This is the activity and mission summary from our home page. The box below and the links above provide additional detail.

The Southeast Alaska Avalanche Center is an educational nonprofit corporation. As part of the network of avalanche centers in the US, it is our intent to serve as the snow avalanche education and information source for Southeast Alaska, from Ketchikan to Yakutat.

Our educational services have included avalanche courses, advisories, and research. We will not be issuing advisories this winter, but we still conduct a wide variety of courses from community presentations to professional and industrial training, and provide avalanche information and expertise for the news media, the community, government, and emergency responses. We serve as the regional snowpack information center and mountain weather link source.

Our programs have been particularly strong in research and snow science, and in the areas of urban, highway, industrial, snowmobile, snowboard, ski, high-latitude maritime, big mountain, and heliski avalanche issues.

Alaska has the highest total and per capita avalanche deaths of all the states and urban Juneau has the largest potential avalanche disaster in North America, yet despite a state statute mandating that the Department of Public Safety run a statewide government-funded avalanche program we are the only avalanche state that does not have one. As a tiny nonprofit, we cannot fund our local program or statewide system without the support of concerned citizens. You can learn more about us and find out how to help us serve you better through the How You Can Help link. You can also join as a member or make donations to help our efforts.

Information on the AK Block research project is under the Research link.

Additional Information:

• For those unfamiliar with Alaskan geography, the easiest way to visualize Southeast Alaska is to hold your right hand out in front of you. Make a fist then extend your index finger and thumb with both spread apart. Your finger is the Alaska Peninsula and the Aleutian Islands; your hand is the large landmass of Southcentral, Interior, and Arctic Alaska; and your thumb is Southeast Alaska.
• Southeast Alaska is mostly mountains, islands, and fjords. It is a temperate rainforest climate where rain and snow commonly alternate at sea level, the winter weather swings from cold and clear to warm and rainy, and snowfall in the mountains is tremendous. It is not a conventional maritime snow climate, but rather a very different high-latitude maritime snow climate. Above the snow level, our snowpacks are deep and complex, and the higher mountains are thickly covered with glaciers and icefields.
• No roads connect our communities. Travel is slow and expensive. We must travel by ferry to teach workshops in other towns, because air service is weather-dependent and frequently delayed.
  
• In the winter of 2006-07 we ran a nine-week urban avalanche forecasting demonstration program for the Junea area and we are continuing to work with the CBJ in hopes of establishing an ongoing urban forecast program. Our earlier backcountry advisories did not include a forecast or avalanche danger level because as an all-volunteer program we did not have the staffing for the seven-days-a-week field presence necessary to forecast accurately. Those programs were also very popular but we were not able to continue them because they never had any operational funding.