Bound by instant in life, death

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

By Brooke Williams

Little did I know when I first mentioned Dolores LaChapelle in my column a few weeks ago that I would be writing a trilogy.

When I wrote about her death the next week, I briefly mentioned Ed LaChapelle, her ex-husband, one of the world’s premier avalanche scientists.

I heard last week that Ed died just days after Dolores. He was in Silverton, Colo., where Dolores lived, attending her memorial service. He stayed on to spend time with friends and because the skiing was so good. He was 80-years old.

In a story one could never make up, Ed had been skiing most of the day with his current wife and some good friends, when he felt a pain in his chest, suffered a heart attack, and died.

Ed LaChapelle wrote “ABC’s of Avalanche Safety,” which covers the subject from assessing conditions and traveling in avalanche terrain, to what to do if caught and search and rescue techniques.

During my two-decade long powder skiing holiday, I considered this book scripture. This book was first published in 1961, when Ed was working at Alta, Utah. It was a more practical version of the first avalanche handbook he co-wrote for the U.S. Forest Service.

He and his colleagues at Alta laid the foundation for using explosives to protect ski areas and highways from avalanches.

According to an article in the Salt Lake Tribune, during his 20 years working for the Forest Service, Ed  “strung wires all over the mountainside … as he conducted experiments using everything from old bike tires to record players.”

And, with an engineer he met skiing at Alta in the sixties, LaChapelle came up with the design for a radio transmitter that would send out a directional beep tone that could be picked up by any transistor radio.

This became the Snow Ranger Finder, which became the Skadi — the first avalanche rescue transceiver.

I never met Ed, but I know two of his disciples: Sue Ferguson and Bruce Tremper, directors of the Utah Avalanche Forecast Center (former and current, respectively).

They both tried to teach me that the science of avalanche safety had an element that was counterintuitive — that the more one knows about snow, physics and the power of wind in the mountains, the less sure one becomes. And the more careful.

Along with deposition rates, wind direction, and slope angle, both Tremper and Ferguson include “instinct” as a key factor in assessing the danger of a given slope on a particular day. Instinct, according to one dictionary, is an “inborn pattern of behavior often responsive to specific stimuli.”

Writing this, I remember thinking for the first time about how this instinct for survival we attribute to other animals might actually work for us.

I wonder how Ed LaChapelle might have helped his followers to incorporate “instinct” into their study and their knowledge.

And then I wonder how Dolores, with her growing knowledge of the earth and the value of ancient ritual might have influenced Ed, who began his career because avalanches were a great way to blend his youthful passions for “mountains, and skiing, and explosives.”

Did living with Dolores in the mountains in the winter give Ed insights into our deep and ancient connections to the wild world? Did living with her help him understand survival from not just the biological, but a human, and even personal perspective?

I read every news article I could find on the LaChapelles’ deaths and can’t find any writer who dared to speculate about their connection and the “coincidence” surrounding the timing of their deaths.

I don’t know anything about what brought them together or why they split up. Yes, they shared a past and a son who is now grown. But they also shared time in the wild and a deeply intimate knowledge of mountains and winter and gravity.

Perhaps they shared something beyond human love that she took with her when she left and he couldn’t live without.
PERMALINK:
Bound by instant in life, death | Planet JH News Article: Left Wing Local

Leave a Comment