The cultural gap between snowmobilers and avalanche professionals may be partly to blame for low levels of safety training in the fast-growing sledding community.
Those who work in avalanche awareness and forecasting overwhelmingly come from the skiing community, and though they have made efforts to reach out to snowmobilers, that has created communications problems, says a former avalanche worker.
"The people who work in the industry as snow science professionals and avalanche technicians are almost exclusively skiers and snowboarders, so I think we have a hard time reaching the snowmobile community sometimes," said Evan Stevens, a former Utah-based backcountry avalanche forecaster who now guides in British Columbia and owns the Valhalla Mountain Touring lodge.
As a result, there is a "disconnect" with snowmobilers, said Mr. Stevens, whose personal experience taught him how dangerous conditions were on March 15, when an avalanche killed two snowmobilers on Revelstoke's Boulder Mountain.
Mr. Stevens saw a 1.4-kilogram snowshoe hare trigger an avalanche large enough to bury a human, on a slope very similar to the one that broke loose on Boulder's Turbo Hill.
"It just shows you how touchy things had gotten," said Mr. Evans, who says anyone with even entry-level avalanche training would have known to keep away from Turbo that weekend.
But fewer than 10 per cent of those who take two-day safety courses offered by the Canadian Avalanche Centre are snowmobilers, even though that population has suffered three-quarters of all avalanche fatalities in the past two years.
The avalanche centre is looking into posting warnings at trailheads for snowmobilers, but also wants to understand why the safety message doesn't seem to be getting out.
"We're puzzled," said executive director Ian Tomm, who has proposed a "special project to do some social science research into the snowmobiling community, to understand what their motivations are, how they perceive risk. We can then focus our prevention programs better to that audience."
Part of the reason may be that snowmobilers feel safety courses will preach an "abstinence" message when it comes to avoiding backcountry avalanche risk, says Lori Zacaruk, who with her husband runs ZacsTracs, one of the biggest private snowmobile avalanche training schools in the country.
Ms. Zacaruk can identify. An avid snowmobiler, she spent years avoiding avalanche training for exactly that reason.
"I thought they would just say it's steep and we shouldn't be there," she said. "But we were misunderstanding avalanche safety, believing it was go or no-go when in fact it's not that. It's choice. Look and see the difference between slopes" - some dangerous on a given day, some not - "and all of a sudden there's an empowering number of choices out there."
"Until somebody points it out, you don't know what you don't know."
In part thanks to her efforts, awareness is growing. ZacsTracs worked with more than 1,100 snowmobilers in trade shows, seminars and weekend courses this season, a three-fold increase from two years ago. Professional snowmobilers are almost all well-trained and well-equipped, as are many enthusiasts, and avalanche experts say better avalanche practices were evident on the weekend of the deadly slide. Rather than the thousands who have in the past attended the Big Iron Shootout at Boulder Mountain, only several hundred came after a series of strong avalanche warnings were issued.
Still, anyone with avalanche knowledge should have known to stay away from Turbo on March 13, Mr. Zacaruk said. Turbo is classified as complex terrain, the most dangerous classification, which means it has multiple avalanche paths, as well as traps in the landscape that worsen the effects of a slide, especially on a day when the danger level is "high."
"Nature has stop signs and warning signs. But they're not red octagons," she said. "We as snowmobilers need to learn nature's warning signs and heed them."