March 10, 2026

How Jackson Hole Turned 50 Years of Avalanche Data into a Live Operational System

By Matt Ball

Jackson Hole Mountain Resort has recorded every significant avalanche since the early 1970s. For decades, this meant boxes of handwritten paperwork—notebooks filled by forecasters who understood that what happened on the mountain would matter to future ski patrollers trying to predict daily dangers.

“The culture here has always been about meticulous recordkeeping,” said Mike Rheam, who leads avalanche hazard reduction for Jackson Hole Ski Patrol and forecasts for the Bridger-Teton Avalanche Center. “Somebody might want to do a research project on something we haven’t even thought of yet. The records have to be there.”

More than 17,000 of those slides can now be explored in 3D on a map.

The terrain demands it. Jackson Hole covers 2,500 acres with a vertical drop of 4,139 feet and has received more than 240 inches of snow at the summit this season—more than double Colorado resorts like Telluride and Vail with similar expert terrain. Corbet’s Couloir drops 20 feet into a steep chute. From the Bridger Gondola, a steady line of skiers hikes towards the Headwall cliffs. Before each patroller heads out to prepare the mountain, the dispatcher tests their avalanche beacon: Is it beeping? Then they go to work.

Jackson Hole ski patrollers head out at dawn to assess avalanche conditions and deploy explosives on dangerous slopes. Using SmartMountain, a GIS-based app built by Earth Analytic on ArcGIS, the team documents every charge placement and resulting slide—creating a safety record before the first skier arrives.
Inside Jackson Hole's ski patrol locker room, decades of stickers document mountain culture and individual personalities. This is where patrollers suit up before dawn—the human side of operations that combine old-school mountain expertise with cutting-edge mapping technology.
Jackson Hole once used military artillery to trigger avalanches, with gun crews stationed in avalanche run-out zones. Remote exploders and GIS mapping eliminated that risk—patrollers now mitigate slopes from safety while documenting every charge and resulting slide.

That work is now tracked in SmartMountain, a suite of geographic information system (GIS) applications. What began as avalanche risk mitigation now also manages ski patrol dispatch, missing persons, and injury response. The paper is gone. The map is the operating record—every condition observed, every action taken, documented with coordinates and time stamps that can be queried long after the snow melts.

Reading the Snowpack

On February 12, patroller Scott Matthews read conditions aloud to the crew. The previous day brought the largest 24-hour snowfall of the season—the first significant storm after 30 dry days. Southwest winds were gusting nearly 40 miles per hour. Slabs up to two feet expected in unskied areas. This was an avalanche mitigation day.

It was also the last day of preparations before the Kings & Queens of Corbet’s competition—an annual event where spectators gather in Tensleep Bowl, accessible only through expert terrain. That Valentine’s Day weekend, patrollers prepared the area so a crowd could safely watch the best freeride skiers in the world drop in. A couple—Tristen “Pants” Lilly and Piper Kunst—fittingly were crowned.

The snow and the terrain make the contest possible. The Teton Range rises abruptly from the valley floor with no foothills to slow incoming weather. Pacific storms hit the range head-on, forcing moist air upward—a process called orographic lift–dropping it as snow. The summit regularly exceeds 400 inches in a full season. The same geography that creates steep terrain keeps it loaded.

This season’s snowpack tells a layered story. Warm temperatures through November and December brought rain to high elevations, forming a dense ice crust. Big avalanches followed. A subsequent storm arrived warm and gradually cooled. “We had good bonding of the new snow, so we kind of put that ice layer to bed,” said Kevin Brazell, an avalanche hazard reduction specialist. “It’s down in the pack and we’re not too worried about it. It will probably reawaken in the spring.”

Deeper, faceted layers—sugary, cohesionless snow formed during dry spells—remain the persistent concern. When enough mass builds on top, it can collapse. “You can’t really be a good avalanche forecaster if you don’t have your head in it all the time,” Rheam said. “The only way to have that knowledge is to be thinking about it from the first snowflake in the fall.”

Jackson Hole's 4,139 vertical feet encompasses cliffs, chutes, and varying snow conditions across different aspects and elevations. Patrol uses GIS mapping to track every avalanche path, explosive deployment, and resulting slide across terrain where a single storm can require 40 patrollers.
From Rendezvous Mountain, Jackson Hole valley spreads below. Patrol's predawn avalanche mitigation work protects not just skiers but this entire community—documenting every explosive deployment and slide in a database that goes back to the early 1970s.
Skiers carve turns below Jackson Hole's cliff bands—terrain that requires precise avalanche forecasting and explosive mitigation each morning. Every charge placement, every resulting slide gets logged in patrol's GIS database, creating a safety record that stretches back decades.

Charges, Polygons, and Color-Coded Dots

Before patrollers head out, Brazell sits at a console operating remote exploders—automated systems that deliver charges ranging from 10 to 35 pounds onto avalanche-prone slopes. “Nobody is out there right now, and I’m able to mitigate the slope from here,” he said. Automation replaced the artillery the resort used for decades, until expansion eliminated the lines of fire. “We lost targets,” Brazell said. “Too many new buildings and lifts in the way.”

Explosives are prepped in the staging room, loaded onto the tram car, and deployed from designated positions. Forty patrollers head out in teams of two. Some charges are thrown by hand from clifftops along routes mapped as layers in the system.

After mitigation, every patroller logs what happened. Rheam called it the “100 workers, 100 ways” problem—some patrollers are technical, others less so. The form has to work for all of them. Each patroller selects their route, marks explosive placements on the map, and if an avalanche resulted, draws the extent of the slide–how deep it broke, how far it ran. The system calculates vertical fall and slab width from terrain data.

