term
[7] AST = Avalanche Safety Training
[8] Alan is referring to the $25 million endowment Avalanche Canada received from the Government of Canada in 2019.
[9] 105 mm recoilless rifle
[10] Kingston, Ontario, is the hometown of Chris Stethem.
[11] WSL–Institut für Schnee- und Lawinenforschung SLF