First tracks: Idaho Panhandle Avalanche Center hires first full-time director

Avalanche forecasting isn’t really an office job.

Sure, Chris Bilbrey, the new director of the Idaho Panhandle Avalanche Center, is going to spend plenty of time in the office. Someone has to type up the forecasts and get them online, for one thing. Then there’s the scheduling, planning, thinking big picture about the center’s growth – all of that needs to get done, and it’s on Bilbrey to do it.

But he’s also going to be outside. Getting to know the region’s snowpack intimately is part of the job. Watching the weather isn’t enough.

“I’m a believer that it’s critically important that us as forecasters are out looking, touching, tasting the snow,” Bilbrey said in an interview.

Bilbrey, 44, moved to Sandpoint this summer to take the reins at IPAC, the avalanche forecasting and education outfit covering North Idaho and far northwestern Montana.

His arrival is a major milestone. Bilbrey is the first permanent, full-time director for the center, which has long been staffed primarily by part-time workers, volunteers and Forest Service employees on temporary assignment.

The U.S. Forest Service’s decision to bring on a full-time director will free up staffers who had been splitting the director’s duties and allow the center to expand its forecasting offerings this winter. It also means there’s someone who can begin planning for the center’s growth and the future of avalanche forecasting in the region.

“To have somebody full-time being able to do all the little things that we wouldn’t be able to do is just huge,” said Jeff Thompson, an avalanche forecaster who has worked at IPAC since 2016.

Gabe White, board president for the nonprofit Friends of IPAC, which supports the center, said Bilbrey has already been updating safety policies and making other decisions to improve the center’s operations.

He also said the hire shows that the Forest Service recognizes the burgeoning interest in backcountry winter recreation in the region and the rising support for the nonprofit.

“They saw our growth and they wanted to match that,” White said.

Avalanche danger is a perpetual consideration for those who venture into the backcountry in the winter. There were 27 avalanche deaths in the U.S. last year. Two of those were in North Idaho – one near Mullan in January and one in the Pack River drainage north of Sandpoint in March.

Forecasters help backcountry users understand the risks and how they change through the winter. Kelly Lynch, the chair of the backcountry skiing committee for the Spokane Mountaineers, said forecasts often help skiers rule out places they’d consider going, and that they provide insight that would otherwise be unavailable.

“The forecasters are out in the field much more regularly than us recreationalists,” Lynch said. “They can see the changing snowpack.”

IPAC is one of 26 avalanche centers across the country. Its forecasts cover the Silver Valley and in the Purcell, Cabinet and Selkirk mountains, and the center also runs education programs throughout the region.

Centers in places like Colorado and Utah are much larger, and they’ve had robust full-time staff for years. IPAC has not. Instead, it has long operated with a spartan crew of federal employees on temporary assignment and part-timers funded through the nonprofit.

White said given the staffing constraints, he’s always been impressed that the center has put out forecasts as often as it has, typically about twice a week. Last winter, the center produced 112 forecasts over 20 weeks.

The nonprofit, which runs avalanche safety courses and partially funds forecasting operations, has seen donations and memberships rise over the past several years. Businesses have signed on as sponsors. Web traffic for the forecasts is up, as is interest in their avalanche safety classes.

All the while, IPAC’s leadership has been in flux. In 2016, the Forest Service hired Thompson as a part-time director. Funding for that role dried up quickly, however, and restructuring had to be done just to keep him on as a forecaster. For a couple of years, he and another forecaster split director duties.

One season, the Forest Service hired a temporary full-time director. But that position didn’t return the next season, again forcing longtime staffers to take on extra work to keep the ship afloat.

Last December, the agency began advertising the permanent director job, and it hired Bilbrey in June. Thompson said staffers have noticed a difference.

“It felt like we were always putting out the fire right at our toes the last couple of years,” Thompson said. “Now we have some breathing room.”

Bilbrey grew up in Tennessee and picked up backcountry skiing while in college in Durango, Colorado. He took an avalanche class in 2001 and started ski patrolling in 2002.

“That just kind of set the wheels in motion for my career working in the snow and avalanche industry,” he said.

After 12 years of patrolling at a Colorado ski area, he moved north to go to graduate school at Montana State University. After grad school, he worked a season as an avalanche forecaster at the Flathead Avalanche Center in Hungry Horse, Montana.

In 2018, he became a forecaster for the Colorado Avalanche Information Center focusing on the San Juan Mountains in the southwestern part of the state, where he stayed until he took the job at IPAC.

Snow science fascinates him. There are countless variables at play – wind, the interaction between snow layers, microclimatges in the mountains.

It’s a complex and unpredictable puzzle, and it changes every day.

“There have been people that say snow and avalanche work is sometimes almost more complicated than rocket science,” Bilbrey said.

He jumped at the chance to take over at IPAC because it seemed like a chance to have an impact on a growing program, and that he’d be filling a role that was much needed.

“Just being able to have someone in sort of the director role to just work on strategic planning and day -to -day operation logistics is going to be a huge benefit to the program,” Bilbrey said. “It’s something that’s been long overdue.”

Bilbrey said his first few months in Sandpoint have been spent trying to make some of the center’s processes more efficient, the sort of work that might not be noticeable to the public.

Longtime users will notice a few changes this winter. The forecast zones have been tweaked. Instead of three, the center will now forecast avalanche conditions in five zones: the Silver Valley, Selkirks, Purcells and West and East Cabinets.

Although he is the only full-time employee, Bilbrey believes the center can ramp up its forecast frequency this winter to five days a week for most of its zones.

In the long term, Bilbrey would like to see other improvements, such as building weather stations that could provide more high elevation wind data. Fundraising could also eventually help them add more people, which could eventually allow them to produce forecasts for every day of the week.

For now, though, it’s forecast season.

The center has kicked out a few general forecasts, letting people know about early season snow conditions, and Bilbrey has been in the woods. He can be seen talking to the camera in two separate videos on the IPAC Facebook page, one from the Selkirks and one from the Cabinets.

He plans to be in the field three or four days a week with his team. That’s the fun part of the job, working with other forecasters and trying to understand the snowpack.

“Even after doing this 20 years,” Bilbrey said, “you always learn something new every day.”