Alta Ski Area Communications Manager Lexi Dowdall said nearly 90 people were killed in 14 avalanches in the town of Alta between a 50-year span from the 1870s to the late 1920s.
When Alta was established as an official ski area in 1939, snow rangers with the U.S. Forest Service were in charge of avalanche mitigation.
“At first their only course of action really was to shut the road, and they’d do that for one, three to four days at a time, while they just waited for new snow to settle,” Dowdall said. “That would either result in a natural avalanche cycle or the snow would just settle and that would be that.”
Dowdall said that changed in the 1940s when a man named Monty Atwater came up with the idea to use military artillery.
“[Atwater] called up the Utah National Guard and said, ‘Hey guys, why don’t you come up to Alta and fire a couple rounds?’ And so they did kind of a demonstration in 1949 and it was wildly successful,” she said.
Managing the snow load in Little Cottonwood Canyon is critical because over half of state Route 210, which runs up and down the canyon, lies within avalanche paths.
“Over the course of decades, we’ve developed a lot of the protocol that ski patrols will use operationally now across the U.S.,” Dowdall said. “A big part of that is, we receive 546 inches of snowfall on average per winter. There’s no choice but to address that avalanche problem head on.”
The military Howitzer guns were retired from operations after the winter of 2023, when Alta received a record 903 inches of snow.
Now new tools have been added to the avalanche mitigation arsenal, largely thanks to innovation in Europe.
The new remote avalanche control devices (RACS) are now used at several local ski areas, including Alta, Snowbird and Solitude, and by the Utah Department of Transportation.
“The avalanche safety professional or the ski patroller will be in a remote location away from the start zone where this device is stationed, and they’ll key in a command, and that will drop a charge on a piece of cord that hovers about eight to 10 feet above the snow surface,” Dowdall said. “After a specific amount of time, I believe our operations are using 90 seconds, that charge will detonate above the snow surface, and the force of that will hopefully trigger any weak layers lying within the snowpack and then release an avalanche.”
She said the new system saves hours of work and makes for a safer environment for snow safety professionals.
Dowdall recently made a short film highlighting the history of avalanche mitigation in Little Cottonwood Canyon.
