Utah Avalanche Center Podcast

The Utah Avalanche Center is more than just a corps of extraordinary forecasters. Since 1990, a group of dedicated, visionary, and hard-working people has helped the UAC expand its range and helped push it to the forefront of the industry. This episode, we're joined by all five men and women who have helmed the Friends of the Utah Avalanche Center through the years. Wendy Zeigler, Colleen Nipkow, Paul Diegel, Chad Bracklesberg, and Caroline Miller have helped fund UAC's operations and shape its future, while providing the leadership and support necessary for the center to develop innovations in avalanche education, target unique user groups, develop the Know Before You Go program, embrace new technologies and media platforms, and share what works and what doesn't. It's all in the service of keeping those who love Utah's winter mountains on top of the snow rather than buried beneath it.

Brett Kobernick’s nickname may be “Kowboy,” but he’s actually something of a Leonardo da Vinci of the snow. A garage tinkerer who builds the tools he needs to better understand winter conditions, he’s also an early adopter of the snow bike, and he helped invent the split-board. True story. Kowboy joins us to talk about all of that, as well as the science, the excitement, and the tragedy of avalanches. As he says, the hardest part of the job isn’t forecasting for a PWL on the mend, although that is very difficult. No, the hardest part is talking to the survivors or family members of the victim of a deadly avalanche.

If you were looking to move somewhere because you love to ski, Moab, Utah likely wouldn’t be anywhere near the top of that list. Dave Garcia loves to ski. It’s why he came to Utah in 2002. He spent 12 seasons skiing the Wasatch, then he moved to Moab, and not for the snow. But the thing is, there’s actually some pretty good skiing in the mountains that loom over the deserts of southeastern Utah—if you know how to manage the hazards. These days, Garcia forecasts for Avalanche Center office in Moab, and he joins us to talk about the challenges, and the rewards of moving from a resource- and input-rich environment to one where the info is sparse and terrain is immense and remote.

Dave Kelly’s career on snow has included stints forecasting for a remote narrow-gauge, trans-national railroad on behalf of the Alaska DOT. He’s also put in time at Turoa, one of the largest ski areas in New Zealand. And for 16 years, he worked as a ski patroller at Alta. He joined the Utah Avalanche Center in the 2022-23 season as a forecaster for the Salt Lake area. And he says it was the challenge of forecasting for bigger terrain that drew him to his new gig. Kelly joins us to talk about making the transition from an operational forecaster to a public one. And we also try to wrap our heads around the mysteries of radiation recrystallization.

More often than not, UAC forecaster Craig Gordon heads into the backcountry alone. He loves it. the solitude. Moving at his own pace. Spending as much time as he wants, as much time as it takes to understand the snowpack. He also understands the risks involved in touring alone. Craig joins us to talk through two of his most memorable solo backcountry tours, what he learned out there, and how he came back a changed man.

If there's one thing we can all agree on, it's snow. In his 20-plus years as a UAC forecaster for the Logan region, Toby Weed has seen snow's uniting effects. The Logan mountains boast an abundance of terrain, and for years, motorized and non-motorized users battled for the best slopes. But, Weed says, these days, things have changed. He joins us to talk about how, by focusing on the snow, and how to travel safely on it, we can all just get along.

There isn’t any hard data on this, but it seems safe to say that Paige Pagnucco is one of very few people who are both full-time avalanche forecasters and MBAs. In fact, she may well be a group of one. Pagnucco, who forecasts for the Logan region, says that, while it may not seem like it at first, there’s actually some significant overlap between business and forecasting. It comes down to messaging. Marketers and forecasters are both trying to figure out how you inspire certain behaviors by saying the right thing in the right way. Pagnucco joins us to explore the nuances of effective communication in a backcountry locale shared equally by motorized and non-motorized users.

The La Sal Mountains of southeastern Utah erupt out of the surrounding red rock desert. They sport steep slopes and big alpine lines that just beg to be skied. But this is expert terrain, says UAC forecaster Eric Trenbeath. It’s highly avalanche prone, especially in the heart of winter, when the coverage is thin. Trenbeath is based in Moab, and he’s been forecasting for the La Sals and nearby Abajos for nearly 15 years. All that time, and for years before he arrived, the shadow of the Gold Basin accident has hung over winter recreation down there. Trenbeath joins us to recount the tragic events of February 12, 1992, and to explain how the shockwave of an avalanche fatality can reverberate through a community for years.

Greg Gagne is a self-described conservative backcountry skier. His greatest satisfaction comes from putting in the work before entering avalanche terrain. He wants to know, as well as he possibly can, that the snow he’s traveling on and around is stable. Greg joins us to explore how we grow our knowledge and experience in avalanche terrain, and we also talk about the ingredients of a healthy backcountry community.

UAC forecaster Nikki Champion knows first-hand the challenge of charting a career path in snow and avalanche science. She joins us to talk about how having role models and mentors that looked like her helped her find her way. We also talk about her recent ISSW paper evaluating the accuracy of the avalanche center’s forecasts in the last few years.

