White Heat: The Extreme Skiing Life - Hardcover

Avalanche Control
On Duty With Dynamite Girl

It is shortly before 6:00 a.m., and you are sitting in the Park City Summit Patrol hut, waiting for Jackie, the Dynamite Girl.

All you've been told is, you won't forget her, which is really no help, you think, given the skiers crossing the hut are wearing bulky red and black Patrol outfits, gear festooned all over those outfits, rope, carabiners, first-aid tape, Pieps, shovels, and, on their backs, packs stuffed with yet more gear to near bursting. You settle in on the bench against the wall, angling your recently blown-out ski boots -- which, already, have begun to torment your feet again -- toward the fireplace, warming them.

Here at Summit the hut is the size of a lodge, really, and is a swarm of morning activity. There's been a heavy snowfall, over three feet, a stiff wind from the south, and, being an unseasonably warm January, the temperature over the week has risen above and fallen below freezing umpteen times, creating sheets of snow in varying layers of density and composition. It has even rained briefly.

Perfect conditions for avalanches.

"You my Dynamite Donkey?" a tall, blond woman says, strutting in your direction, her face the kind you see in television ads, those making even lawn chairs or white bread seem sexy.

"Jackie?" you ask, not getting what she's just said, having been...distracted. Dynamite Donkey?

"Are you my shadow?" she says, in a cutting voice, as though you might be a little deaf, or, perhaps of diminished mental capacity (which is presently true), and something clicks in your head: Right, you're here to shadow an expert on an avalanche route after your Blaster's Clinic. You're glad now that even though you only got four hours of sleep, you stayed up to read the Patrol text on avalanche rescues, all that swimming to the frontal lobes of your brain, which you haven't been using for the last good ten seconds, watching --

"Jackovitch," she says, "but call me Jackie," you standing to shake her hand, thinking, Oh, I get it, but she's already moving away from you, and you follow her, admiring, from the back, that leonine strut of hers.

What a...character, you're thinking. And you're not wrong about that, either.

***

"This is the part I like," Jackie says, in the basement of the hut, a pile of gear at your feet.

"What part is that?"

"Getting out there with the explosives."

You've had to go through about a gazillion safety measures to be on for this gig (including a full FBI security check), and now Jackie is rigging a pack around your back, in it eight, two-pound pentolite charges, each equivalent to a stick of dynamite.

You feel bloated, all that firepower sitting right over your kidneys -- even a little anxious. Could all of that explosive...kind of...just...go off somehow? (And what would you look like if it did?)

"Can't be short," she says, lifting four more charges. She gets three of them in the pack -- twenty-two pounds now of explosive, on top of everything that's already jammed in there -- hefting the last charge in her hand.

"Well?" you say.

"I like throwing these things," she tells you, something suggestive and warning in it, her eyes lighting up. Teasing.

She motions for you to turn again, and while she's getting that last charge in your pack, you don't feel so much like a donkey, but a camel -- the proverbial one broken by that last straw.

Jackie starts hanging and clipping yet more things on you. First, a belt with a plastic gadget the size of a fist on it, your avalanche beacon, state of the art and the new frequency, 457 kHz, the international standard.

"Never use recharged batteries on a beacon," Jackie tells you. Why, you ask.

"They'll test fine and then they'll drop dead on the mountain." Jackie takes a step back from you. "What's wrong with it?"

You crane your head down to check out the belt, which is clipped roughly over your navel. "Wrong with what?"

Jackie sighs, gives you a sharp rap alongside the head, as if this is her idea of some joke.

"Knot the belt, so if you get involved, your beacon won't get torn off." She gives you a level look. Involved? "One guy got dug out," she said, "was under for almost thirty minutes. The snowpack pressed so hard on him, when he peed later, it was like root beer. Pressure forced protein from his bloodstream into his kidneys and bladder."

Jackie now hangs a short-handled shovel to your pack and bungies it in place. The aluminum blade upright, "so the metal won't interfere with the beacon's signal, if you're caught and tumbled under." Then avalanche probes, like tent poles, for finding victims. A snow saw. A forty-foot length of nylon rope. And last, she hands you a "crystal card" on a lanyard, which she tells you to hang from your neck. The "card" is really a thick, clear-plastic device with gadgets in it for measuring snow crystal size and types, and for gauging slope angles.

She winks at you, says, "Enough gear there?"

