Avalanche forecaster Jeff Davis couldn’t tell you how many accident reports he has written on slides that killed or injured someone. Nor could he tell you how many bodies he has taken out of the field.
“It’s been quite a few, but I think something that’s important to me is that I don’t keep track,” he said.
Davis, who forecasts in the San Juan Mountains, began work at the Colorado Avalanche Information Center a decade ago, at a time when the industry was led by and filled with a hardened group of professionals who, in Davis’ words, kept “their emotions in a box” and “just dealt with it.”
The CAIC is responsible for issuing daily forecasts for avalanche conditions across the state and producing reports on avalanches that injure or kill people.
The investigations that inform those reports are exhaustive and often demand lengthy conversations with mourning families and adventure partners about the decisions that led up to the incident. Sometimes they involve contact with bodies, and sometimes forecasters themselves are assisting in body retrieval.
“I’m very intimately involved with … the moment of the accident, and then I relive it for a week along with the people involved,” Davis said. “And that’s really challenging.”
It is not uncommon for forecasters to know people connected directly or indirectly to an accident. Or perhaps the investigator has themselves skied the terrain where an accident occurred.
The emotional load of accident investigation piles onto the baseline stress that is inherent to a forecaster’s daily workload, which stems from the fatigue of regularly making consequential decisions about the forecast.
“I know some people will struggle to sleep or go to bed (wondering), ‘Is it going to be considerable tomorrow or moderate?’” said Ian Fowler, a CAIC forecaster in Colorado’s northern mountains.
When Fowler joined the CAIC in 2021, there was nothing formal in the way of mental health resiliency programming at the agency. He put the question to Deputy Director Brian Lazar.
“Well, we kind of check in on each other,” Lazar responded.
Fowler saw an opportunity.
Like many forecasters, Fowler came to the CAIC with a background in ski patrol. It was through his work at Eldora Mountain that he first became acquainted with Laura McGladrey, a national expert in trauma and stress resiliency and founder of the Responder Alliance.
McGladrey has adapted existing models used to gauge and address stress to apply specifically to outdoor recreation professionals, such as search and rescue teams and ski patrollers.
Her work, which as implemented at Eldora, became the basis for the program that Fowler spearheaded at the CAIC, which implemented stress-resiliency tools specifically targeted at avalanche forecasters.
The CAIC piloted its stress-resiliency program during the 2022-23 season. Fowler, Lazar and CAIC Executive Director Ethan Greene were co-authors to a paper, alongside Gabriel Benel, an avalanche technician with the Snowmass Ski Patrol Snow Safety Team who piloted a similar program at the Aspen resort, and McGladrey to present at the International Snow Science Workshop in October 2023.
“I was pretty adamant that we address both acute stress, which is the obvious stuff like a gory accident scene … but then also chronic stress buildup,” Lazar said.
The 14-year veteran of the CAIC has observed the buildup of fatigue in workers who are part of a round-the-clock operation. Unlike a ski resort, where the customers go home when the lifts close in the afternoon, avalanche forecasting can feel never-ending.
“It can be a hard job to unplug from,” Lazar said from his car, parked on the side of Berthoud Pass before a mission into the field.
Working with the Responder Alliance, the CAIC modified the stress continuum used by the U.S. Marine Corps and superimposed it onto the North American Public Avalanche Danger Scale – the five-tiered color-coded spectrum used to communicate avalanche likelihood, severity and requisite travel advice.
A “considerable” or “orange” avalanche danger would indicate dangerous avalanche conditions and advise that backcountry travelers carefully evaluate the snowpack and make conservative decisions; a “considerable” or “orange” stress level would indicate that a forecaster is losing sleep, unable to disconnect from work when they should be resting, barely on time or late for forecasting, and communicating in an aggressive or defensive manner.
The co-optation of the familiar avalanche danger scale was “pretty cheeky” said Davis, a somewhat stoic skier.
CAIC staff members take a monthly survey asking them to describe stress levels and symptoms, which gives the organization a snapshot of the overall mental health of their forecasters (since the first season, staff members have the option to take a survey daily, although few do). Increased stress levels would prompt increased check-ins from managers and stress “buddies.”
“We’re using it as kind of a self-reflection tool, a way for people to check in and take their temperature,” Lazar said.
To address acute stress, generally in the wake of potentially traumatic incidents such as the investigation of fatalities or high-stress highway events, the CAIC borrowed two tools from the Responder Alliance: the incident support tool and the 3-3-3 exposure protocol.
The incident support tool allows both the exposed person and an unaffected staff member to score elements of a response, such as the level to which children were involved, complexity or extreme exposure, on a scale of one to 10. Things like interaction with a victim’s family or prolonged contact with a body might lead to higher scores.
A moderate or high score will trigger a 3-3-3- protocol (which can also begin at the request of the incident responder).
The 3-3-3 system is designed to review and address the mental health impacts of a traumatic event on the job. It consists of check-ins from another peer or supervisor at the three-day, three-week, and three-month waypoints, with corresponding action items at each point depending on the level of trauma.
“The protocol promotes awareness and mitigation of depletion stress, forward connection and validates the predictable trajectory of exposure stress,” the paper says.
Davis took the 2022-23 season off from forecasting and worked as ski guide instead.
“Part of the reason I stepped away was because of accidents – dealing with accidents,” he said. “I was burned out.”
Still, Davis comes from a generation of snow professionals who don’t wear their emotions on their sleeves, and he was wary of the program at first.
“I’ve never been someone who’s good with fluff,” he said.
When Ophir resident Dr. Peter Harrelson was killed in an avalanche outside town in January, Davis got a call in the middle of the night. The next morning, he passed the search and rescue team extricating Harrelson’s body as he traveled to the accident site.
Davis knew Harrelson – Dr. Pete, as many, including Davis, called him – from the tiny mountain town, and built a house next to Harrelson’s last summer.
It wasn’t Davis’ first go-round investigating an avalanche that killed someone he knew. In 2022, he led the investigation into the avalanche that killed Devin Overton, a 29-year-old snowboarder from Telluride.
The investigation into the slide that took Harrelson’s life was not particularly traumatic, Davis said. Still, his exposure prompted his supervisor to begin the 3-3-3 protocol check-ins.
In most cases, the protocol is ended after three weeks, as respondents’ stress has decreased.
Davis said he has not experienced huge impacts of the CAIC stress mitigation program – but he recognizes the value of its presence.
“You might think you don’t need it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t help,” he said.
Despite the program’s simplicity, its introduction is part of an evolution as the CAIC shores up its professional bona fides.
“Our procedures for going through the accidents have just been tightened up over the years,” Lazar said.
The organization is more considerate of who responds to traumatic events, logistics allowing, and has formalized the way its staff members conduct interviews and write reports.
“Now, as soon as something like that happens, we start a calendar,” he said. “Essentially, this 3-3-3 check-in protocol, you know, never took place even as recently as four years ago.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
