The safest slope at Alta is the one that already slid this morning.
That is the whole idea of avalanche control. A loaded slope is not something you make safe. Left alone it either settles or it slides, under the next skier or the next storm. What you can choose is the hour. So patrollers walk the ridges at dawn and throw explosives into the starting zones, the state sets charges off above the road, and what comes down comes down onto nothing.
Alta has done this longer than anywhere in the country. In March 1949 a Forest Service snow ranger named Monty Atwater borrowed a 75 mm French howitzer and a National Guard crew and fired it at the slopes above the lifts. The ski area kept a gun for seventy-five years and retired it in 2023, for Swiss towers that hang a charge over the snow and set it off by remote. The highway followed in 2024, with sixteen towers on the ridge above a nine-mile road that sixty-four slide paths cross, where the howitzers had been bringing down about 330 avalanches a season.
The part I keep turning over is the town. Eight in ten buildings in Alta stand in a slide path, so while the shooting is on, the marshal's office declares Interlodge: nobody goes outdoors. Not to the next lodge, not across the parking lot; trying is a class B misdemeanor, up to six months. Usually it runs from midnight to eight. In February 2021 it ran sixty hours. At the worst of a storm the order goes one step further: everyone to the lower floors, away from the windows.
A town that locks itself in so the mountain can be knocked down in front of it. By the time the doors open, the danger has not been avoided. It has been spent.