“This avalanche cycle was to snow scientists as an asteroid hitting Earth would be for astrophysicists,” says Dr. Kelly Elder, a research hydrologist at the US Forest Service (USFS) and an avalanche science instructor at Colorado Mountain College. “Scientists can go whole careers or even lifetimes without seeing these rare events.”

Though the avalanche season was catastrophic, claiming three lives and incurring many millions of dollars in damage to public and private infrastructure, Elder and his colleagues are finding the silver lining in the debris that nature deposited in their backyard. The unprecedented onslaught of snow has provided new information that will help researchers better understand the future of avalanches in a changing climate.

Elder understands the poetics of science–how studying minutiae can more clearly inform larger landscapes and how looking at the past can help reveal the future. Placing these avalanches in historical context is key to unraveling their mysteries, but systematic avalanche monitoring in the United States only began in the 1950s; more data were needed. So Elder and his collaborators looked to some of the best record-keepers on the planet–trees.