There was rain; there was snow. It came down heavy in the fall, and it built up during the winter. The train of storms never seemed to pass. Several residents who had long been living in the crevices of Mount Charleston—the peak of the Spring Mountain range, which forms the western slope of the Las Vegas Valley—said that they had never seen Mother Nature act as she did from October 2004 through February 2005.
There was wind; there was sleet. And at times the Southern Nevada sun would reclaim its authority in the mountains, refusing to be repressed by the cold storms that tormented the western United States last winter with floods, mudslides and record-breaking rainfalls. It was a turbulent five months in the Spring Mountains, full of anomalies. Few living in the Valley, just 45 miles away, realized the extremity of it all.
The rain and the snow, the wind and the sleet and the unpredictability of the mountains: It all helped trigger a season of avalanches that fell high above the Las Vegas Valley, that wreaked more havoc than this era of living people or standing trees had ever witnessed, and which swallowed the life of a young snowboarder, just 13 years old, rendered miniscule and helpless in the midst of Mother Nature's enormity.
It had all started just before Halloween, says Virginia Pippin, an amiable woman of 50 and an unhesitant talker who had moved into Kyle Canyon, one of Mount Charleston's two residential regions, three years before that tumultuous winter. In and out of the canyon, she says, clouds passed through in locomotive succession—some dumping rain, others dumping snow—and they all seemed woven together by threads of wind and warmth. In December she rejoiced at the certainty of a white Christmas, for Virginia, like most of her neighbors, moved to Southern Nevada's lone alpine forest not just for the junipers and pinion pines and ponderosas, and their enveloping serenity, but to indulge in the four seasons as well. And they did indeed receive a very white holiday week.
But they also received bad news—from the National Weather Service, which forecasted a grave storm that would move through the larger part of the Southwest. And then from the U.S. Forest Services regional office, which issued an extreme avalanche warning for Mount Charleston's backcountry area, as well as the higher regions of both Kyle Canyon and its residential neighbor to the north, Lee Canyon.
Up there, in Lee Canyon, where the Strip and its surrounding suburban desert are but a distant memory, and where the Las Vegas Ski and Snowboard Resort had been operating without a mortal calamity for more than four decades, snow was accumulating not by the inch but by the foot. In the end, the snowfall on Lee Peak that winter—some 20 feet—exceeded the yearly average twofold. Visitors were in a skier's Eden, and they loved it. As did the general manger of Southern Nevada's only ski resort, Brian Strait, for his three chairlifts and 11 slopes were running without glitches, and their meticulous avalanche-control program revealed no signs of imminent danger. In other words, everything on the horizon looked like smooth sailing from their view some 9,000 feet up the mountain, and even through the precipitation—the rain and hail and snow—was heavy, no one could foresee the cataclysmal avalanche that would soon rush down the mountainside, leaving in its wake an inconceivable gully of ravaged terrain and a dead young boy, still just in the eighth grade.
In the Rainbow neighborhood of Kyle Canyon, Virginia Pippin paid close attention when the U.S. Forest Services and her boyfriend, a seasoned mountaineer who has called Mount Charleston home for 22 years, issued extreme avalanche warnings every day for the first week of the new year. For they had recognized that conditions in the mountain were ripe for slides. Abounding all around them, that is, were the necessary factors for an avalanche to fall: snow buildups, susceptible terrain and a catalyst, the intractable weather.
As it challenged the durability of her roof, stood 12 feet high outside her window and loomed like cavernous walls along Kyle Canyon's sole channel in and out of the mountain, State Route 157, Virginia could see that snow was accumulating with great rapidity. She also knew that in Mount Charleston there is ample terrain beyond 6,500 feet with just the right 35- to 45-degree incline to accumulate snow and then release it, and that, in fact, avalanches were nothing new in the region, though for the most part they occurred in the backcountry, where they presented harm to no one. And she knew that the weather—the rain and sleet and snow—could act as a trigger for natural avalanches at any time. She understood she was in avalanche country. And so Virginia Pippin was one of the residents in the Mount Charleston subdivisions to prepare her belongings for evacuation after extreme avalanche warnings proliferated for the first seven days of 2005.
It was a season of avalanches in the high country. By the time the summer heat would melt away the danger of any new cases, the Colorado Avalanche Information Center counted 27 deaths in the United States due to avalanches. On January 8, two men in the backcountry of Utah's Wasatch Plateau were buried and killed by them, becoming the eighth and ninth victims of the year. The 10th would come the following day, in Lee Canyon.
January 9 was a Sunday, and it began with relentless early morning rain. When residents stepped out into the new day on Mount Charleston, the snow beneath their feet, much deeper now on account of the interminable storms, was highly unstable. This was incontrovertible knowledge, solidified by a small avalanche that broke loose later that morning near the Echo residential neighborhood in Kyle Canyon. The U.S. Forest Services, which rely on the expertise from the ski resort's avalanche-control program to issue avalanche warnings, and which only issues them when they are of the extreme nature, advised residents of Kyle and Lee canyons (the latter of which had experienced 80 inches of snowfall in the previous two weeks) to be alert, and skiers and snowboarders to steer clear of backcountry.
