Some things are a given. Like when Michelin announced it would be adding Aspen and Vail restaurants to its esteemed culinary guide, it was a forgone conclusion that Bosq would receive a coveted star (and the next day would sell out for the entire season.

Another no brainer? That attending Puppy Class at Colorado Rapid Avalanche Deployment’s Dog School (the nation’s  largest annual avalanche dog training program, which in 2023 was hosted by Snowmass Mountain; with my young Lab, Stryker (pictured with me above), would be a blast.     

Over four days last February, I’d meet my classmates (ski patrollers from Beaver Creek, Crested Butte, Keystone, and Vail, plus one paratrooper from the Kentucky Air National Guard) at the Fanny Hill base area, and together with our pups, we’d cram into Skittles-hued Sky Cab pillboxes, then with another half-dozen K9 teams and four instructors we’d board the towed trailer of a waiting snowcat, overloading it like a Ringling Brothers clown car, and crawl up the mountain to a training area outside Slider’s Cabin.

On Slider, a closed groomer that looked more like a mogul run, only the moguls all were quinzees—mounds of snow hollowed out like igloos that patrollers call “dog holes”—we’d take turns playing hide and seek. Then the games would become ever more difficult, progressing from runaways (a patroller with a rag toy diving into an open dog hole while the howling pup watches) to full burials (the pup following a buried patroller’s scent on wind then digging into the correct blocked-over dog hole). Every search drill always ended with a raucous round of tug of war, with the quarry—even the burly military special operator—gleefully shrieking like a teenage girl at a sleepover party (the high-pitch tone, I was told, satisfies the dog’s instinctual prey drive, mimicking the sound of a captured animal). And it was fun. As assistant instructor Leland Thompson told me: “If you’re a handler and ... this is not your happy place, then you’re in the wrong line of work.”

But deploying with a trained avalanche dog is anything but fun and games. Another certainty: Somebody will die in an avalanche this season (if this is an average winter, avalanches will claim 27 lives in the US). Almost all of these will happen in the backcountry, in terrain outside ski resort boundaries (due to required mitigation like preemptively triggering slides with explosive charges, a fatal inbounds avalanche happens once every 111 million skier days; in the backcountry, even for those who are exceptionally skilled and equipped and lucky, the chances of surviving an avalanche are at best 50/50, the flip of a coin).
While backcountry enthusiasts may grumble, this season, Aspen Mountain will fold 153 acres of formerly out-of-bounds terrain into its patrolled and mitigated perimeter, the resort’s largest expansion since 1985. Of this I am sure: I’ll be at Hero’s at rope drop, and the next Dog School in February.