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Show A-24 Sat/Sun/Mon/Tues, March 16-19, 2019 The Park Record See it LIVE #AtTheEccles ECCLES THEATER, DOWNTOWN SLC M OUNTAIN TOWN NEWS A Roundup of News from Other Western Ski Resort Communities ALLEN BEST Mountain Town News MARCH 21 MARCH 30 Live-at-the-Eccles.com • (801) 355-ARTS ArtTix Box Offices (M–F 10a–6p, Sat 10a–2p) George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Theater, 131 Main Street, Salt Lake City S ALE Exceptional snow year produces deadly slides CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. – The Colorado Avalanche Information Center described the snowy torrents thundering over the weekend as historic. There were deaths, there were bizarre circumstances. And at least one snowslide occurred at a scale perhaps not seen since 1910. “The avalanches are running much larger than they have, in some cases, for maybe 50 to 100 years,” Spencer Logan, an avalanche forecaster with the center, told the Summit Daily News last Friday, soon after the avalanche cycle began. First, the bizarre circumstances of the death of a 25-yearold man who was shoveling a low-angle roof with a companion on Saturday at a housing development near Crested Butte. According to a preliminary report by the avalanche information center, no one noticed the roof avalanche for about 10 minutes. Help was summoned, and their bodies were located by probes. The second snow shoveler, a 37-year-old man, who had not been buried as deeply, was treated for hypothermia. They had been buried for 20 to 30 minutes. This was in a subdivision about a mile south of the town of Crested Butte. Another roof avalanche buried a 28-year-old man the evening before in Mt. Crested Butte, the town at the base of the ski area. He was treated for low core-body temperature. Yet another roof shoveler had been rescued from a roof avalanche the weekend before. CBS4 in Denver said the Crested Butte area had received more than 4 feet of wet, heavy snow in the days prior to the weekend avalanches. Several days more of snowfall are predicted for early this week. Roof avalanches are not completely rare. At least 8 have occurred in this century — including one in Fargo, N.D. Before the Crested Butte death, avalanche.org had reported 20 fatalities in the United States this winter, all but one since January. Of the victims, 12 were on skis and 8 were on snowmobiles. Colorado led the death toll with 7 deaths. It leads all states in avalanche fatalities, with 257 from 1950 to 2017. Alaska is second with 152 during the same period, followed by Washington, Montana, and Utah. Not all avalanches in Colorado during the last week resulted in loss of lives. The Aspen Times reported a snowslide in the Conundrum Valley, near the Aspen Highlands ski area, that was a mile wide and tore down the valley, snapping mature trees, for 3,000 vertical feet. “This is as big of an avalanche as this terrain can produce,” said Brian Lazar, deputy director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. “This is a landscape-changing event.” In Summit County, Arapahoe Basin was closed for two days as a precautionary measure. Probably a good thing, said the Summit Daily News as notorious avalanche paths called The Professor and The Widowmaker ran, burying the highway to the ski area. More notable yet was an avalanche in the Tenmile Range above Frisco. There, a slide in 1910 took out a mining camp called Masontown. In local lore, everybody had been off to the bars in Frisco when the slide occurred. In fact, the town had been abandoned. Whatever. It was a big slide, and experts tell the Summit Daily that the slide that occurred last week might have been even bigger. Finally, U.S. Highway 550 between Ouray and Silverton in the San Juan Mountains had been closed for a week as of Monday. Also called the Million Dollar Highway, the route was projected by Colorado highway crews to remain closed “indefinitely.” The notorious Riverside slide had claimed many lives over the years until a snowshed was erected to funnel snows over the highway. This time it wasn’t enough. There were 20 to 30 feet of snow on the pavement before state crews intentionally triggered more slides, leaving up to 60 feet of snow. The new slide filled in the snowshed, too. Skier responsibility at stake in slide situation JACKSON, Wyo. – Jeff Brines owns up to having disrupted the lives of many people who travel between Wyoming and Idaho. He’s sorry. He was skiing above Teton Pass on the Wyoming-Idaho border. He’s done so 1,000 times, beckoned by the wonderful snow especially in an area call Glory Bowl. It’s located above the highway that connects Jackson with Victor and Driggs, the Idaho towns where many workers in Jackson, as well as the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, work. Brines and his dog were unhurt when he triggered the avalanche that closed the highway for most of a day. Moreover, he had no immediate knowledge of whether the avalanche might have buried somebody below. “That was one of the darkest moments of my life,” Brines told the Jackson Hole News&Guide. “That feeling that you might have hurt somebody else is something I hope I never feel again.” Nobody on the highway was hurt or even hit by the snowy torrents. But there was great inconvenience. The slide occurred at 7:30 a.m. The highway remained closed until 5 p.m. There’s another way, through a town called Alpine. But it adds more than an hour to the trip. The News&Guide reports rising tension between users of the backcountry above the pass and Wyoming transportation officials responsible for the safety of travelers. A local resident, Jay Pistono, who spearheads much of the outreach work with skiers, says he has pushed the idea that those slide-prone areas, as delicious as the skiing can be, should be in- Please see Mountain Town, A-26 Y A D I R F S S TART 40-50 30-50 OUTERWEAR Some Restrictions May Apply ALL SKIS & BINDINGS PARK CITY DEER VALLEY 1284 Lowell Ave. (PCMR Center) Park City, UT 84060 (435) 649 - 8430 The Chateaux at Silver Lake 7815 Royal Street East (435) 615-1134 |