You flex your knees, give yourself a little shake. Were you just to, say, try this stuff on and stand in a nice, clean, temperaturecontrolled environment like this one, why, it would still feel ungainly, because...

You're also carrying, in addition to the twenty-four pounds of explosive, a two-way radio on a chest harness; carabiners, spring- locking and screw-locking, which hang from your beacon belt; in your fanny pack, you've got first-aid tape, gauze, triangular bandages, six blood stoppers, glucose, a multifunction pliers/cutter, latex gloves, an extra pair of leather gloves for rough work, and plastic airways in three sizes. From your neck are hanging, with the crystal card, your quick reference cards, Park City Helicopter landing sites, a Glasgow Coma Score, vital signs ranges, radio codes, and a quick assessment card.

And add to that what you're wearing, from inside to outside, bottom to top: a pair of wicking Cascade socks; a Duofold union suit (wicking and two-layered, cotton against the skin, wool off, and in one piece so snow will never get down your backside and onto bare skin); Mountain Hardwear ski pants made of doublestrength Gore-Tex; a wicking Cascade turtleneck shirt, a wool U.S. Olympic Team sweater you got from a friend nearly thirty years ago (which is a talisman for good luck), a Mountain Hardwear vest, and a Mountain Hardwear double-lined ski jacket. And strapped over that, over your shoulders, is your sixteen-pocket Olympic three-quarters pack. Cocooning your hands are Cascade double-lined gloves.

On your head is the (required) Park City Patrol hat (wicking wool), and over that a pair of battery-powered, fan-driven Smith goggles (antifogging).

On your feet are Tecnica Diablos -- racing boots that, off skis, are so rigid even with the upper cuffs unbuckled, that they make you walk like Frankenstein's monster. You are tempted to do that now, as Jackie, of the oiled hips, marches out the hut door with her mountaineering skis to the waiting snowcats.

Avalanche control workers, almost without exception, use skis, Alpine or mountaineering, as they need to climb and maneuver in their gear, something not possible on snowboards, given the rider's feet are fixed to a single surface.

RRRRR. RRRRRR, you growl behind Jackie, lifting your arms like some sleepwalker, or like Boris Karloff, laughing to yourself. (You've been a cutup all your life, this gag track running through your life, unstoppable -- a good portion of the time -- and you just have to live with it.)

Outside, though, you do stop all that.

"Oh, baby," you say, in it a kind of total dread, but with it...excitement.

And it has nothing to do with Jackie. "Come on," she says and, with an eagerness beyond explanation, you follow her out into the blizzard, to stand a block from the hut, taking it in.

A damn near, bona fide whiteout.

The mountains, in all that snow, are phantasmagorical blue-black and white teeth.

Standing just behind Jackie, the snow burning your face, you hear a sound in the distance not unlike what someone would make leaping face down onto a feather bed. A whoooomphf!

(And that's where that dreading part of you wants to be: back in bed, the sun not even up yet.)

"Avalanche, and no skier trigger," Jackie says, grinning. "It's gonna be a big day."

A big day?

And this is just for starters, recognizing the danger inherent in avalanche conditions.

Realize that avalanches in the United States alone kill on the average twenty-eight people a year. In the 2002-2003 season, in the United States, avalanches killed fifty-eight people: five climbers; twenty-five backcountry skiers; four snowboarders; twenty-three snowmobilers; and one hiker. Figures such as these, though, become even more significant when one works in a continental or transitional climate, such as that in Idaho, Colorado, or Utah, where most fatal avalanches occur.

Here they become a real and present danger that must be dealt with.

In Utah, in 2005, for example, eight people were killed in avalanches, among them, in the Salt Lake City area, twenty-three-year-old Zachary Eastman, thirty-seven-year-old Melvin Denis, and the snowboarder your life will become indelibly connected to on this avalanche training day, twenty-seven-year-old Shane Maixner, caught in an avalanche at the Canyons.

It was feared, initially, that as many as fifteen skiers and snowboarders were caught in the Canyons avalanche, the most deadly kind, a "slab avalanche," where a sheet breaks off from the slope underneath and hurls down the slope, in seconds the "slab" reaching speeds of 60 to 80 miles per hour, and sometimes, where not impeded, speeds as high as 120 miles per hour.

If you are standing off to the side of such an avalanche, the very compressed air generated from it can knock you off your feet.

When the snowpack col...