NYT :: Skiers Risk Answering the Call of Their Wild Side

This is a relatively balanced article on the risks of out of bounds skiing. I liked hearing from those who were irked by the disasters because it stood a chance of endangering other people's access rights.
Really, it's too bad that people are so litigious these days. We should all have the right to launch ourselves off cliffs without other people being afraid :)

January 19, 2005
Skiers Risk Answering the Call of Their Wild Side
By KIRK JOHNSON
ARK CITY, Utah, Jan. 18 - The solo skier or snowboarder cutting virgin tracks through the deep powder on a steep mountain slope has become a signature and symbol of the Western tourism industry - heady with its mixture of freedom, beauty and rugged individualism.
But that seductive image may be encouraging more and more people - many without much experience or training - to venture beyond the relative safety of the big resorts, risking harm to themselves and others, skiers and backcountry experts say. Seven people have died in backcountry avalanches in Utah alone since the season started, more deaths than there have been in any other year since 1950.
"They built the lifts and they pushed the powder," said Bob Athey, a backcountry veteran who was preparing Tuesday morning, as he does just about every day, to ski by himself into the woods near the Alta Ski Resort. "But then you have more skiers, which dampens down the powder, and that means the people who do want it have to go out of bounds to get it."
In the past few years, the ski industry has responded to a hunger for untrammeled terrain. Alpine touring, which allows a skier to hike like a cross-country skier, or lock the boot down for traditional downhill skiing, has become one of the fastest-growing categories in winter sports, industry officials say. Traditional ski makers like Atomic have expanded into the new market, and boot makers that once served only mountain climbers have retooled as well. The American Alpine Institute, a climbing school and guide service in Bellingham, Wash., estimates that off-road skiing, as it might be called, is growing three to five times faster than the traditional downhill sport.
But there is a deep culture clash at the heart of this new phenomenon. Many people who identify themselves as backcountry skiers - knowledgeable about the risks, trained in survival skills and never without an electronic homing device to help people find them if they are buried by snow - look with barely concealed disdain at what they call the "out of bounds" skier, who simply rides the chairlift up, disregards the warning signs and ducks under the rope.
The 27-year-old man who died here Friday, Shane Maixner, found still on his snowboard under four feet of snow near the Canyons Resort, was an out-of-bounder who apparently reached the place of his death through a gate on the resort boundary marked with a prominent skull and crossbones. The gate, which leads onto public land, is unlocked and unguarded, and its location is clearly marked on resort maps.
Mr. Maixner was not carrying any of the recommended backcountry survival gear. "You can't sugarcoat it or people will never learn," said Patrick Ormond, a mountain guide who lives here in Park City. "Once you cross that gate, if you're unprepared, you cross the line from ignorance to recklessness."
But other backcountry skiers, dyed deep with the free-will ethic that imbues their sport, say that individual decisions and their consequences are all that matter. Life is a calculated risk, they say, and an out-of-bounds skier, however unprepared, has made a choice. That fact must be respected, they say.
"They got killed doing something they like," said Charlie Sturgis, a ski tour guide who manages an outdoor outfitting store here called White Pine Touring, referring to the recent skier deaths. "That beats hanging out the front of a windshield."
Other backcountry skiers are simply angry. Access into national forests and other public land is already tighter than ever, they say, as private property and resort development have encircled mountain areas in the West. Reckless people, they say, give careful people a bad name - and create an excuse for landowners who might want to close roads or trails. "Besides putting rescuers in danger, our access could be hurt," said Brent Sherry, a college student in Salt Lake City who skis both the backcountry and the resorts. "I think that could be a real issue."
Avalanche experts say that the recipe for a snowslide is simple: different storms deposit different layers on a mountain, some with wetter snow and some with drier powder, and the terrain is safe only when the layers bond, like a layer cake, usually with a few days of warm sun. Experienced skiers say they venture out only after digging a snow trench to see how well the pack has congealed. And any slope steeper than 30 degrees is double prone to slide, they say. Dutch Draw, where the slide occurred last Friday outside the Canyons Resort, has a slope of 37 degrees to 38 degrees.
Other skiers say it is not about the snow or the slope, but about decision making. Some people have a hard time backing away, or backing down, even if they are able to read the dangers. It is a problem that men, in particular, are apparently prone to. Of the 629 people killed in the United States by avalanches since 1950 whose sex was determined, only about one in 10 were women, according to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center in Boulder.
"Ninety-nine percent of the problem is testosterone poisoning," said Larry Guild, a skier from Amherst, Mass., who was on vacation in Utah and preparing on Tuesday to depart for Utah's backcountry for the first time. Mr. Guild said he was going with a guide and would not have it any other way. "There's no way I'd go up there by myself," he said, nodding his head to the mountains towering above the road where his group had parked.
Other people said that intuition was what could save a person in the wild and that there was only one way to get it - through years of experience. Sex does not matter, they say. "My husband has tried to develop a sixth sense about avalanches, and I usually defer to him," said Julie Cooke, who lives in Alta and was walking Tuesday morning past the backcountry access trailhead near her home. Ms. Cooke, who said her husband had been skiing the backcountry for 30 years, has not felt right going out since the last big wave of storms and said she would probably just wait a bit longer still, until she and her husband were sure.
With their grooming equipment and ever-present ski patrols, mountain resorts project an aura of safety that can obscure the risks beyond the borders of a flimsy fence, some skiers say, especially when the snow might look, to the untrained eye, about the same on either side. Others say that in the blur of warnings and precautions that modern society requires on so many things it is easier than ever to dismiss an avalanche danger sign as the work of lawyers or fussy government monitors, however dire the language. "There's a lot of stuff that can get you killed, but when you're in a ski resort, you don't have that expectation," said Mr. Sturgis, the tour guide and store manager.
Referring to the backcountry access point near the summit at Canyons Resort, he added that he thought that most of the people who went past the gate believed they were merely extending the resort experience.
Police officials say there is also the question of how to enforce the rules. The Summit County sheriff, Dave Edmunds, whose jurisdiction includes the Park City resorts, said that leaving a resort to ski onto someone's private property, for example, was an easy one - that is trespassing. But public lands outside a resort, like the Dutch Draw area where the big slide hit last week, are far trickier. The public has a right to be there, Sheriff Edmunds said, unless individuals have violated some other law along the way.
"If you're an adult and you want to go and risk your life, it's your business," he said. "We just have to clean up the mess."