SE5:EP6 - Craig Gordon: Helping Others Understand the Danger

The Christmas blizzard of 2003 still ranks as one of the biggest winter storms in Utah’s history – legendary enough to have its own Wikipedia page. It dumped four feet of snow in the valley and upwards of twice that in the mountains, closing resorts. But it also brought tragedy. On Dec. 26, 2003 an entire mountainside of snow broke off the flanks of Mt. Timpanogos, roaring down out of the clouds towards a dozen skiers, riders, hikers, and snowshoers. Five were buried, with three not making it home that evening.

Just three years into his forecaster career with the Utah Avalanche Center, skier Craig Gordon was deeply troubled by what he had seen. The victims simply didn’t know that their playground for the day, just above the Aspen Grove trailhead, was in a massive avalanche run out. So he decided to do something about it, creating the now ubiquitous educational program Know Before You Go.

What Gordon and others realized was that we all live amidst snow-filled mountains, but there was no way to get the message of snow safety to youth and teens. In its first season, Know Before You Go reached over 10,000 students in local middle and high schools across Utah. Today, it’s the staple introductory snow safety program not just in Utah but across the nation and even the world.

It’s just one of the many programs Utah Avalanche Center manages to help keep us safe. Whether you’re an avid backcountry enthusiast or limit yourself to in-bounds action, UAC has education and information to help keep you safe.

A New Jersey native who found his way out to Utah to attend college and soon found himself working in snow safety at Brighton and as a heli-ski guide. He joined UAC in 2000. Today, he’s part of a deeply experienced team and is known around the state as the guy who makes avalanche safety education fun.

This episode of Last Chair is quintessential Craig Gordon – complete with stories, humor and emotion. Dig in … it’s a fun one! Here’s just a sampling.

Craig, how do you view the services that Utah Avalanche Center offers?

We're best known for our forecasting – we're your one-stop shop, Utah Avalanche Center.org. But forecasting is just a segment of education. And to me, really, the forecasts are an educational tool. Any time I have the opportunity to share knowledge and to throw an anecdote or two and maybe throw some institutional knowledge and wisdom in, along with some tongue-in-cheek humor, yeah, now, this is sort of where the rubber hits the road. To me, it's all about education. And the more well-informed our user public is, the more they can get out of the Utah Avalanche Center forecast. The forecast is really designed in sort of a tiered approach, from beginner to intermediate, novice to expert to uber expert. You can gain something out of reading the forecast day-to-day and reading it each day. You get to know the characters in the snowpack. And you know, the last thing you want to do is open up the middle of this book, this novel and try to figure out who the characters are. So I always advise people, even on the days that you're not planning on going out, definitely take heed, check out the forecast, and see what the snow is doing. And then, when you do get a day off, or you're making your travel plans, you'll be that much better informed. So, really, to me, education is where the rubber hits the road. For us, that's the big ticket item. And that is not only in our forecasts, that is in our outreach and our classes, our backcountry 101, our basic avalanche classes, our rescue classes. It all revolves around education.

The Christmas storm of 2003 brought snow, but it also brought tragedy.

Yeah, oh my gosh, that time frame right around Christmas of 2003 brought an epic storm by all standards – historic storm rolls bigger than last year. As a matter of fact, this the Christmas storm of 2003 has its own Wikipedia reference. The storm rolls in right before Christmas and just blasts the Salt Lake Valley, Provo, Ogden. There are 30 inches of snow in downtown Salt Lake, several hundred thousand people are without power. I remember it's all I can do to get to the foothills to go skiing. It is complete mayhem just to go a mile or two. So there were three groups that had been riding at Sundance inside the ski resort boundary. The resort closes down, and these three individual groups – they don't even know each other – they ride up the road, and they're at the Aspen Grove trailhead, which is underneath one of the largest avalanche paths in Utah that funnels off Mount Timpanogos. Of course, you're going to go hike for the freshies, right? And no one's wearing avalanche transceivers, no shovels, no probes, none of the appropriate rescue gear. And as three separate groups are hiking up, one natural avalanche peels off from about 3,000 plus vertical feet above off the ridge in the clouds. So everything is just is just chaos as one slide, then sympathetically triggers two others. And now, instead of having just one football field, you have several football fields of snow crashing down from up above. 

I know even 20 years later, it’s still emotional. But you chose to do something about it?

It was so glaringly apparent how dangerous the conditions were. And again, just trying to move around in the valley, it's like it's all I can do to get to the mountains. So I'm going to the mountains on its terms, and it doesn't even want me there, you know. So this is not, you know, kind of a soft, fuzzy kind of place to be right now. It's very harsh. It's very wicked. That night, I looked my wife in the eye, and I said, ‘I am going to do everything in my power that not another family, not another partner, not another parent has to experience the tragedy of what could be a preventable avalanche accident.’I said, ‘Well, I am going to create a program where we go talk to kids in schools and middle schools and high schools.’ (My boss Bruce Tremper) says, ‘You put it together, you find the money, and it's yours.’ And I thought, ‘Man, you just challenged a go-getter overachiever who grew up in New Jersey. Man, I got this. At the time, nothing like this existed. There was nothing that was fun, that had energy to it, and that could resonate with teens.

What was the reception like when you launched Know Before You Go into Utah schools?

One of our very first talks was in front of 1,600 kids. And it was remarkable. It wasn't like some soft rollout. It was like you hit the ground running with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones, and here we go, you know? And man, for that kind of crowd you had to have a touchpoint with everybody in the audience. And that meant giving out a thousand times the energy that was coming back. That was the secret of the success of the program. 

Did you reach a lot of kids with KBYG?

In our first year, I thought, man, if we could reach 5,000 kids, that would be remarkable. And the first year the thing took off like a rocket. We talked to 12,000 kids, and in the second year, we talked to 18,000 kids. By the start of the third year, we were able to get Know Before You Go embedded as an elective in health and phys ed in middle schools. And then everybody started coming on board. The Park City schools were awesome to get us embedded early on. The snowbelt community schools knew that this was very important.