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More snow has fallen at Stevens Pass in December than during all of last year’s ski season. That means countless ecstatic skiers and snowboarders.

But every year people die on the mountains. A lot of those fatalities can be prevented if snowboarders and skiers take a couple extra steps to be careful.

For example, if you want to go to the backcountry, you have to know about avalanche danger, and how to read the weather report and snow. But did you know that skiing through the trees &#8212 or the non-groomed areas of a ski resort &#8212 is just as dangerous?

Some of that danger comes from tree wells, which are the holes created around the base of a tree due to snow hanging on branches.

Paul Baugher, who has been the director of the ski patrol at Crystal Mountain Resort for 20 years, says people tend to know about the avalanche danger when they’re nowhere near a ski resort and off in the backcountry. They don’t often think about the risks when skiing with their buddies in-bounds &#8212 within the boundaries of a ski resort like Crystal or Stevens Pass.

“The risks of dying in a tree well or a snow-immersion accident within a ski area are almost identical to the risks you’d face if you went out and encountered an avalanche after you’ve left the ski area boundary,” he says.

Baugher teaches the instructors who teach avalanche safety courses and is one of the only people who has pulled all the data on who dies from falling into tree wells.

“And this is really a ski area in the ski area-boundary phenomenon,” Baugher says. “… Most of the people have had partners, but the partners don’t keep them in sight, and what they typically do is they end up at the bottom of the lift waiting for the other person to show up, and they don’t, and so they go back and they retrace where they were. And by the time they go back through there and they find their partner, it’s generally too late.”

Baugher says he’s documented about 70 cases of fatalities from “snow immersion suffocation,” only four or five of which happened beyond the boundary of a ski resort.
He says you can still go through the trees off of the groomed runs, but you have to stay with your partner.