02 Avalanche Pass Read Free Page B

the cornice. Then he noticed it. A faint stirring in the slope opposite, as if the cliff face itself had trembled. Then a black split appeared suddenly in the hitherto perfect white of the snow and a huge slab of fresh fallen snow slid lazily away from the cliff face and toppled into the valley—perhaps a few hundred tons of it in all.
    In a few seconds, it had lost its cohesion as a single slab and become a tumbling, roiling, formless mass that rolled with ever-increasing power down the slope. A deep rumble accompanied it as those few hundred tons rapidly became thousands.
    “Jesus,” he said softly.
    “Avalanche control,” the instructor told him briefly and Jesse raised one disbelieving eyebrow.
    “You call that control? Didn’t look like anyone was controlling that from where I’m standing,” he said.
    Larry shrugged, acknowledging the point. “True enough,” he admitted, “but this way the ski patrol makes it avalanche where and when they want it to. Better to do it now when the area is clear than risk having it come down when there are people under it. Besides, this way, it can’t keep building up into a really unstable mass.”
    Jesse nodded his understanding. He’d done his share of avalanche control with the ski patrol back in Routt County. But there it consisted of placing small satchel charges in the snow and roping off suspect areas to keep skiers away. They didn’t have these massive, sheer walls of airy, almost insubstantial powder snow on Mount Werner.
    “So what was that they fired at it?” he asked. “Sounded like some kind of mortar?”
    “Sort of,” Larry told him. “Actually, a 75-millimeter recoilless rifle. It’s kind of like an overgrown bazooka, I guess.”
    Jesse gave a short bark of laughter. “It sure did the job,” he said, still looking at the ravaged mountain face across the valley. In the valley, shrouded in white clouds, the massive avalanche was slowly boiling to a stop.
    He looked across the slope to the timber platform where the small artillery piece was sited. Two members of the Snow Eagles Ski Patrol, their task completed, were already fastening a canvas weather cover over the gun.
    “We’ve got maybe a dozen of ’em around the mountain,” his instructor continued. “Fire ’em on fixed bearings to bring down the bits that are awkward to get at. In other parts, the patrol plants fixed charges and sets ’em off. The whole area is a high-risk avalanche zone, you know.”
    Jesse nodded thoughtfully as he watched the patrollers skiing away from the site. In the past three days, he had been conscious of the continual dull thumps of explosions echoing around the resort.
    “I’d heard that,” he replied. “So why build a resort here in the first place? You’d have to have a pretty good reason.”
    Larry grinned and swept an arm around the entire valley. “Best reason in the world. And it’s the same thing that makes this such a high-risk zone in the first place: the best and deepest powder snow in the world. It’s great to ski in. Pity is, it’s also highly unstable and avalanches if you look too hard at it.
    “But don’t let it bother you too much,” he added. “In the twenty-five years the resort’s been here, we’ve only had one fatality caused by avalanche.”
    Jesse frowned, remembering a half-buried detail in his mind. “Didn’t I read somewhere that you had a major avalanche here ten years back?” he asked, then, as more details came to mind, “Buried the Canyon Lodge, didn’t it?”
    Larry nodded. “That happened sure enough. The western wall of the valley—behind the hotel building—came down in the springof 1989. But the resort had closed by then and there was nobody here. The snow was wet and melting and really unstable.”
    “What set it off?” Jesse asked and Larry gestured skyward.
    “Some hotshot air force jet jockey flying too low and too fast. A National Guard F-4 created a sonic boom right over the valley and that set it