By Ken Smith
Turnagain Times
John Meyer was casually driving down Portage Valley Highway March 19 around 2 p.m. during his daily commute from Anchorage to his job at the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel when he heard a loud “boom!” He immediately recognized the ominous sound and became nervous.
“I heard the howitzer go off, and I thought, ‘I better get out of here’,” said Meyer, 21.
He approached the turn-off to the Begich, Boggs Visitor Center and Portage Glacier Lodge and Meyer heard the howitzer go off again.
“I heard the second one, maybe 20-feet in front of the avalanche—Boom! and it comes down and then there’s a white out, so you can’t see anything, and I ran right into it.”
Meyer described his collision with the massive avalanche, “like being in a head on crash.” He said his Jeep traveled around 15 feet across the top of the avalanche, which was about six feet high.
“It was a matter of seconds after the second howitzer when the avalanche hit,” he said. “If I was going five miles faster or five to ten seconds earlier, I would have been dead. I would have been taken 100 yards into the brush, crushed in my tin can Jeep. I lucked out. There was no notification, just the sound of the howitzer, and I knew what they were doing,” he said.
Meyer walked away from the collision uninjured, but his vehicle sustained over $1,200 in damage.
Marilyn Williams has owned Portage Glacier Lodge for 26 years, and she’s seen her share of avalanches, but she said she’s never seen an avalanche like this one.
“It’s an avalanche chute that’s been there forever,” she said. “They shoot that on a regular basis. I’ve seen it come across the river, but that time it crossed the river and about 100 yards onto the other side of the road.”
Williams said the avalanche reached a depth of about 20 to 24 feet. She said road crews responded quickly, and the highway was cleared within three hours.
A gun crew of five to six Alaska Railroad workers were called down to Portage Valley the day of the slide for avalanche mitigation—they’d been working in the area all week.
Gun crews routinely shoot the mountains in the area near the railroad tracks to trigger avalanches that pose a risk of sliding.
The train tracks are a quarter-of-a-mile or more from the highway, running parallel to the mountains along the left side the valley when traveling down Portage Valley Highway to Whittier.
The highway has never been closed in the past for avalanche mitigation because it is considered far enough away from the mountains that no avalanche could reach it—so thought DOT and railroad officials.
It is the DOT’s decision whether or not to close a road when shooting a mountain, something they typically do on the Seward Highway due to its close proximity to avalanche chutes.
“DOT is always with us when we shoot down the Bird flats and the Centerline,” said Tim Thomspson, Dir. of External Affairs for the Alaska Railroad.
“DOT will be closing the road next time,” he assured. “This is the first time in 20 plus years that an avalanche has reached the road in that area.”
Thompson attributed the unprecedented slide to the immense build up of snow over the previous three days when a heavy storm had moved in. Combine that with extremely steep mountainsides, and you’ve got ideal conditions for large avalanches.
“That’s what happens when you get those heavy storms through there,” he said. “Look where the tracks are, there are some really steep slopes above and sometimes it’s difficult to keep up with them. The crew had been working since the sixteenth—that was a pretty hefty storm.”
Dave Hamre is an avalanche specialist for the Alaska Railroad. He was in charge of the gun crew working in the valley March 19.
Hamre, 57, said he’s been involved in avalanche mitigation for 38 years, but he said he’s never seen one slide like the one he saw that day.
“It was an unusual event, really unusual,” he said. “That’s at least a 100-year event. There’s been no recorded event anywhere close to that. Once it hit the valley floor, it went over a quarter mile before it hit the road.”
The avalanche also wiped out several power line poles, knocking out power to the Whittier Tunnel and city of Whittier for six days.
It was an incredible avalanche, one that still has Hamre looking back in amazement for both its extraordinary size and power.
“It didn’t look any larger than any other avalanche,” he said, “and from the gun mount, you see it off to the side. It didn’t look from our perspective, larger than avalanches we’ve shot in the past.”
It wasn’t until Hamre and his crew got to the highway and saw the avalanche across the road that they realized how large it was and the scope of what had actually happened.
And when the unexpected happens like the Portage slide, it’s unnerving and perplexing for people like Hamre, who said he’s shot close to 10,000 avalanches in his career.
But Hamre admits avalanches are not an exact science and anything can happen at anytime.
“This avalanche is right at the extreme margin of that kind of event,” he said. “We may not see something again like that for 300 to 500 years. That’s definitely up there as the most unusual event I’ve ever experienced.”