The eastern face of the mountain is avalanche terrain. There are no trees to anchor the snow. A screaming wind picks up even more snow from the mountain's far side and deposits it onto a bulging cornice that threatens to crack under its growing weight. The slope here is steep, 40 degrees, and the snowpack must cling like a prostrate man on an A-frame roof. Inevitably it loses its grip. To ski this slope after a heavy snowstorm, you would have to be either exceptionally unwise or an avalanche researcher. Four of the latter—Bob Brown, Ed Adams, Jim Dent and Karl Birkeland, of Montana State University—are making plans to do just that. Their destination is a plywood shack in the protective embrace of a small rock outcropping—directly in the path of an avalanche. The structure is nine by six feet, enough room, barely, for two scientists (the rest retreat to the edge of the slide path), an array of instrumentation, a gas-powered generator, and one rather nervous journalist.
When all is ready, one of the men will ski to the top of the ridge, hoist four pounds of explosives on a pulley out over the crown of the slope, and light the fuse, sending vast amounts of snow down on his colleagues’ heads. If you want to understand the dynamics of avalanches, these men reason, what better place than smack dab in the middle of one?
In the weeks leading up to this event, I have been in the Swiss Alps, because the best way to learn about avalanches is to pay a visit to the very impressive, very modern Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF), located in a small ski resort town called Davos. Switzerland spends $2.5 million a year on avalanche research. The architect who designed the raised-marble snow crystal motif on the lobby floor probably got paid more than Bob Brown’s entire budget for 1999. But the Swiss have a compelling reason to spend this kind of money on understanding avalanches: More than 50 percent of them live in avalanche terrain. In the 1998-1999 season, hundreds of major avalanches hit the Swiss Alps, causing more than $100 million in damages and killing 36 people. It was the most destructive season in more than 45 years.
Like Bob Brown and his Montana team, the Swiss also have a mountain avalanche hut. At the moment, it’s out of commission. Last week an avalanche of unanticipated ferocity let loose and destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of test equipment. Just hours before, two men had been in the avalanche’s path installing radar equipment that clocks the speed of tumbling snow. Had fate been running on a slightly different timetable, they would be dead. Immediately after the avalanche, a group of researchers who had watched the destruction debated whether they should venture out and salvage what remained of the equipment. “We thought: Okay, it’ll be very rare that two avalanches hit within five minutes,” recalls physicist Dieter Issler, SLF’s reigning expert on avalanche dynamics. While they deliberated, a second avalanche let go. Avalanche research is a lot like lion taming. Most of the time, it’s safe, but when it’s not, it’s very, very not.
