CRESTED BUTTE — After a long morning throwing almost a dozen explosives into Crested Butte’s alpine snowpack, ski patrollers Eric “H” Baumm and Jon Francisco grab a couple of “glory laps.”

“You know, you want to touch and feel everything out here,” says Francisco, shoving off into a foot of fresh snow on the resort’s famed Headwall, shortly after blasting the terrain and determining it ready for skiers. Across the mountain, skiers briefly stop pillaging powder to cheer and thank Baumm and Francisco, like they are war heroes.

They are soldiers in a dangerous crusade.

After an epic storm cycle that has buried Crested Butte and elevated the avalanche hazard in the region’s surrounding backcountry to the very rare “extreme” level, Crested Butte ski patrollers are battling that same avalanche danger with thousands of pounds of explosives. When avalanche forecasters across the state urge skiers to stick to the chairlifts while the new snow settles — there are dangerous conditions in nine of the state’s 10 avalanche zones — the pressure grows for patrollers tasked with delivering safe, skiable terrain at resorts all over the state.





“We are the only game in town right now,” Francisco said.

“So we are neurotically thorough,” Baumm said. “We have some of the most hard-charging locals in North America here, and we want to get this to them, you know.”

The meticulous approach was required to tame a volatile snowpack that became particularly unstable in the last 10 days of relentless snow and wind. Crested Butte Mountain Resort picked up more than 100 inches of new snow and grew its year-to-date snowfall to more than 200 inches — well beyond last year’s full-season total.

Across the state, the wet, prodigious storms have elevated avalanche danger in the backcountry. In the first 12 days of January, the Colorado Avalanche Information Center recorded more than 400 avalanches. So far, 11 backcountry travelers were caught in slides; two were completely buried. Amazingly, no one has died.

The latest avalanche warnings for the Gunnison zone around Crested Butte have forecast avalanches “large enough to break mature timber and can easily kill you.”

“Travel in avalanche terrain is not recommended,” reads the CAIC’s Thursday avalanche warning.

Patrollers are on the front lines. Slides recently swept two Crested Butte patrollers off their feet, and one escaped using one of the patrol’s new fleet of Black Diamond JetForce avalanche airbag backpacks.

Since Jan. 1, Crested Butte’s patrollers have hurled more than 1,500 pounds of explosives into the area’s steep terrain. It’s not just for the experts. Some of the mountain’s avalanche-prone steeps tower above intermediate terrain. Reducing the risk of avalanches that could bury a blue run — or a chairlift — is the first objective for patrollers who arrive at the mountain at 6 a.m. on days when the avalanche hazard climbs with new snow and wind. The last four days have been early calls, with teams of two testing just about every hanging snow field in the 1,550-acre ski area.

Frank Coffey, the mountain’s 66-year-old snow-safety director, orchestrates the battle plan every day. He wakes up 2:30 a.m. and checks snowfall reports, radar and avalanche forecasts, rallying his troops with a 3:30 a.m. call for an early attack. He pencils the names of patrollers — nicknames more often than not — along the more than 20 avalanche paths around the mountain. The patrollers load their packs with explosives — cast boosters of Pentolite, a mix of pentaerythritol tetranitrate and trinitrotoluene, or TNT — and tiptoe into avalanche terrain. They follow rigid processes.

“Arming,” screams Baumm as he slides the igniting cap onto a 2-pound explosive fuse.

“Arming,” comes the response from Francisco and Jason Holton.

“Pull!” Baumm answers, lowering the fuse to the snow to watch for telltale smoke. “I got a burn.”

They hurl the explosives into snow above the Headwall Glades and wait. Ninety seconds later, they give the 30-second warning and cram their gloves beneath helmet straps to cover their ears. The blast resonates across the valley, serving as a sort of call to arms for skiers miles away. A small slide cascades down the face of the slope, just below a blackened bomb hole.

The trio then suspends a 4-pound charge from a bamboo stake, leaving it about a meter above the snowpack in an open glade of old-growth timber. Renowned snow scientist Hans Gubler’s research shows that percussive blasts above the snow can better test snowpack stability than blasts from inside the snow.

“Gubler is our route partner here,” Baumm said.

Coffey, who also directs the snow-safety program at Chile’s Portillo ski area during the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, is no stranger to big dumps. He said the challenge of this storm is the snow’s high water content. The 57 inches that fell on the mountain over five days was wet and heavy, carrying the equivalent of 4.9 inches of water.

While his team has been focused on storm slabs and wind slabs from the new snow, the weighty snowfall earlier this week and late last week has Coffey’s attention. It’s tearing chimneys off houses in town, so it could trigger a catastrophic slide.

“The twist with this storm is the weight. We are concerned about a persistent slab at the ground level because we were seeing that release just three weeks ago,” said Coffey, manning a double-screen computer and radio at his mountaintop patrol headquarters.

Francisco, Holton and Baumm didn’t see a lot of reaction to their explosives. Nothing big. And that’s somewhat “nerve-racking,” Francisco said.

Still, he said, “it’s great that we are not getting results.

“We’ve got a much more stable snowpack than we typically do, but you always have it lurking in the back of your mind if we are being thorough enough and are we getting to the point where we need to start thinking outside the box and maybe testing it with heavy, heavy explosives or putting shots in places you don’t normally put them,” he said. “We just have to be neurotically thorough.”