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On the lift at Whitefish, Colorado native Zach Guy recalled a less-than-auspicious start to his forecasting career. In the early 2000s, during his undergraduate days at Western Washington University, he and a friend headed up to Mount Baker Ski Area.

“They have terrain similar to here,” he said. “You take a chairlift up and then you can traverse out into the backcountry.” Neither he nor his friend had any backcountry skills, but they decided to leave the resort “because the powder looked good.”

As they were ducking under the ropes marking the ski area boundary, “a ski patroller snagged me by the jacket and was like,’Where are you going?”’

“Oh, it looks good over there,” he remembers saying.

“And he was like, ‘You guys don’t have any avalanche gear, clearly. Do you know what you’re doing?’ And we were like, ‘No,’ and they took me down and gave us a little 10-minute avalanche awareness talk.”