Jerry Duncan was just getting off his lunch break on Wednesday when a natural avalanche occurred at Chop Gully near Gold Creek. Duncan was sitting in his office at the Father Andrew P. Kashevaroff State Library, Archives, and Museum building. It was 12:52 p.m.
“I just got done reading. I just put my book down and was getting ready to go back to work and I looked out the window and it was sliding,” Duncan said Thursday.
Duncan grabbed his phone, shot a video and posted it on Facebook calling it a “large avalanche.” As of midday Thursday, it was shared more than 400 times on the Juneau photo group page.
The view of the avalanche in the 1 minute, 25 second video is slightly obscured by the reflection of lights on the window, but you can still see the avalanche crashing down the mountainside. You can also hear Duncan saying, “It’s a biggie. … It’s going to cross the road. Wow, it’s coming down heavy …”
Tom Mattice, emergency programs manager for the City and Borough of Juneau, said the new snow avalanche was actually quite small.
“It’s always impressive because it’s a big powder cloud. That’s a thousand foot cliff so it just comes straight down and turns into air, so even small avalanches look very, very large,” Mattice said Thursday.
Mattice wasn’t expecting any natural avalanches Wednesday, but a brief flurry of snow changed that.
“With the warming and the brief rapid inset of snow, it was just enough to bring down some small slides,” he said.
Chop Gully has avalanches several times a year, Mattice said.
“We worry about them when they get bigger because they can affect the Flume Trail, but right now there’s not that much snowpack up high,” he said.
On Wednesday and Thursday, the avalanche advisory was moderate, a two on a scale of one to five, with five being extreme danger.
Mattice said small avalanches, like the one Duncan captured on video are “cool to see” and serve as a good reminder that avalanches can still happen even when the danger is low.
“Low danger doesn’t mean no danger, and if you’re going into the mountains, you always need to be thinking of safety,” Mattice said.
Duncan, a microfilm equipment operator for the state, said he’s seen avalanches in the area in years past, but this was his first time from the new museum.
He anticipates seeing more of them.
“Next time we’ll get the lights turned off,” he said.
• Contact reporter Lisa Phu at 523-2246 or lisa.phu@juneauempire.com.
