Home

Steamboat Springs — Some guys name their boats after their spouses. Not Art Judson.

It might not sound romantic, but one of two avalanche courses on the east side of Hahn's Peak is affectionately named "The Milly O" after Milly (Opie) Judson. On the left side of the peak, there is a crooked slide path known as the "Dogleg."

But the long straight chute on the right is named after Art's wife of nearly 50 years. And when you think about it, it's only fair.

For all these years, she has put up with a man whose career demanded that he get up in the middle of the night. When he left the house, it was to climb high into the mountains, just to see whether he could start an avalanche.

He has been retired from his career as a U.S. Forest Service avalanche researcher for more than two decades. But excitement creeps into Judson's voice when he talks about snow and the laws of physics that can cause it to come crashing down steep mountain bowls and ravines.

"I still get pretty wound up about it," Judson confessed.

He keeps a weather station in his backyard, where he records snowfall statistics and faithfully reports them to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder. And from his sunny dining room table, he can monitor avalanche activity through a pair of binoculars.

"See that shady patch on the side of the Sleeping Giant?" he asked a visitor. "It's the most prone to avalanches, probably because more depth hoar (crystalline layers) form there. There can be several a year -- sometimes none in a year. But there are 26 avalanche paths on the north, northeast, east and southeast sides of the Sleeping Giant. The slides just run year after year in the same places."

Youthful adventures

Judson grew up near Tug Hill, N.Y., and the snowy logging camps of the Adirondacks. His father, Oliver, was a contract logger, who moved frequently to be near his work. When he was 18, he followed his father west to continue logging near Ukiah, Calif. It meant he would become the first Judson in several generations who did not matriculate at Yale.

In 1953, he moved to South--ern California and enlisted in the Marine Corps, missing the tail end of the Korean War. He began climbing in the San Bernardino Mountains and later joined a buddy from the Corps in Boulder, where the rock climbing became more serious.

Art met Milly while they both were working with Rocky Mountain Rescue. If you ask him, he might admit he fell in love with her because she was a better climber than he was.

He learned humility on South Arapahoe Peak, where he misjudged how difficult an icy slope was.

"I think I was overconfident because of my ice climbing experience. I didn't think I needed my crampons, and I fell off an avalanche slope wearing a 50-pound Kelty pack," Judson said.

He pursued geology at the University of Colorado, but Judson found he didn't enjoy studying rocks as much as he enjoyed climbing them. In 1957, he left Boulder for Corvallis, Ore., where he studied forestry. He earned his bachelor's degree in 1960.

In Oregon, Judson and his climbing buddies were exposed to the big volcanoes of the Cascade Range. They climbed Mount Hood and Mount Baker and two of the three peaks known in Central Oregon as The Three Sisters. They made a trip to Washington and climbed Mount Rainier.

Climbing partner Bert Brown recalled the time Judson introduced him to a four-legged member of the team for an assault on the South Sister.

"Jud had a German shepherd named Kawatchee. A few minutes out of camp in the forest, the dog collided with a porcupine, and, as you can imagine, that was noisy. We used a rope for crevasse safety on the South Sister glacier, and Kawatchee was the 'middleman' on the rope. That was the only time I've done such a climb with a dog."

'Head full of snow'

A magazine article prompted another shift in Judson's career plans.

"In my junior year, I read an article in Coronet about snow rangers who were practicing avalanche control in preparation for the 1960 Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley, Calif. I thought, 'That really sounds like what I'd like to do,'" Judson recalled. "That's what turned me on to snow."

Judson landed a job as a snow ranger with the Arapaho National Forest and became a protege of veteran snow ranger Dick Stillman, who was the lead avalanche forecaster in the region. From a base in Golden, they conducted extensive res--earch about snow conditions and the behavior of avalanche zones on Berthoud Pass. They helped to document the history of more than 185 avalanches on the Front Range.

"My whole head was full of snow at all times," Judson recalled. "That's all I thought about."