The ski resort, however, conducted their routine hazard analysis, concentrating on areas proven to be susceptible to avalanches, and deemed the slopes suitable for another day of recreation. No one had reason to doubt the results of the analysis, for the ski resort's avalanche-control program—by which human expertise and sophisticated tools are used to measure snowfall, weather conditions and the snow's crystal structures for cohesiveness and stability, as well as to detonate potential avalanches—had earned the faith of both skiers and resort operators alike with its trustworthy record over the 42 years of the ski resort's existence. As ever, they opened at 9 o'clock in the morning. And everything appeared to be fine.
Several hours later, after an unfathomable avalanche fell upon the ski resort and swept away a young boy, eyewitnesses would say that, all day, it seemed as if snow and rain and sleet were coming down at once. Which is mysterious, even for the Spring Mountain range, a desert archipelago where cryptic things happen all the time, like avalanches that fall in Las Vegas' back yard.
Piecing together fragments from eyewitnesses accounts, it all seems to have ignited with a BOOM! of snow breaking off just before 3 o'clock. Then a vast wave of white, white, white came rushing down the mountain like a tsunami, very cinematic and surreal to several openmouthed spectators, but not to the little boy, just 13 years old, whose misfortune it was to be sitting in the doomed seat on Chairlift Two as it escalated toward the rushing white wave which only a second ago was a BOOM! but now was consuming him and sweeping him from his seat; and though he tried to hold on he couldn't because he was only 13, and even if he were 30 and the strongest man in the world it wouldn't have mattered because nature is always more powerful; and now for a moment he was part of the white wave along with the debris also victim to nature's indiscriminate and untamable fury; but then it tossed the boy more than 100 feet through the air, only to collapse on him a moment later, burying him under four feet of debris that settled like concrete, trapping him in a frozen sepulcher, white and inescapable. About 60 skiers, resort patrolmen, Metro search-and-rescue agents and Clark County firefighters scavenged for his little body, but it was as if he had vanished into the mountain. His cold body was found about six hours later, and the coroner would later state that the cause of his death was blunt trauma.
Officials from the U.S. Forest Services determined that high winds had plastered loads of snow—made wet by the rain—against a steep ridge, and on account of those exact elements, the snow's cohesiveness deteriorated and a slab of catastrophic proportions fell.
It was a monster, with its crown face 15 feet deep, its fracture line 3,500 feet wide, and its traveling distance 2,400 vertical feet and 7,150 linear feet, at a speed that has yet to be calculated but in all certainty exceeded 80 mph, and it was unprecedented. A man deep in the snow business for 27 years, Brian Strait says it was the largest he has ever seen; and the U.S. Forest Service expert who would lead an investigation into the incident on January 11, says the same thing. Nothing of the avalanche's scope or magnitude had ever been witnessed in the immediate region upon which it fell. It had initiated within the ski resort's 700 permitted acres, but outside of the 60 acres the resort has demarked for recreational use, and it was an area that had been "previously unforeseen as a hazardous spot," according to Tim Short, a district ranger with the Forest Services.
The boy's death was an anomaly as well. According to researchers at the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, only 10 percent of fatal avalanches are triggered by nature, with the snow crashing down upon the victim. Most are triggered by the weight of humans, who slide down with the slab that falls like china off of a table. Moreover, fatal avalanches that occur within recreational boundaries are scarce, for ski resorts are built on safer terrain, and managed with an air-traffic-controller's vigilance. The boy was only the fourth person to fall victim to an avalanche inbounds at an American ski resort since 1985. (The fifth came soon thereafter, in the improbable month of May, in a Colorado avalanche not even half the size of Lee Canyon's.)
And further, the boy did not die from suffocation, as he was first reported to have done, nor did he die from carbon-dioxide poisoning, which is the cause of death for eight out of 10 avalanche victims (as their respiration gets trapped in the snow around them); but rather, he died on account of the blow delivered by the white wave, which erupted some 2,500 feet above his head, gained mass and momentum as it triggered other loose snow packs to break during its charge down a channel flowing northeast, parallel to Chairlift Two, and then, without warning or rationale, veered west, into the path of the boy's seat. It was as if the avalanche lunged out at him.
Just as the rain and snow and wind continued, so did the avalanches. And so did the damage.
