ROGERS PASS, Canada — As Dwight Pahl remembers it--although it is something he'd really rather forget--his first clue was a sharp gust of wind rolling down the mountainside on what had been a perfectly still day.
It wasn't wind. It was the blast of air riding ahead of an avalanche. Before he had time to react, Pahl and his snowmobile were engulfed in a white maelstrom, tumbling like feathers in a hurricane.
"It was completely out of control," Pahl recalled. "I didn't know if I was up or down or sideways. I didn't have any idea of which way my body was going."
By a stroke of chance Pahl finds unfathomable, when the slide had run its course he was left standing upright, chest high in snow, while one of his companions, Murray Perrin, was buried so deeply his body wasn't recovered for hours.
A day after his buddy's funeral, Pahl, a 37-year-old oil field worker, sat numbly at home in Medicine Hat, Alberta, grappling with his sense of loss and guilt and confusion.
"It happened to us in an area where it shouldn't have," Pahl said more than once during a 30-minute telephone conversation. "We'd never seen any signs of slides in the area. It was known as a safe spot. . . . We got caught in something that shouldn't have happened."
January was a perplexing and dangerous time in the mountains of Western Canada for Pahl and other outdoor enthusiasts. Sixteen people have been killed in avalanches so far this winter in what is expected to become a record year for such fatalities. Canada's toll matches the number of deaths so far in the United States, where the population is 10 times greater.
Canada, a country synonymous with snow, has one of the world's most elaborate and respected programs for avalanche forecasting, prevention and warning. But the unpredictable weather associated with El Nino and the surging popularity of winter recreation have thrown its avalanche hunters off their stride this year.
"The system is obviously not working in terms of the number of dead people we've got right now," conceded Alan Dennis, managing director of the Canadian Avalanche Center in Revelstoke, British Columbia, which is run by a private, nonprofit association of ski resorts, mine operators, forestry firms, outdoor outfitters, helicopter ski companies and government agencies.
Moreover, he said, the danger is likely to increase with each new snowfall on the already unstable slopes.
