In 1990, at barely twenty years old, then-pro snowboarder Don Schwartz was in the helicopter that crashed at the Blue River Powder 8 Championships. He escaped with severe burns to his face that left him hospitalized for a month; three of his good friends died. Numerous people came and went, asked how he was doing, and what happened; in answering, he re-lived the event over and over and over. At the time, few people even knew what PTSD was. Also at the time, “the saying in mountain culture was ‘You need to get over it, you need to man up.’” Schwartz said. “And I thought, I’m twenty, I’m indestructible. Thirty years ago, it was not okay to ask for help. It was considered weak.”
When he did speak to a couple mental health professionals, they didn’t understand Schwartz’s world of extreme sports or mountain culture, and he gained little from the sessions. Over the years—as he became a guide, learned to fly helicopters, and ultimately became co-owner of Powder Mountain Cat Skiing—he experienced classic PTSD symptoms like denial and certain visceral reactions of the body in particular situations.
Contrast that with the experience, around the same time, of Greg Miller, then a member of the North Shore Rescue team. On a training exercise in the Tantalus Range, a team member fell through a snow bridge into a crevasse. The team got him out, but he was severely injured and passed away en route to the hospital. Immediately after, the team’s leadership brought in an expert to perform a critical incident stress debriefing, which is designed to prevent or mitigate development of post-traumatic stress in responders immediately after highly stressful or traumatic events.
Today, Miller remembers that incident clearly. “I was down at the bottom of the crevasse for ten minutes, just me and him wrapped up in a stretcher. He was unconscious. And I had a conversation with him. I didn’t know if he could hear me. I remember that acutely, but I’m separated from the emotionality of that time.” Which is the goal with critical incident stress management (CISM), he says.
“You can think of it like this: you’ll never forget this traumatic event. But you won’t be traumatized by it.”
Miller is one of the trainers of the new Mountain Community CISM Team, part of a CISM program launched by HeliCat Canada and several other Canadian mountain associations to fill an increasingly acknowledged mental health need in the community. The team is made up of veterans, including Schwartz, from across the mountain community—guides, lodge owners, operation managers, ski patrollers, etc. To a one, the all-volunteer CISM team members, who underwent comprehensive training in September 2022, have experienced their own traumatic events in backcountry mountain situations.
That’s what makes a peer debriefing so effective in talking through a stressful event and defusing resulting stress symptoms, which can range from emotional and mental to physical and behavioral: all the people in the room understand what the others may be feeling and why, creating a deep level of trust that works toward healing.
The CISM team is available to any participating mountain association or operation. When a critical incident occurs—injury or death of a client or colleague in the field, a multi-casualty incident, body recovery, suicide of a colleague, or any significant event that can cause a stress response—the affected group calls the Mountain Community CISM dispatch number at 604-670-2772.
The dispatcher puts out a call to CISM team volunteers, and two available volunteers will travel in person to facilitate a debriefing session (or online, if necessary), where the group comes together in a supportive, entirely confidential environment to talk about their experiences, roles, and reactions, without blame. The CISM team offers ways to recognize the impact of a critical incident and reduce the stress associated with it. When appropriate, they’ll also direct individuals to mental health professionals for deeper interventions.
Anyone who’s worked in mountain professions for a period of time has seen the effects that unaddressed stress and trauma can have on individuals or a team. Laura Waterer, now avalanche forecaster at Whitewater Ski Resort and also on the new CISM team, recalls when one of her patrollers called her a few years ago to say they could no longer work; after a traumatic incident the season before, they were suffering from severe depression and moving home to seek treatment. As assistant patrol manager at the time, Waterer felt terrible that she hadn’t seen the trauma and reached out before it turned into PTSD. And last December, after a dramatic start to winter with several big injuries, an avalanche, and tree well fatalities, she saw her team wearing down mentally.
“Similar to a physical injury, we can get mental injuries that limit our ability to function. But it’s an injury we can’t see and people don’t really understand, so it gets shoved away,” she said. Bringing in the CISM team after critical incidents can help people deal with such mental injuries and reduce the high staff turnover the mountain world often sees.
In recommending the training to others as the CISM team grows, Waterer says, “You have to have a huge capacity for empathy, and patience, and also be okay addressing your own trauma.” Volunteers learn how to defuse and debrief groups that have experienced a critical incident, how to word certain things and interact with people, to recognize when someone needs additional help, and to lead the conversation from a personal place. For all that delving into past trauma during the training can be difficult, Waterer, Schwartz, and other peer volunteers know it will ultimately be rewarding.
“I want to help people so that a year down the road, they don’t come to me and say they can’t work anymore, they’re having suicidal thoughts, it’s gotten to that critical point because they weren’t supported the way they should have been.”
“If I can help just one person to have a healthier recovery, it’s worth it.”
Learn more about the Mountain Community CISM Program and how to contact the peer CISM team >>