This season, something a little different on the podcast. We want you to get to know the UAC forecasters, so, Drew is handing over the host's mic to producer Benjamin Bombard, and he'll be the one interviewing the crew. Drew's first at bat. He joins us to talk about how relaying valuable information through stories—rather than "just the facts, ma'am"—can help backcountry users get home safely.

Laura McGladrey, the founder of the groundbreaking non-profit Responders Alliance, works with front-line teams who witness and experience traumatic events—law enforcement, fire, EMS, Search and Rescue. She crafts language and creates tools to help them foster mental well being and resiliency. As Laura told us, you can spend all the time you want in classes, studying snow science and the human factors, you can spend all the time you want on the snow. But, for a lot of us, when your soul gets raked over the coals of trauma with loss so common to life in the mountains, there isn’t much anybody can do to help you prepare for that. Laura's hoping to change that. Laura McGladrey is a force of nature.

Unlike a lot of snow and avalanche professionals, Jerry Roberts spent a fair amount of time hanging out around San Francisco, soaking up the Buddhist-infused literary scene of the '60s. He developed a deep affection for some very old school snow enthusiasts: Basho, Issa, Buson, and other 18th-century Japanese poets. He went on to a lengthy career forecasting for the Colorado Avalance Information Center, the Colorado Department of Transportation, even Quentin Tarantino. Along the way, he's written a number of his own wintry haiku. He joins us to share stories and wisdom from a lifetime in the snowy mountains, as well as a few poems.

At the end of nearly every episode of the podcast, Drew asks his guests, "To what do you attribute your longevity?" The answer he hears more than any other: Luck. When he got the question as a guest on the show last season, it got Chris Lundy thinking. He ended up making a presentation at the Bend SAW about what luck has to teach us about winter backcountry travel. Luck, he came he think, is just the other side of risk. They're opposite sides of the same coin. Lundy is an avalanche forecaster at the Sawtooth Avalanche Center and a avalanche specialist with the National Avalanche Center. He joins us to talk about luck versus chance versus uncertainty in avalanche terrain.

Where and when does a situation go bad? It's easy to think that an accident is the result of a single bad decision. But as Laura Maguire tells it, to understand an accident, which can be read as a failure of decision making, you really need to examine the systemic influences and the progression of choices that led up to that pivotal moment, because no decision is made in a vacuum. Maguire is an expert on human decision making. She joins us to talk about how the choices we make are often based on flawed thinking and dangerous biases. She also shares tools for hacking the decision making process to build in greater safety margins.

A lifetime ago, back in 1981, Brad Meiklejohn was ski-bumming and working at Alta when he witnessed a full-depth avalanche on High Rustler. It was mesmerizing, and it changed his path in life. He went on to study snow and avalanches on the East Coast, moved back out West and joined what was then known as the Utah Avalanche Forecast Center. His life, or his sense of its preciousness, changed again when he recovered the bodies of four friends buried in the Talking Mountain Cirque slide in the La Sal Mountains. These days, he works as a conservationist in Alaska, and he joins us to share his memories of the evolution of the UAC and his insights on life, death and the true value of outdoor recreation.

After five years of hosting the podcast, Drew Hardesty was curious about the mindset of the young guns just now cutting their teeth and testing themselves in very real, very consequential ski mountaineering terrain. Is the old guard wasting their time wagging their tongues and fingers about the dangers of backcountry travel while the youth just roll their eyes? That's where Zack Little comes in. Hired by Exum Mountain Guides as a teenager, Little has climbed and skied all over the Teton Range and even climbed the Grand Teton before high school. He joins us to talk about risk management, mentorship and laying the groundwork for a long life in the mountains.

In the winter of 2002-03, 24 people were killed in a pair of large avalanches in British Columbia. Those horrific tragedies spurred Canada’s national parks agency to find ways to better insure public safety in the winter mountains. That’s where Grant Statham comes in. An accomplished mountain guide and avalanche forecaster, Grant led the development of new safety systems and methods that have been implemented around the world, but curiously, not in the U.S. Grant joined us to talk how we think about avalanche hazard and how we communicate that risk to the public.

It’s been said that culture eats training for breakfast. In other words, you can take all the classes, read all the books, develop a fool-proof checklist and a dialed-in system, but when the snow falls, and when a social animal enters a high-risk environment, all that education and preparation can go right out the window. AMGA/IFMGA mountain guide Margaret Wheeler and Sawtooth Avalanche Center forecaster Chris Lundy join us for a conversation about the push and pull between cultural pressures, “selfish” rewards and the difficulty of actually understanding risk in the backcountry.

At first glance, financial advising and heli-skiing might not seem to have much if anything in common. But, think about it like this: Both take on clients who put a lot of money on the line, they put a lot of trust in their guides, and there are some heavy costs to getting it wrong. This time around we’re joined by Ronna Cohen, a financial adviser and backcountry skier, and Jed Workman, an Alaskan heli-ski guide to talk about risk, reward and “accident cascades.”