Dispatches News From The Field

Safety in numbers? How a park city, utah, tech start up is trying to make avalanche deaths a thing of the past.

- Christopher Solomon

IN FEBRUARY 2011, Brint Markle and three friends were skiing the uncontrolled back side of Mont Fort in Verbier, Switzerland. It was a great day for poor decisions: the powder deep, the sky blue, the stoke high. “I think our skiing experience was above our education,” Markle says today.

One of the skiers took an aggressive line. The slope ripped out. Markle watched, helpless, as the avalanche swept his buddy 750 feet down the mountain, siphoned him through a cliff band, and spat him out at the bottom, partially buried but unharmed. The group later heard that, shortly before the incident, another slide had occurred on a similar slope just a ridge or two away. “I just re- member thinking, Gosh, had we known a bit more, we wouldn’t have been out there,” Markle says.

That dodgy experience drove Markle to co-found Mountain Hub (formerly Avatech), a startup in Park City whose avalanche tools— including the company’s website, app, and probe—are designed to help people instantly share safety information, along with route descriptions, alerts, trip reports, pictures, and topo maps. In doing so, the company is creating the kind of backcountry buzz not heard since the rollout of Dynafit bindings.