Backcountry safety and etiquette

[Admin]

Did anyone else notice this in today's Utah Avalanche Advisory?? :shock:

There was a very close call in the backcountry yesterday. Two avalanche workers were examining different crowns in the south facing Monte Cristo slide path in upper Little Cottonwood, when a party above inadvertently released a cornice, hitting the upper worker and triggering a slab avalanche that ran 1500?. The upper worker was caught and carried, eventually self arresting to avoid a fatal ride, and the slide missed the lower person. In spite of almost killing two people and wasting $1000 worth of gear, the cornice droppers didn?t even offer an apology. Bottom line: Just because you have two strong legs, good lungs and can make turns doesn?t mean you belong in the backcountry. You need good avalanche and backcountry travel skills, and before you drop cornices, jump off cliffs, ski cut slopes or drop steep lines, you must be CERTAIN that no one is below you.

 

[hamdog]

WOW! :shock:

that is the bottom line......

 

[Killclimbz]

I read about this and what a bunch of jerks! :evil:

Unbelievable, and it sounds like they probably didn't have a clue as to what they were doing. You should be checking out any BC line like this before dropping it. Guys like that are probably going to end up as a statistic sooner or later. Probably had no avy gear to boot.
Interesting enough, Coulior ran their State of the Backcountry and the "drive by slide" was one of the concerns due to the increase of BC users everywhere. Seems that we have our first real example of this. Scary stuff indeed.

 

[Marc_C]

As a follow-up, this paragraph was in today's avi advisory:

First, we want to apologize for our ranting yesterday when a backcountry party triggered a cornice and very nearly killed two UDOT avalanche workers below on Monte Cristo in Little Cottonwood Canyon. As avalanche workers, we all have several close friends who have been killed in avalanches and we all live in constant fear of it ourselves. So when some of our closet friends and most respected avalanche workers have a close call, we tend to get tweaked. It sounds like it was unintentional and an honest mistake?something that many of us have done in the past. But we still shouldn?t loose the lesson that we all need to be careful about traveling above other parties in avalanche terrain?something that is often overlooked in the urban backcountry of the Wasatch. On most ski patrols, traveling above your partner is considered to be tantamount to attempted homicide and the infraction often dealt with severely.