A good book about avalanches

Randomly I recently chose to read “Throwing Stones in a Glass House” an autobiographical book by Liam FitzGerald, who at 23, in 1968, started a career as a ski patrol and snow avalanche worker at Squaw Valley (now Palisades Tahoe). 

In 1971 he moved to Snowbird at its opening and became Snow Safety Director until 1998 when he moved on to the Utah Department of Transportation, where he managed the highway avalanche program in Little Cottonwood Canyon, Alta and Snowbird’s access road, one of the most prone roadways in North America. 

If you love the mountain industry and skiing as much as I do, and of course if you have skied Alta, Snowbird and driven countless times on highway SR-210 to get there, I encourage you to pick up this book that you’ll find to be a page-turner. 

In it, you’ll discover that Liam’s life is a perfect illustration of “Passion, Courage and Imagination” and will conclude that avalanches are before anything, unpredictable, and when you dare venturing outbound into suspicious or even harmless-looking snow condition, you’ll never know what might happen to you. 

That’s the big takeaway of that book encapsulated by Switzerland’s André Roch best known for having planned and surveyed Aspen in Colorado, an expert himself on avalanche management whose expertise was sought throughout the world. He liked to say: “Be careful, because the avalanche doesn’t know you’re an expert!”