That link between charge and consequence is the system’s core value. On the map, color-coded dots tell the day’s story: red means the explosive triggered an avalanche; black means it didn’t; yellow means weather obscured the result. “We can use this tool to look at a period of time in a storm cycle and make sure we’re getting the activity we expect,” Rheam said, pointing to the large path—the biggest slide at the resort this season, triggered by a snowcat working above it.

At day’s end, forecasters review every entry, verify sizes, correct mistakes, and push cleaned data to a permanent repository. Significant events get flagged for training or investigation. The system also serves patrollers on days off—pull up the avalanche outlines, understand what you missed before stepping back into it.

Mountain to Clinic to Public Record

SmartMountain covers end-to-end patrol operations. When someone is injured, the process starts with rough information over the radio—approximate age, location, complaint. A pin goes on the map. The nearest patroller arrives and updates the form. If care is accepted, the form follows the patient from slope to clinic, where staff add identification, vitals, drug administration records with signatures at every level, and a narrative of what happened. The same system tracks rope-line violations with photos and repeat-offender histories, out-of-bounds incidents, and missing persons—down to jacket color and last known contact with family.

Ski patrol reviews avalanche polygons and explosive deployment records on the SmartMountain GIS interface built on ArcGIS. The map-based system creates a shared operational picture of hazards across the mountain. (Left to right: Wetherbee Dorshow of Earth Analytic Inc., Kevin Brazell, Mike Rheam of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort/Bridger-Teton Avalanche Center)
Each dot marks an explosive dropped to trigger avalanches—red caused slides, black did not, yellow is uncertain. Remote deployment keeps patrollers out of hazard zones while systematically clearing dangerous slopes before skiers arrive, creating a verified safety record for the day.
The avalanche occurrence table details every recorded slide—size, trigger method, location, and characteristics. Combined with map polygons, forecasters analyze patterns across storm cycles. The database contains nearly 17,000 avalanche records dating to the early 1970s.
The dispatch dashboard shows patrol assignments, work missions, and incident locations in real time. Dispatchers track who's on duty, where they're assigned, and what tasks need completion—from avalanche mitigation routes to equipment repairs to injury responses across the mountain.
SmartMountain's clinic dashboard tracks every injury from first report through treatment, creating detailed records for liability and quality of care. The system logs witness statements, vital signs, treatments administered, and patient signatures—all spatial data tied to locations on the mountain.

All this data stays internal. But with avalanche records, Jackson Hole takes an unusual approach.

The resort merges avalanche activity with the Bridger-Teton Avalanche Center’s database, making resort explosive results visible to the public. “Everything’s transparent here,” said Rheam. “We do our best to mitigate the avalanche hazard. We can’t reduce it 100 percent. So we’re letting the public know the hazards exist.” The partnership dates to the 1970s, when two young men died on Jackson Peak and the community recognized the need for backcountry forecasting.

The transparency has practical value. Backcountry travelers use the resort’s explosive results to calibrate their own risk. When a 35-pound charge triggers a significant slide on a slope that’s been mitigated all season, it says something about what’s waiting on slopes that haven’t been touched.

The database that started with handwritten observations in the 1970s now tracks a lost child’s jacket color and links a charge detonated at dawn to the avalanche it produced. Fifty years of institutional memory, mapped and searchable, used every day by the people responsible for safety on one of North America’s most demanding mountains.

Learn more about the GIS components that combine to deliver operational intelligence.

SmartMountain—The Technology Behind the Map

SmartMountain is built by Earth Analytic on Esri’s ArcGIS platform. The system uses ArcGIS Experience Builder as its primary interface, with ArcGIS Survey123 smart forms handling field data collection—from avalanche observations to clinic intake. Dashboards provide real-time operational views of dispatch status, clinic activity, and daily explosive results, while 3D scene views let forecasters examine terrain and avalanche paths with depth.

Automated geoprocessing scripts calculate vertical fall, slab width, and explosive-to-avalanche associations from terrain data, reducing manual entry for patrollers. Data flows from a staging layer through supervisor review to a permanent repository, creating a spatial record searchable across 50 years of avalanche history.

The platform is scalable. Originally developed with Jackson Hole and Taos Ski Valley, SmartMountain’s avalanche, dispatch, and risk modules now serve more than 20 resorts and heliskiing operations, including remote areas of Alaska.

Each deployment is configured for local needs. Jackson Hole pushes avalanche results to the Bridger-Teton Avalanche Center’s independent system, reducing duplication. Other resorts integrate weather feeds from client-owned stations and third-party aggregators, like Synoptic, or connect snow pit profile tools like Propagation Labs’ Snow Scope through API calls. This flexibility—combining real-time data sources with decades of historical records—gives each resort command of their own location intelligence.

The platform combines spatial analytics to model terrain, explore avalanche history, and forecast weather conditions in a single view.

Learn more at smartmountain.earthanalytic.com

Matt Ball

Matt Ball is the editor of the Esri Blog and writes about applications of geospatial technology for all its departments. With nearly 30 years of reporting on GIS technology, he has chased future-forward user stories and watched as wild ideas, innovative tools, and enterprise-wide geographic approaches have become common practice. Prior to Esri, he edited GeoWorld magazine, organized the GeoTec Event, founded V1 Media, and launched Sensors & Systems and Informed Infrastructure magazines. He’s thrilled to be closer to GIS users, and at a company that pushes what’s possible.