Abstract

Across the world avalanche services report around 140 fatalities on average each winter, mainly involving backcountry recreationists. These events deeply impact local mountain communities. Examining patterns in accident data can provide valuable insights into trends in fatal accidents and highlight challenges that need to be addressed with future avalanche safety initiatives.

Avalanche Canada recently consolidated the available information about all known fatal avalanche accidents in Canada into a new database which can be accessed at https://incidents.avalanche.ca/. This searchable public database documents 1,077 fatalities from 577 accidents dating back to 1782.

In this study, we examine trends in avalanche fatality age demographics over the past 42 seasons. We used quantile regression modelling to gain more insight into trends across the entire age distribution. We conducted this analysis across the entire dataset as well as for the main user-activity groups: back-country skiing/snowboarding, snowmobiling, and mechanized skiing/snowboarding.

We observe that for the overall dataset the age of avalanche fatality victims is getting older, but there are distinct trends in the age distributions of each activity. Snowmobiler fatalities are getting older and the age range is widening; backcountry skier and snowboarder fatalities are getting older at the median, but the oldest fatalities are getting younger; and mechanized skier and snowboarder fatalities are getting older with the greatest increase occurring among younger fatalities. This clearly highlights that avalanche fatality age demographics are changing in Canada. While the current lack of participation data prevents us from providing insights into fatality rates for different age groups, our results provide a com-prehensive baseline to compare with in the future and can help to inform future awareness initiatives and safety services that aim to target specific at-risk groups.

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