Latest News – Wallowa Avalanche Center

In Memory of Roger Thomas Roepke; February 21, 1959—March 7, 2009

This Sunday marks the one year anniversary of an avalanche that took the life of a fine man– husband, father and friend. There are no words to adequately convey the gratitude my sons and I share for our friends and for this community and especially for the Search and Rescue team that came to our aid. Despite our loss, we feel truly embraced by these incredible people that have helped us through this year. Roger would be so proud.

As we celebrate the life of an extraordinary man I would ask you to honor him by loving and respecting the back country as much as he did; be present and enjoy every moment. That is how Roger lived his life. His powerful spirit thrives within all of us.

Lisa Armstrong-Roepke
March 5, 2010

Tim Farrar, an avalanche forecaster in the Sierra Nevadas and good friend to us (The Roepke family) sent the following quote:

Snow means different things to different people. To a small boy/girl it is an inexhaustible supply of ammunition; when s/he makes a snowball s/he is utilizing two of snow’s special qualities; cohesion and compaction. To the merchant, it is an unmitigated nuisance to be scraped off his/her sidewalk; in a big city, snow can be a minor disaster that halts all forms of transportation, tears down power and telephone lines, and costs millions of dollars to get rid of. To the hydrologist it is the most perfect form of water storage; requiring no costly dams, it collects the moisture of an entire winter and releases that moisture gradually through the summer; without it the snow-fed rivers of the West would alternate between raging flood and blistering desert and life as we know it would be impossible. To the skier, snow is an ideal sliding surface for a pair of steel and plastic slivers attached to his/her feet, a combination that has reversed man’s age-old dread of winter; the mountains, avoided in the snow season by our forefathers, have become the playground of millions. Thus the nature of snow depends somewhat upon the eye of the beholder.

Lying on a mountainside, snow looks so innocent, so bland, and to the uneducated eye so unchanging, yet the avalanche hunter knows it to be the most changeable substance on Earth. From the moment the first molecule of water vapor floating around in the atmosphere condenses around some minute particle of dust, snow never really stops changing until it becomes water again, flows down to the sea and begins the cycle all over. The life of a snow crystal can be shorter than a butterfly’s, for it may melt on the way down and fall to Earth as rain. On the other hand, the life of a snow crystal may be measured in centuries if it happens to become part of a glacier. Be it for moments or eras, the nature of snow is that it never entirely stops changing. This is not of course, a unique property. Everything is changing in its own way and at its own pace.

~Montgomery M. Atwater-father of US Avalanche Science