Northern Rockies Snow & Avalanche Workshop

November 9th, 2024

10:00 am- 5:00 pm at the

Whitefish Performing Arts Center

ONLINE TICKET SALES ARE CLOSED. TICKETS $35 AT THE DOOR

Josh Lipkowitz‘s talk – What do we know about wet slab avalanches? – will provide a broad overview of the current understanding of wet slab avalanches, present the key findings and implications from his graduate research, and discuss ideas for future research.

Josh has just begun his first season as an avalanche and mountain weather forecaster at the Northwest Avalanche Center. This December, he will complete a master’s degree in Earth Sciences at Montana State University where his thesis research focused on wet slab avalanches. He has taught avalanche education and backcountry skiing to aspiring mountain goers since 2018. In the non-winter months, Josh calls the coast of Maine home; he and his wife co-run a youth outdoor education company and tackle an interminable list of land and house projects. Off of the snow, Josh loves to read, sail, surf, play music, and make things out of wood & flour. He is also a licensed sea captain

Christine Donnelly asked forecasters at the FAC to hindcast the avalanche danger for randomly-assigned days in the 2023 and 2024 winters. She then compared the hindcasts with the original forecasts for those days. She’ll describe the results in a talk titled How Consistent are our avalanche forecasts?

Christine is a Machine Learning Engineer based in Whitefish, MT. Her professional work currently focuses on reinforcement learning and Natural Language Processing. She studied Electrical Engineering as an undergraduate and graduate student, and conducted her graduate research in superconductive electronic devices at the National Institute of Standards and Technology laboratories in Boulder, Colorado. When not spending time in the backcountry, she has a passion for applying data science and statistical methodologies to datasets involving weather, climate, and various forms of geospatial information.

David Hill is on the science team for the Community Snow Observations campaign, a program that helps riders and recreationists provide snow depth data in areas not measured by existing program. He’ll describe the project and how people can make their backcountry travels count by participating.

Kaleb Retz will review a near-miss that he and several partners experienced while snowmobiling in the southern Whitefish Range in March, 2024. His talk, titled In a talk titled Throttle Decisions – Close Calls and What They Can Teach Us, will describe the events, group dynamics, decisions leading up to the event, illustrating these factors with images and video shot that day. He’ll reflect on what the group could have done differently, the post-event effects on the group, and how examining close calls like this can be invaluable.