Stillman taught him how to approach known paths of small avalanches with relative safety and how to set them off with a hard check turn of his skis.

"We would get up in the middle of the night in storms and study density trends and the quantity of blowing snow," Judson recalled. "We sometimes worked 20 hours straight. When you work long, long hours, you learn that much more. It was a labor of love."

Most often, the men carried backpacks stuffed with explosives. They used "seismograph sticks," each about 3 feet long and weighing 5 pounds. The sticks contained a mix of dynamite and other compounds and were set off with pull-wire igniters, Judson said.

He remembers detonating a seismograph stick and marveling at its effect.

"The slope would shatter like a pain of glass," he said.

In his younger years, before Judson met him, Stillman was known for studying avalanche behavior by deliberately inserting himself into a slide.

"He actually rode 50 in his first year of work," Judson said. "In the last one, he broke his leg."

Stillman was wiser and more conservative when Judson be----came his student, and they had a rule that they wouldn't touch a slope with more than 18 inches of new snow on it.

Still, Judson had his own unpleasant brushes with avalanches.

"I got caught in two over a period of 25 years," Judson said.

He recalls a time on Berthoud Pass when a safety rope saved him from a dangerous ride.

"My partner roped me down about 30 feet to a line of stakes where I wanted to take readings. I heard a sound like a rifle crack," Judson remembered. "This entire slope took off below me. I fell straight down about 7 feet to the bed surface. I was looking at this huge mass of snow. It was like I was in the front seat of a Greyhound bus, looking out the window."

Another time, Judson was buried to his neck in a slide, and Stillman dug him out. Judson's children were ages 2, 4 and 5 at the time.

"I worked the rest of the day and didn't say anything to Milly for several days," Judson recalled. "It does make you begin to think."

Judson's son, Mike, doesn't recall the day his father was caught in the slide. However, his memories of accompanying him to witness the triggering of an avalanche on Berthoud Pass are distinct.

"I remember like it was yesterday," Mike Judson said. "We took the chairlift on the west side of the highway, where the avalanche paths were, and skied down toward a run called 'The Roll.' I was maybe 11 or so but a pretty solid skier from all the time we spent at Mount Werner. We skied down to a certain point where the slope began to get noticeably steeper, and that's where we stopped. My dad and others in his group used a type of explosive to set off avalanches. At a given signal, we all covered our ears. That didn't stop us from hearing the loud 'bang!' As I stood above the hard-slab avalanche and looked down the hill, the snow looked like a big, fast-moving river as it roared away. It definitely was an unforgettable day in my youth."

'The highest of honors'

During his 25-year career with the Forest Service and even in retirement, Judson continued to write research papers about avalanche science. He is credited with founding Colorado's avalanche warning program.

The Judsons built their home here in 1969 and moved here permanently in 1985, after Judson retired from the Forest Service.

Judson is keenly aware that more people than ever are skiing and snowmobiling into the Colorado backcountry and potentially putting themselves in harm's way.

"It's a different kind of thinking today," he said. "People have a lot more knowledge (about avalanche conditions), and they don't want to be told you can't really forecast these things accurately."

One of the most dangerous qualities of avalanche paths, Judson said, is that a skier or snowmobiler might traverse the same path many times without incident. That experience builds a false sense of security. And then, without warning, one day, the slope lets loose.

"It might be a matter of micro fractures buried in some layer, and when it starts, it propagates at the speed of sound," he said.

Former colleague Ron Perla of Canmore, Alberta, Canada, said that for decades, Judson has served as the conscious for the field of avalanche research. Judson always was able to sort through some of the "nonsense" being published in the field and bring it back to science, Perla said.

"When it came time for Noel Gardner, the father of Canadian avalanche studies, to convert his many years of field and theoretical experience into a publication, he chose Art Judson as co-author," Perla said. "Noel could have chosen a co-author from other candidates in Canada, USA, Switzerland -- but he chose Art Judson. Noel's endorsement is the highest of honors."