In the 1970s, there was no guidance for people heading outside of controlled ski areas. Rich Marriott and Mark Moore set out to change that.
SNOQUALMIE PASS, Wash. — This year, the Northwest Avalanche Center marks 50 years of backcountry avalanche forecasting. It’s a milestone that traces back to two curious graduate students and a mission to fill a dangerous information void in the mountains of the Northwest.
In the early 1970s, avalanche deaths in the western United States climbed sharply — rising from roughly seven per year to more than 20 as backcountry recreation surged. There was no guidance for people heading outside of controlled ski areas.
Rich Marriott and Mark Moore, then graduate students at the University of Washington, set out to change that.
“Before we started the avalanche center, if you wanted to go up to the mountains and recreate outside of the controlled ski areas, you had no information at all,” said Marriott, who is currently KING 5’s senior meteorologist.
Working alongside snow scientist Ed LaChapelle and Bud Reanier with the National Weather Service, the pair was given a temporary research mission: to figure out how to forecast avalanches from a central location. Together, they took the first steps into a science that had yet to be discovered.
“We were trying to do the education part and the instrumentation part, and we did the forecasting part,” explained Moore.
On Dec. 6, 1975, they issued their first backcountry forecast, and the Northwest Avalanche Center, known as NWAC, was born. It was only the second program of its kind in the country. Avalanche science, as the two founders put it, “was just beginning. It was still in its infancy.”
Early forecasts went out via phone recording — the only option before the internet. As the forecasts grew longer and more technical, Moore found a way to make them stick. He started turning them into poems.
“He was trying to make it more interesting for people listening to these long oral forecasts,” Marriott exclaimed. “So he started to rhyme the forecasts.”
Moore has since written hundreds of poems weaving avalanche science into language backcountry travelers could remember. You can read some examples here.
Dallas Glass, NWAC’s current deputy director, said Moore’s approach was central to the center’s public safety mission from the start.
“His written word and the way he put that into a format that would be engaging for people — that was how he was a successful communicator,” Glass said.
The stakes were real. Moore and Marriott recalled a fatal avalanche at Snow Lake near Alpental that killed two young girls who were snow camping with their families.
“Even if you fight hard, you’re not going to win,” Moore said. “The avalanche is going to beat you up every time.”
Half a century later, Glass heads into the Cascades carrying much of the same equipment Marriott and Moore used for field work in the 1970s — shovels, probes, cards and magnifying glasses to study snow grain structure.
“A lot of the same tools that Rich and Mark used 50 years ago, we still use today,” Glass said.
What has changed is the scale. NWAC has grown from a two-person operation to a staff of 18 and established a nonprofit office in North Bend. Avalanche deaths across the Northwest, once climbing into the dozens annually, now typically stay in the low single digits each season.
This winter, described by Glass as one of the lower snowpack years in the Cascades — “about one of these once a decade” — is a reminder that the mountains remain, as he put it, “a wild, unmanaged place.” On March 15, the Northwest Avalanche Center recorded a 69-inch snow depth at Snoqualmie Pass, compared to 115 inches during its first season in 1976.
NWAC Executive Director Scott Schell said the core mission has remained the same, even as technology has expanded the tools and reach. “What’s interesting is how much has changed since this time,” Schell said, “and yet how much is the same.”
Half a century later, the poetry written in the snow still guides every step in the backcountry.