Here’s the rundown of what’s been happening at the MSC over the last year.

April / May

There is a whole bunch of stuff that takes place behind the scenes at MSC. Part of that is advocating for a platform that provides World Standard alpine hazard reporting. Over the years since we started there has been a push pull in Victoria with Emergency Management Victoria. They’ve tried diligently to provide a meaningful warning program much like our own home spun version via the EMV app.

This project was referred to as Interim Avalanche Instructions. It worked along the lines of whenever the ski patrol directors at Falls or Hotham (Matt and Bill respectively) had due cause for ‘considerable’ concern a regional warning was issued. It was felt that the product had challenges and we’d wrestle in conjunction with Vic Police and Parks over the weeks leading up to the season.

Meanwhile MSC engaged Dynamic Avalanche Consulting through the help of Alex Sinickas, probably one of Australia’s best avalanche brains. They collaboratively produced a review and a bunch of recommendations for the MSC service. This insightful little document pulled apart the strengths and weaknesses of what and how we’ve been cobbling together and issuing as the ‘Backcountry Travel Advisory’.

We also had the film night in conjunction with the Mountain Journal fans at RMIT for a lil pre season stoke. I gave probably the worst public speaking performances ever witnessed as I mumbled rubbish into the mic about what MSC is important… needless to say there was little rub but the films are always amazeballs.

June / July

Joining the dots in this document and we have an ‘MO’. In short to ready, train and provide a Level 2 forecaster, supported by Level 1 obs to provide a national picture of all alpine hazard advice.

To this day we’ve no idea wether this document was compelling in the case that by mid July the EMV commissioner dropped Avalanche from their remit, it read as ‘Avalanches are no longer an emergency in Victoria’. Deemed no doubt due to the size of the participant exposed to the risk of Avalanche in Australia in any given event, and the fact that by the time state led rescue is deployed, surviving a burial is unlikely. This was a good thing as it has left the issue to be managed by the participant and the land managers specifically. MSC and Parks Vic. Woohoo.

Season Synopsis

May: We had an early start (false start) with a late May snow event that was deep enough in the Vic North East and deep south to provide a bit of bushy fun. Around 35 to 50cm of low density snow falling over a 62 hour period on the 26th-28th of May. Followed by a period of warm flows this snow disappeared and by the end of the first week of the resort season there was nothing much left on the ground beyond the halo if the snow making.

June / July: Intermittent but marginal snowfall occurred over the following month with much lamenting which culminated in what was the low point of the season with a big southerly front edging in against a warm continental flow and arriving on the mountains as nice dry cold snow that then became slop below 1750m, and a veritable ice storm above. One of a few events this season where the air temp was below 0˚ yet precipitation was rain. Explained as a warm cloud above cold.

By the 15th of July the accumulation had reached a point where we issued a warning based of Patrol Obs here with 40cm falling as low density with a temperature shift of over 3˚ observed over the following 48hrs.

This was producing resistant planar results on CTs at scores around 10 in much of the NE Vic.

Interestingly these storms seemed to slip past the Central East part of the park and they had very low snow depths recorded for most of July.

By Mid July we moved into a intermittent prevailing ice events that lasted over six weeks and can be attributed to three serious rescues across the range and a fatality at Mt Bogong. In NSW throughout this period the conditions were described as glacial, and it really looked un fun for the most part.

Importantly at this stage if you look back through the archive we had been issuing ‘observation only’ warnings. This was based off the Dynamic Avalanche Consulting Review. They’d urged that issuing the 5 scale danger ratings was a real no-go. Problem was that reading them without the knowledge base of AST2 was leaving a lot of the audience pretty miffed. And, as you’ll remember this point was also when EMV ‘dropped the mic’ on avalanches in Vic, so based off ‘The liability thing is only a problem if you get it wrong… So just don’t get it wrong’ philosophy the 5scale ratings returned in conjunction with what the Ski Patrol was seeing.

August: By the 8th we started to see a series of big storms rolling through. With a continued period of cold dry snow precipitation we strarted issuing a few High Danger periods. All this new snow was sitting on the prevailing ice that existed for the month preceding these storms. On the 17th, almost like clockwork someone found the weak spot on the slope below Etheridge in the NSW and took the whole face out with him. Check it out here

The weeks after this storm cycle saw the arrival of a melt freeze crust that, with the help of both rain and some warm flows again turned the range to a ‘glacier’. We issued ‘Hard ice and Rime’ warnings for these two weeks. Just before the end of August we had another precip event, this time very cold at -8˚ and strangely with a lot of south and east in it. This rendered the already slick hard south and east aspects as completely bulletfroof. Or the leeward aspects north and west with a thin cover of dry cold accumulation sitting atop similarly bulletproof ice. Unfortunately this recipe spelt disaster for a party skiing late in the day. David Blair was initially injured from a fall on the Eskdale spur. He later died during the night as a result of these injuries, where he’d fallen, with emergency services unable to provide rescue.

September: We had a few days of fine weather and safe skiing conditions at the start of the month with then yet another big storm wedging across the range and delivering initially 35cm of medium density ‘upside down’ snow raising the High Danger Flag for Vic and NSW then another 35cm of ‘right side up’ snow the following 24hrs which mended the hazard, and reduced the danger rating to considerable which is where it remained until the conclusion of the warming event for that cycle which saw some late ‘recycled’ rain delivered on the very tail end resulting in heavy wet slides after a southerly transportation event. North and west aspects became easy to trigger slow moving wet slides that would run long distances. Cornice collapse triggered naturals occurred across the range. High danger rating was associated with these events. Late September saw some surreal scenes with an extensive dust storm turning the peaks of the NSW Main Range pink. This was followed by a snow event that then rendered the range a strange pink and white zebra effect. Still prominent even now in late October. Everything settled down pretty promptly after this. The road opened to charlottes pass at the end of the frst week in October and the bulk of the action taking place there is harvesting pink corn with few reports of incidents as the solar aspects burnt off, now non existent.

Whist the ‘Backcountry Travel Advisory’ was patchy for some of the aforementioned reasons we still managed to get the word out to 9.5k users with 35.8K page views. Not a bad effort.

Slay Safe

In response to the call by members at our last AGM we initiated the ‘SLAY/SAFE’ program. The goal is to help facilitate better entry level participants in the backcountry. This was a ‘free for members’ two day introduction to backcountry taking in a whole bunch of good stuff to know from emergency first aid and contingencies, some snow science, weather and ‘reading the hill’ through to skiing / riding some serious terrain using safe smarts. In some cases we got to rope up and ski cornices, in other cases we dug snow shelters and practised navigation in white outs. The academy was really based out of what the weather threw at us. Roughly 40 people participated across two states and three events. Thats 40 people who now know and will share a raft of snow smarts to their peers. We’ll most likely stage the event again next year…

VICTORIAN BACKCOUNTRY FESTIVAL 2019

Strength to strength is the only way to describe this years festival. For the 400+ participants who enjoyed the slightly precarious snow conditions (upside down event described above) we really went wide on whats possible with a shite tonne of volunteer organising in the work Cam Walker threw at this, and a strong snse that on the day everyone mucked in to get the thing done. Skiing pow and sinking frothies with the frothers fireside at the ‘Outdoor Bar’ Christmas Hills was the high point for me… ceasing the water pump for lack of antifreeze was the low point.