Avalanches on Red and Granite

[...] but it actually pales in comparison to the generalized incompetence and even utterly terrifying travel techniques we saw the prior day on St Helens.

Care to elaborate?

Care to elaborate?

Isn't St Helens always a gaper magnet?

Granted I've skied there only once before, but I sure saw lots of confusing behavior that time, and this time was even weirder.

So we saw four different parties in total:

1. Father & son (with trailhead send-off from Mom) who spent about an hour and half walking up low-angle nordic trails in their Scarpa 3 boots with their skis (Volkl Snow Wolf for Dad, some twin tippish ski for son, both with Dynafit bindings) on their packs (skins affixed!).  "Why aren't you skinning?"  "I was just thinking now might be the time to start skinning!"  "The time to start skinning was at the trailhead."  (They don't seem to have had ski crampons though, as they must have turned around shortly thereafter when they reached the steeper terrain with increasingly firmer snow, with no signs of any subsequent lapping.)

2. Woman who dropped something down a gully, and seemed incapable of going any higher, yelling back and forth with her guy who had gone higher up into the steeper terrain she now couldn't reach.  (I contemplated sticking around for the resolution of this one, in the hopes of another epic SW F!#@%!#! Chutes showdown.)

3. Party of four skiers heading up for an overnight in stormy weather and elevated avy conditions the following morning.  (Maybe they were just practicing for some future trip, but I can't imagine how an overnight that Friday could be considered ... fun?  Or safe, if they were planning on skiing up any higher.)

4.  Party of four hikers who were ascending solid ice with a collective one pair of crampons, two or three ski poles (definitely not four poles, and definitely no ice axe), one pair of summer lightweight hiking shoes, one pair of boots that looked like what you'd wear around the city on a really wet day (i.e., no treads of any sort), probably one good pair of boots (with the aforementioned crampons), and some other pair of decidedly non-mountaineering footwear.   (I passed them down low when they were taking forever ascending one pitch, with one of them even resorting to scrambling up on all fours.  I passed them again while skiing down, maybe at around 6500'.  I asked the group "leader" what they were doing:  "They wanted to climb up without crampons!" he replied with the kind of smile I use for explaining why my toddler daughter is wearing pants around her neck as a scarf or using a broken MP3 player as a phone.  We never saw them again even after our laps down lower, so they either descended out of view, or they were high up on the crater rim when the snow started coming down later that afternoon...)

"They wanted to climb up without crampons!" he replied with the kind of smile I use for explaining why my toddler daughter is wearing pants around her neck as a scarf or using a broken MP3 player as a phone.

A+ for that.

Tragic. I can definitely see both sides of this issue; that signs won't help, yet also that if they did prevent one of these incidents, it would be well worth it. I kind of like the idea of a sign specific enough to mention the past fatalities/injuries at these sites. Perhaps something that was specific enough to mention the people lost/injured, the conditions present at the time of those events, and a final question to the people ascending if they know the conditions they are ascending into are so different than those of past tragedies - it could be an effective sobriety test. I have $10 bucks or so for such a sign. It has been several years now but one of the most memorable avy incident reports I have read was on Granite where a skier was pushed down the face and broke femurs etc. That is such a fun mtn to ski (especially springtime with the mullet potential of a powder party in the back and corn down the front) but also a potentially terrible one.

I can't argue against signs, but it seems like a more effective long-term solution is to reroute the damn trail out of the slide path. Or at least cutting an alternate "winter route" up through the trees to the SW shoulder, to avoid traversing the south face. I would volunteer for the trail building for that.

I was thinking the same as Charlie - signs at the 5-10 most popular trailheads in the state could save lives. Also, we have signs along highways that tell us what the fire danger is today. Could they be repurposed for avalanche danger in the winter?

I think the trail head signs would go a long way for those who are simply ignorant. I had a coworker who wanted to go for a hike in the winter and did virtually no trip planning. He ended up on Granite Mountain on a considerable hazard day. He simply had no idea that avalanches might be a problem.