Exploring Brighton Sidecountry Avalanche Risks
The debris field in Hidden Canyon looked fresh. That was the first thing Malia Bowman noticed on Saturday afternoon, January 4, as she and Drew Hardesty, a forecaster with the Utah Avalanche Center, picked their way across the steep northwest-facing slope. They were there investigating a different avalanche, one that had been reported the day before. But this – this was new.
Two distinct holes in the snow. Probe marks radiating outward from one of them. Blood.
Bowman, a member of Brighton Ski Resort’s Snow Safety team, read the scene the way a detective reads a crime site. Someone had been here. Someone had been buried. Someone with equipment had dug them out. And whoever they were, they had walked away without telling anyone.
The Utah Avalanche Center would later put out a call for information, emphasizing in all caps that people were “NOT IN TROUBLE.” Eventually the story would emerge. But standing there that Saturday afternoon, all Bowman and Hardesty knew was that someone had gotten extraordinarily lucky.
And luck is not a strategy.
Friday, January 3
Twenty-four hours earlier, two skiers stood at the top of Brighton Resort’s Great Western lift. Ages 17 and 18. They knew Hidden Canyon – they’d skied it before. Below them, a rope marked the boundary between resort-controlled terrain and the backcountry beyond. They ducked under it.
The first lap went fine. Untracked snow, no issues. They rode the lift back up and went again.
The second time, the slope failed beneath them.
The avalanche released 200 feet wide, fracturing two to four feet deep. Both skiers were caught and carried 500 to 600 feet down the slope. One ended up partially buried. The other disappeared completely, upside down in the snow. Only one ski boot remained visible.
Neither wore avalanche rescue equipment. No beacon. No probe. No shovel.
A third person saw the slide and skied down with a beacon and probe. The partially buried skier dug himself out and helped. Five minutes, maybe less – an eternity measured in heartbeats, but fast enough. The buried skier came out conscious, breathing.
There was blood, but nothing catastrophic. Both walked out of Hidden Canyon, leaving behind the evidence Bowman and Hardesty would find the next day.
They were lucky. Extraordinarily lucky. But the conditions that nearly killed them had been building since October.
The Season That Built the Trap
Utah’s 2025-2026 winter season began with promise. October delivered above-average precipitation. Then November and December turned warm and dry. By December 26, Utah’s average statewide snowpack hit 2.7 inches of snow water equivalent – the lowest on record since measurements began in 1981.
What fell in October and early November didn’t melt away entirely. It sat there, shallow and exposed, through weeks of cold, clear nights. And in that stillness, something dangerous was happening.
When snow is thin and temperatures are cold, water vapor moves from the relatively warm ground upward through the snowpack toward the colder snow surface. This temperature gradient drives a process called faceting. Snow crystals lose their intricate structures and transform into larger, angular grains that look like rock salt or coarse sugar. Under a gloved hand, they bounce and sparkle. Under a slab of new snow, they fail.
“Over the time that it didn’t snow, those cold nights drive what’s called faceting, which makes the snow really, really weak, kind of like sugary grains,” Greg Gagne, a forecaster with the Utah Avalanche Center, explained. “They don’t stick together – they’re almost like ball bearings. Then it doesn’t take a ton of snow to overload that.”
These faceted crystals become what avalanche professionals call a persistent weak layer. The layer is weak – it has little structural strength. And it persists – it can last weeks, months, even an entire season, lurking beneath subsequent snowfall like a geologic fault line waiting for the right pressure to slip.
Then came Christmas Eve. Rain fell to 10,000 feet, penetrating the shallow snowpack. When temperatures finally dropped, that rain refroze into a hard crust. Drew Hardesty warned that “rain crusts are notorious for both connecting slopes together AND fostering the development of weak, faceted grains.” Temperature gradients form above and below the crust. More faceting occurs. The weak layer gets weaker.
By early January, the Utah backcountry had a snowpack that resembled a poorly constructed layer cake: weak facets at the bottom, a hard rain crust in the middle, and new snow on top. UAC staff wrote something they’d never written before: “We collectively have not seen anything quite like this, especially in late December.”
When new snow finally arrived, it added weight to slopes already primed to fail. Some crusts were strong enough to support the load. Others weren’t. And there was no reliable way to predict which was which without digging a snow pit – something the two teenagers never did.
The Illusion of Proximity
Hidden Canyon sits just outside Brighton Resort’s boundary, easily accessible to anyone willing to duck a rope. It’s what backcountry users call “sidecountry” – backcountry terrain that feels like an extension of the resort. The lift is right there. The patrol shack is visible. Other people’s tracks suggest someone else has deemed it safe enough.
