It wasn’t until Marshall Dempster picked up snowmobiling in 2009 that he started to think more about the differences between snowmobile and ski touring safety in avalanche terrain. This switch prompted him to dive deep into how to better educate and inform motorized users about avalanche problems. We caught up with Dempster to hear what he had to say about his approach to techniques for sled users and what he loves about teaching snow safety. —Backcountry Access
I got into the industry younger in life. I grew up in a farm town in Alberta and didn’t love it. The mountains called me and I answered the call early. I went to a ski hill in Penticton and became a ski patroller. Then one day, we went out practicing for some avalanche control work and we got to throw a bomb and that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I knew then that was what I wanted to do and that led me to Jasper, Alberta where I was able to gain a position on the Marmot Basin snow safety team.
I spent 13 seasons at Marmot Basin developing my knowledge and expertise under the mentorship of the director of public safety, while employed as a professional ski patroller and avalanche technician. I gained my Operations Level 2 certification with the Canadian Avalanche Association and obtained the position of assistant director to public safety.
While that was happening, I was spending my weekends in B.C., which was 30 minutes down the road. We were doing a lot of backcountry skiing and my core group of friends and I decided that we would try to get after some bigger objectives and that the most efficient way to do that would be to purchase a snowmobile and travel a long distance on the sled first and ski more lines in a day. Instead of one big descent we could do laps. So, I bought a sled and after that first winter I kinda just fell in love with the snowmobile.
I started to ski way less and I had the opportunity to shadow a sled-based Avalanche Skills Training (AST) course and I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed teaching to the entry level, eager, keen students. Through my travels in the Valemount, B.C. area, I crossed paths with Curtis Pawliuk of Frozen Pirate Snow Services. Curtis offered me a position as a full-time instructor and I couldn’t say no.
After the first winter of forecasting for Marmot Basin and instructing on weekends for Frozen Pirate, I decided that my true calling was instructing AST courses for the mountain sledding community.
Since then, I have spent some time consulting for railway companies and logging operations, but basically my sole winter activity is guiding full time and teaching sled-based avalanche courses. If you’d told me that six years ago, I would have said you were crazy. I was set up to be a full-time office-based forecaster, sitting somewhere stressed out about a highway. I’ve spent some time volunteering with B.C. Search and Rescue, and trained a Canadian Avalanche rescue dog, Bandit, who is retired now.
The past four years I’ve been fortunate enough to travel across western Canada speaking about avalanche safety at select BRP dealerships. This has been a strong program that is free of charge thanks to Backcountry Access and Bombardier Recreational Products (Ski-Doo). During these events I share stories of my own learning and information about how to obtain further avalanche awareness education. A highlight is always calling on one unsuspecting participant to join me at the front of the stage and demonstrate one of my favorite pieces of gear, my BCA Float MtnPro Vest.
My experience as a forecaster for public safety as well as industry, supporting Search and Rescue, and being a member of the Canadian Avalanche Dog Association has helped me better communicate how people can avoid avalanches.
My job was to try and control nature as best we could. Being immersed in that world for that amount of time assisted in helping me to convey the signs that mother nature is giving us. I’m not saying you can 100 percent avoid avalanches, but when you’re in the snow and touching it and feeling it you are able to pick up the clues that mother nature is giving us—it’s one of the main differences between backcountry skiing and snow machining. Sleds move through terrain at an incredibly fast pace. You take the sled away and you get me into the exact same terrain on my skis and I get a chance to touch and feel with my pole, I can feel it as I’m walking with my feet: is it slabby or hollow? And you can miss that with the sleds and that’s why we’re focusing on encouraging people to slow down and take the time to investigate the snow.
I’ve spent time in both worlds and the knowledge is applicable to skiing and sledding, but we now have an Avalanche Canada sled-specific avalanche skills training book, which is really cool. It came out last year. It focuses some of the training towards how a snowmobiler would attack and/or plan their day and the terrain they might be faced with given the sled specific variables.
We try to help people understand that just because you’ve come to this place for 20 years--and you haven’t seen a slide--doesn’t mean that today’s the day you can do that specific objective. And having the ability to slow down and use the machine to feel the snow is helpful. We have this really awesome tool with our sleds: sometimes it looks like I’m off doing my own thing and playing around on a little slope, but it’s just my way of feeling the slope. I find a small little test slope that I can quickly cut with my machine. Whereas, to do that on skis—I don’t want to hike all the way up there just to jump on that little roll. With a sled, it’s 10 seconds and I’m there, I make a cut and get a result or don’t get a result and I can make an assessment. So speed can be an asset but it can also be a hindrance.
The biggest thing I see is the human factors. The showing off, the “I’ve been here, I’ve seen this hill and I’ve never seen it avalanche here”—that lack of knowledge. In our curriculum, we do a bit of snow science, and I think the super cool thing about the snow machine is that in one day of an avalanche course, we can cover a ton of terrain. We can get way back there so we’re not spending a bunch of our time during a course just traveling. And I know there’s time to talk while traveling on skis, but on a sled we can see three, four or five drainages in a day and still have a really solid teaching time and snow science time and rescue practice time—I think that’s the biggest difference. It’s the travel.
But for me, that was the biggest transition from my time on skis to my time on the sled. I was finding myself wanting more information and I wasn’t getting enough information when I was on a machine as opposed to walking. So we try to get that information in other ways, whether that’s doing a little cut or actually stopping and sticking your hand into the snow. I’ll quickly whip my probe out to check snow depth and gather as much information as I can over the course of the day.
When I first started riding a sled, it was kind of the wild west. There were a few people dialed in, but now we have a pretty strong youth movement in the sport that’s driving the push for education. It wasn’t always cool to be educated about that kind of stuff, and now it’s cool to have education and people won’t ride with you if you don’t have it. And the best part is that I get clients that have been dragged to the course because of their kids. It’s usually dad who learns the most like, “how did I not know this?” As I’m teaching, I can see in their eyes that they’re going through situations they’ve been in and they’re just realizing how lucky they are to still be sitting here.