Avalanches and humans in Alaska have had a varied history. The Native people were generally smart and observant enough to learn where the hazardous areas were and avoid them, though some Natives still got caught. In contrast, the early miners and settlers sometimes displayed a startling ignorance, often traveling through or camping in obvious avalanche zones during heavy winter storms or cluelessly rebuilding in the exact same locations when mine buildings were destroyed by slides.
This frontier attitude continued into the fifties and sixties, when large avalanche cycles affecting highways and urban areas finally brought enough awareness to lead the highway department to fund Alaska’s first avalanche program. It was a very impressive research and mitigation effort involving ridgetop instrumentation, research huts at starting zone elevations, careful recording of weather and avalanche activity, explosive avalanche reduction work, helicopter support, and construction of protective earthworks.
But after a few low-snow winters, the program’s funding was discontinued. In the following years a handful of avalanche specialists worked for ski areas, the Alaska Railroad, the Forest Service, and the Department of Transportation. Public education was left to the Ski Patrol and mountaineering club courses. There was no coordinated program of research, forecasting, or public education.
Recreational use of the Alaskan winter backcountry boomed in the seventies, bringing a sharp increase in avalanche incidents. Alaska became the state with the highest per capita avalanche death rate in the United States. In 1977 some Southcentral Alaska pro patrollers and guides brought Rod Newcombe and Ed LaChapelle up to teach an American Avalanche Institute (AAI) course at Summit Lake on the Kenai Peninsula.
Among the group attending was Doug Fesler, a State Parks ranger with a strong interest in avalanches. Doug understood that many more courses were needed to reach the outdoor public, that it would take an Alaskan avalanche school to do the job, and that the prospective instructors for those courses were among those attending the AAI workshop.
The State of Alaska was flush with Prudhoe Bay oil money then and State Parks programs were expanding. Doug was able to secure funding for the Alaska Avalanche School, which began offering a full program of avalanche workshops throughout the state. Shortly thereafter, a state avalanche forecast center was started in Anchorage.
The oil money allowed the school to bring a guest instructor from out of state for each course. They brought up the best people they could get and learned from them in the field and in the classroom. The courses improved steadily and earned a reputation for excellence.
But the oil boom ended, revenues fell, and the legislature zeroed out the funding for all government-funded avalanche programs in 1987. The forecast center ceased operations and the nonprofit Alaska Mountain Safety Center (AMSC) was formed to take over the Alaska Avalanche School. Southcentral Alaska still had a full series of high quality workshops every season but funds were no longer adequate for travel to outlying areas.
As the amount of avalanche work in Southcentral Alaska dropped off, longtime Alaska Avalanche School instructor, ski guide, and avalanche specialist Bill Glude moved down to Juneau in 1988, where he ran the avalanche program for a mining operation and did highway studies for the State, teaching only occasionally. There were periodic requests for avalanche courses in Southeast Alaska but the AMSC was no longer able to afford to travel to Southeast for courses and Bill was too busy to do much teaching.
In 1995, one of Bill’s friends was killed in an avalanche in the hills above Juneau. After assisting with the search and the body recovery, Bill vowed to start teaching courses the next season. As the one avalanche specialist in the 900 kilometer-long Alaskan panhandle, he was the only person who could teach the courses that would save lives.
He checked with various government agencies to see if any might host an avalanche center, but declining revenue and continuing budget cuts meant that no single agency could to do it. Only a nonprofit could combine money from small funding sources to do the job. He discussed forming a Southeast Alaska branch of the Alaska Mountain Safety Center with his longtime coworkers, but they decided that coordinating with a headquarters 1000 kilometers away in Anchorage would be difficult.
Bill assembled an advisory board to start the Southeast Alaska Avalanche Center in the fall of 1995. For the first few years, it remained a simple, community-based organization. The longterm goal included public avalanche forecasts, but the initial focus was on courses and training sessions where our minimal funding could have maximum effect. Part-time consulting work on highway studies allowed Bill to donate enough time to keep the courses going.
In the fall of 1999 SEADOGS, the local dog search and rescue group, convened a meeting of about 20 representatives from rescue groups and state, federal, and local agencies to discuss the status of avalanche readiness and education in the region. The group decided that the Southeast Alaska Avalanche Center should serve as the vehicle to provide avalanche education and eventually forecasting for the region. They agreed to help the Center incorporate, obtain IRS educational nonprofit status, and secure stable funding. SEADOGS provided seed money to begin the process, and several state trail and snowmobile safety grants helped get it started.