This proximity creates a dangerous illusion.
“People have this false sense of security because they’re saying, ‘Well, I’m on a slope, and the resort is just right there, it must be safe,'” Gagne said. “But once you duck a rope, then you’re in the backcountry.”
That rope marks the edge of managed terrain. On one side: avalanche control, ski patrol, rescue infrastructure. On the other side: nothing but you and the mountain and the choices you make.
Utah leads the nation in avalanche fatalities involving people who exit ski areas. A 2016 study examining 114 avalanche fatalities in Utah between 1940 and 2015 found that nearly one in five involved individuals who had entered out-of-bounds or closed terrain from mountain resorts.
Neither teenager at Hidden Canyon carried avalanche rescue equipment. If that Good Samaritan hadn’t been there with the right equipment, this story would have a very different ending. Even with proper equipment, burial outcomes are often fatal. An avalanche transceiver helps your partners find your body faster. That only matters if your body is still breathing when they find it.
A Week of Warnings
January 3 was not an anomaly. It was part of a sequence.
On Sunday, January 4, another avalanche released in Two Dogs. It initially failed on facets above the Christmas Eve rain crust, then stepped down deeper, breaking all the way to the ground. The slide measured 4.5 feet deep, 250 feet wide, and ran 700 feet, snapping trees. Remote triggering – where an avalanche releases from a distance, sometimes hundreds of feet away – is a hallmark of persistent weak layers.
Earlier that week, an avalanche in Oingo Boingo (great band) broke 2.5 feet deep on a north-facing slope. On Tuesday, a snowmobiler triggered a massive hard slab at First Cornice with a crown averaging four feet deep.
Four avalanches in Hidden Canyon alone that week. Multiple other slides across the Wasatch. Two separate avalanche fatalities in Utah backcountry, unrelated to Brighton. The Utah Avalanche Center issued an Avalanche Watch on December 26, then upgraded it to an Avalanche Warning that lasted through New Year’s Eve. Danger ratings remained at HIGH for days.
The mountains were speaking. They were not whispering.
Against this backdrop, two skiers saw fresh powder in Hidden Canyon and made a choice. They went once. It worked. They went again.
The avalanche danger rating that day was MODERATE – conditions where “human-triggered avalanches are possible.” Not likely. Not certain. Possible. That word contains multitudes.
The teenagers chose to test that possibility twice.
What the Mountains Teach
Start with the obvious: they did almost everything wrong. No avalanche safety equipment. No evidence they checked the forecast or heeded its warnings. They returned for a second lap after a successful first run – a classic ego trap where success breeds confidence and confidence breeds risk.
But they also did some things right. They appear to have skied one at a time. Someone saw the avalanche happen. That Good Samaritan was prepared.
The persistent weak layer that failed beneath those teenagers is still there. More snow means more loading on that weak foundation. The facets don’t heal. They don’t bond. They wait.
Utah Avalanche Center forecasters continue to advise avoiding terrain steeper than 30 degrees on west, north, and east-facing aspects at upper elevations. “The more complex the avalanche situation, the simpler your terrain choices need to be.”
That’s the mathematical version. The human version is blunter: when you don’t know where the trap is, don’t go looking for it.
Every rope ducked is a decision. Every boundary crossed is a choice to accept different risks. The mountains don’t care about your proximity to a resort, don’t care that you can see the lift, don’t care that other people’s tracks make the slope look safe. The snowpack operates on physics, not proximity.
If you’re going to go – and people will go, because backcountry skiing is part of what makes winter in the mountains worth living – then go prepared. Avalanche safety equipment: beacon, probe, shovel. Avalanche education: not a YouTube video, an actual course. Partners who know what they’re doing and will tell you when you’re about to do something stupid. A daily habit of checking the avalanche forecast and letting it inform your decisions.
To their credit, the teenagers eventually came forward. They provided details. They contributed to the collective knowledge that might save the next person who stands at the top of Hidden Canyon and wonders whether to duck that rope.
The Evidence Remains
Survival is not the same as success. How many times does someone duck that rope before the snowpack finds the weak spot? How many successful laps create the confidence that leads to the fatal one?
This time the teenagers walked out of Hidden Canyon. The persistent weak layer stayed behind, waiting. It’s still there now, buried beneath subsequent snowfall, ready to fail the moment someone adds just enough weight in just the wrong place.
The rope marks the boundary between managed terrain and wild terrain, between calculated risk and consequence. It doesn’t keep people out. It can’t. It’s just rope.
But it marks where safety ends and choice begins. And this winter, in Utah’s mountains, that choice carries more weight than usual.
