VANCOUVER — Twenty years after he survived being buried in a deadly avalanche in British Columbia's backcountry, Ken Wylie is urging people to be cautious and aware while dealing with a similarly unstable snowpack this year.
"Just accept this is a challenging season and make plans around that," he said from his Mill Bay home on Vancouver Island.
Experts have compared this year's snowpack, with a weak layer of sugar-like crystals buried near the bottom, to that of 2003, when avalanches in Western Canada killed 29 people, most of them in B.C.Avalanche Canada, a forecasting, training and safety agency, says the layers are deep enough that people are less likely to see clues of instability but there remains a serious potential for large, human-triggered avalanches.
"But we're in a position as a member of a group where we're exposed to consequence, and I think it's easy to forget that." "So, yeah, my opinion is that the longer this goes on, the harder it is going to be for people to make conservative choices."
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