On the morning of January 10, an avalanche in Lee Canyon destroyed an 18,000-foot phone cable, disconnecting all of Lee Canyon's 69 residents from the outside world for the next 10 months. Sometime between 3:45 p.m. on January 9 and 11 a.m. on January 11, an unwitnessed avalanche debilitated Chairlift One at the ski resort, hitting its upper terminus and a couple of its light towers. On January 11, a voluminous avalanche came within a stone's throw of the Echo residential neighborhood, and "by the grace of God it didn't keep going," says Becky Grismanauskas, the Mount Charleston Town Advisory Board chairperson, "or it would have wiped out Echo Village." Metro Police, of course, advised residents there, as well as in nearby Old Town, to evacuate. Not everyone did, preferring rather to submit their fate to Mother Nature. Just up State Route 157, an avalanche rumbled through the Cathedral picnic area, uprooting bathrooms and damaging longstanding tables. Employees at nearby Mount Charleston Lodge, which would suffer a caved-in window when its own rooftop avalanche came tumbling down, were asked, for safety precautions, to shut down. And they did, for the first time in over three decades.
Virginia Pippin was not asked to evacuate, for authorities did not believe her Rainbow neighborhood was in imminent danger. And it wasn't. But she still absorbed her own blow from nature when rooftop avalanches rumbled down her house and destroyed a chimney and porch during its ephemeral rage.
"This is the wilderness," Virginia says. "I knew when I moved here what I was dealing with: The mountain's not always friendly."
Strait agrees: "In the high alpine, you have to learn to deal with these conditions."
It's true. Rather than being in conflict with nature, says District Ranger Tim Short, you have to strive for harmony. You have to adapt.
In this respect, hindsight is useful. On December 7, representatives from the Forest Services made public the findings of their investigation into the fatal January 9 avalanche, and it came down hard on the ski resort, blaming it for multiple shortcomings in either preventing or eluding the avalanche. In specific, the authors of the report said that the resort failed to dig snow pits to analyze subsurface conditions; that the resort did not have necessary weather data gathering tools in place; and that no visual observations were made in the chute's area for the incipience of a fracture. But Short, who did not have a part in conducting the investigation, said:
"The key here is to learn. Sometimes it's impossible to even be aware of a hazard until disaster strikes. And so you have to assess the outcome, aggressively digest it, and ask: What can we change?"
At the ski resort, Brian Strait had already begun to implement changes before January came to an end. He installed a new weather station on the mountain and hired consultants to assess conditions and manage safety. He felt so comfortable with the resort's safety, as did the Forest Services, that the resort opened back up on Valentine's Day, happy to be playing on the mountain again but nonetheless glum after the life-changing experience in January.
The Forest Services issued an extreme avalanche warning for Lee Canyon one week later.
The Mount Charleston community will adapt too. That's the hope, anyway, of Becky Grismanauskas, who has been active in public affairs ever since she and her husband, Duffy, a retired Clark County firefighter and the current vice-chair of the Nevada Fire Safe Council, built their dream home in Kyle Canyon in 1989. For the mountain is vulnerable to seasonal catastrophes—fires in the warmer months, avalanches in the colder months—and she believes there are too many residents and visitors on Mount Charleston who are oblivious to Mother Nature's consuming power.
And so she says the first step is education—making people aware of the mountain's irascibility, teaching them how to respect Mother Nature instead of provoking her. And then there is preparation. Through the collaborative efforts of many of the 13 government agencies that have jurisdiction on Mount Charleston (all of whom are spoken of with praise by residents: another anomaly of the mountain), $500,000 in congressional money has been appropriated to establish an early warning system much more efficient than the archaic one in effect now, which consists, by and large, of cautioning folks door to door and mouth to mouth.
"We had a lot of measures in place, and we had been working on a lot of things," says Grismanauskas. "But last year was the year of years, and catastrophes have a way of drawing attention, emphasizing the urgency of improvements."
Then came spring; then came summer. The air began to warm, the snow melted into translucent streams that threatened the subdivisions with floods, and then tranquility returned to the mountain and everything was brought into perspective.
The season of avalanches left behind evidence of its massive destruction. From a bird's-eye view, its scope and magnitude are obvious: all across the Spring Mountain range are dozens of large gullies bereft of trees—multitudes of trees that had endured hundreds if not thousands of winters until the force of this year's avalanches uplifted them. And when you stand within the gully of an avalanche's destruction 11 months later, the enormity of it all becomes at once crystal clear and incomprehensible. Up in Lee Canyon, in the path of the avalanche, trees too thick for three grown men to put their arms around lie on the ground, either snapped or uprooted, and rocks like huge prehistoric eggs are scattered everywhere among the sea of deadwood and ashen wreckage. It's as if you're standing in a textbook photo of Hiroshima. And beneath the endless debris is snow that survived the Southern Nevada summer—30 feet of it, some experts say—kept insulated by that awesome carnage. It demands reverence. It commands humility.
And now, after a semiarid fall, the mountains have less than an inch of new snow. It doesn't look like Virginia will receive a white Christmas this year, and the Las Vegas Ski and Snowboard Resort didn't open until December 15, almost a month later than usual, and with only one of its runs available, covered in manmade snow. The dry season—an extreme in its own right—has conscious residents like Becky Grismanauskas fearful of a summer tormented by wildfires.