You're not supposed to panic when an avalanche buries you. Easy to say. Hard to do.
Legal resident Kevin Keller learned that last year while snowmobiling near Valemount, B.C. Keller, 24, was riding through an area known as Bauer's Last Stand when the snow pack gave way above him.
"The whole face slid, filled the gully up in front of us, then the overflow came over the top and threw me off my sled and buried me," he said.
"I was going over in my head, 'Oh man, this is horrible. I can't believe I just got buried in an avalanche. I'm dead.'"
Trapped in pitch black under the snow, he couldn't tell which way was up or how deep the snow was.
"It felt so deep," Keller said. "It's like dried cement. You can't even wiggle a finger. It's incredible."
Luckily, he wasn't that deep. His head was just six inches under the surface and in his panicked attempts to squirm free, the brim of his helmet cracked the snow, letting in precious daylight and air. After that there was no stopping him from wiggling out.
"Just adrenaline I guess. I'm a squirmy little guy," he said. "If it had been another six inches I might not be here today."
Risk and reward
If you ask mountain sledders about the appeal of their pursuit, eyes will light up and tongues will seize in an attempt to describe the indescribable.
"It's awesome out there, feet and feet of snow you can play in, lots of untouched terrain, mountains to climb," said Keller.
His riding buddies have similar descriptions.
"The mountain ranges are huge. You can ride for days and not see the same track," said Pierre Letourneau, 25. "You'll get to places that only helicopters can get to."
"It's an endless playground. You can pretty well go wherever you want," agrees Rob Morin, 30.
Letourneau and Morin are Legal residents who both work in sales at Riverside Honda & Ski-Doo in St. Albert.
Accessing the endless playground of B.C.'s interior mountains is much easier now than it was 10 years ago, thanks to a new crop of lightweight machines that have more horsepower than some cars.
Ranging in price from $10,000 to $14,000, these mountain sleds are slow but powerful compared to standard machines, and have a much longer track that acts like a snowshoe to prevent sinking in deep snow. Their tracks also have longer grips for much better traction.
The specs of these stock machines used to be available only with expensive aftermarket customization. The result is that more riders, some of them inexperienced and unskilled, can access remote and dangerous avalanche terrain.
And many of them do. There are safe, family-friendly places to ride in B.C.'s popular mountain areas but hard-core riders want to challenge their machines and their skills.
"You don't drive six, seven hours to go for a trail ride," Morin said.
According to the Canadian Avalanche Centre, snowmobilers accounted for 38 per cent of the 144 avalanche deaths in Canada between 1999 and 2009. Last winter there were 26 avalanche deaths, 19 of them snowmobilers, about double the number killed in the worst season previously on record.
"Ninety per cent of the people out there have no idea of the dangers. They just ride," Letourneau said.
Home fires
The St. Albert area is home to many avid mountain snowmobilers, say Letourneau and Morin. While the hobby means exhilaration for riders, it means constant worry for family members left at home.
Keller's girlfriend Amy Fokkema, with whom he has an 18-month-old son, wasn't too concerned about the dangers until his brush with death.
"After that, I was kind of like, 'OK, I don't think I want you to do this anymore.' It was kind of a constant worry," she said. "Every day when I knew it was dark, I'd be waiting for his call."
An avid snowboarder, Fokkema has visited the backcountry herself and understands the allure. She wouldn't ask Keller to give up his passion even though part of her wants to. Other enthusiasts say their wives have similar views.
"My wife's a saint," Letourneau said. "She knows this is one of my passions. I don't know if she understands it but … she lets me do it anyway."
When the unthinkable does happen, it's devastating to families.
Stony Plain-area resident Bonnie Scheideman, 33, has been living that devastation for nearly a year. Her husband of 16 years, Shane, was killed by an avalanche near McBride, B.C. on March 24 last year. Now Scheideman is a single mother raising four kids on her own. She was just recently able to return to work part-time and is steeling herself for grief counselling.
"At first it was very overwhelming … now the grief is just there," she said. "Every time I wake up in the morning it's what I think about. When I go to sleep, I think about it and during the day, when I look at my kids' faces, because they all look like him."
Safety
There are three things sledders should do to reduce their risk of dying in an avalanche, said John Kelly, operations manager for the Canadian Avalanche Centre.
Firstly, riders should check the avalanche conditions for the area where they plan to ride. Secondly, all riders should have three essential pieces of safety gear: shovel, probe and electronic beacon. Lastly, riders should take a standard two-day avalanche awareness course that teaches how to identify dangerous avalanche conditions, travel through avalanche country and use the safety gear.
About 50 per cent of the snowmobilers involved in avalanche incidents in the past 30 years haven't had the appropriate gear, but that rate has dropped to about 25 per cent in the last 10 years, Kelly said. However, avalanche awareness trainers still deliver 10 times more courses to skiers than sledders, even though sledders are the largest group of backcountry users.
"There's absolutely no doubt that the death toll is too high," Kelly said. "We will never solve all avalanche accidents … but the stunning thing about a lot of these snowmobile accidents is that the elements to prevent them were really there."
Keller's close call was the kick-start that he and his buddies needed to take the avalanche training themselves. Nine of them went this year.
"It's sad that it got to that point because we've been riding for years out there," Letourneau said.
The men learned things that they'd never considered before and feel far more prepared. Keller now realizes that it was too warm out the day he had his scare, which made the snow unstable.
Perspective
If your only knowledge of mountain sledding is news reports about the latest death, it's easy to think that enthusiasts are irresponsible or stupid. But it's a common saying among riders that driving to the mountains is riskier than riding on them. And there's evidence to support the claim.
People who use avalanche terrain are about as likely to die in an avalanche as a car accident, suggests a master's thesis by University of Calgary student Albi Sole. Using fatality statistics and estimates of the number of backcountry users, Sole compared death rates of backcountry users and B.C. drivers. The respective results were 12.24 and 15.8 deaths per 100,000 users per year.
Kelly has reviewed the data and believes it's accurate.
"Saying the activities are inherently too dangerous to do is incorrect," Kelly said. "They're on the same level as other sports. They're on the same level as driving."
Scheideman doesn't want people to abandon their sleds despite losing her husband to an avalanche.
"He could have died in a car accident and he didn't love driving, so he died doing something that he loved," she said. "You can still go out there and have fun, just be careful where you go."
The Legal riders refuse to let fear overrule their passion for riding.
"I love sledding man, there's no way I'll stop," Keller said. "I didn't buy a $10,000 machine to have it sit in the garage."
