ASPEN, Colo.—You could say Aspenite John Brennan’s business is booming, and he’s having a blast doing it.
The veteran Snowmass ski patroller recently sold his 10th “avalauncher” to the Colorado Department of Transportation to expand its avalanche mitigation program in the state’s southern mountains.
An avalauncher is a two-chambered compressed-gas cannon used for avalanche control work, mostly by ski areas, mines and highway departments. It shoots projectiles into hard-to-reach areas to test slope stability, up to 2,000 meters away. The machines themselves are relatively simple—the first one made in the 1960s was modeled after a baseball pitching machine—but their dynamics historically haven’t been well understood or even studied much, until recently.
This is not the typical kind of side business most seasonal workers might get involved in, but Brennan, who works all day in the winter on the ski mountain, serves as owner, operator, CEO and administrative assistant of Avalanche Mitigation Services, which he incorporated in June 2005. It takes about a month—if everything goes smoothly—to produce one of the custom-made 300-pound guns, including testing that often involves driving far out into the desert to do.
“All the things I’ve done in my adult life led me to this,” said Brennan, explaining how he got into the business of producing avalaunchers.
Brennan was snow safety director at Snowmass for a while, dealing with explosives day to day, and was instrumental in opening some of the ski area’s extreme terrain. It was under his watch that the Colorado Freeride Series came to Snowmass, highlighting rarely skiable lines in places like the Burn Cliffs and off the Hanging Valley Headwall.
Things started rolling after Brennan’s son was born in 2004, when he wrote and published a paper about the history of the avalauncher. After the paper’s publication, Brennan realized he had several ideas on how he could make a better avalauncher—so he set about to do so.
Less than four years after completing his first avalauncher, Brennan’s clients include Sun Valley ski area in Idaho, Mount Bachelor in Oregon, the Kensington gold mine in Alaska and the Idaho Department of Transportation. Arapahoe Basin ski area bought one of Brennan’s Falcon GT avalaunchers to help with its expansion into Montezuma Basin in the 2008-2009 ski season.
Brennan says he’s taken some “common seat-of-the-pants thoughts” to figure out things like how long the barrel should be and how much pressure the chamber should have. And recently, he’s brought on two consultants with deep local roots and very pertinent expertise.
For engineering expertise, Brennan hired Neal Beidleman, a mechanical engineer who has worked in the aerospace industry. Beidleman, also a respected mountaineering guide and avid skier, turned some hand-drawn sketches of Brennan’s into a full-fledged engineering book of designs, which means Brennan can simply bring the designs into a machine shop and have the gun made and assembled to those specs. Beidleman’s designs also helped Brennan produce a version that’s certified by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Beidleman believes that the market for avalaunchers, while small, can grow as the machines get refined and various industries realize the safety and timesaving benefits of using them. And Brennan’s work is advancing that concept.
“He’s taken a garage-type product, a giant potato launcher, and made it a world-class avalauncher,” said Beidleman. “The market’s not like iPhones or anything, but as they become really understood and more people realize they need to do avalanche mitigation,” more sales can be made. Beidleman gave as an example European mountain villages that are often hit by avalanches.
Last summer, Brennan brought on applied physicist Hal Hartman as another consultant. Hartman’s father helped develop Snowmass Ski Area, and the younger Hartman started the snow safety program there. Hartman does the testing of each avalauncher, in particular how its projectile and ballistics work. Hartman has a pressure transmitter that takes 2,000 measurements per second, which means it provides every detail of the conditions in the barrel.
“I don’t know of anyone doing this kind of testing,” said Hartman. “We understand how it works from the beginning to when the projectile comes out.”
The main thing Brennan’s team has done with its extra work, said Hartman, “is busted a lot of myths.”
Hartman’s testing validated the physics and fluid dynamics of the machine, and broke the myth that a certain length barrel is necessary. So now Brennan is able to shorten his barrels from 13.5 feet to 10 feet, a move that will potentially save his clients some money.
Two of Brennan’s clients—at CDOT and A-Basin—affirm that his avalauncher improves on models past. They also like having someone local to call on for questions, advice and technical support, all of which Brennan does for free.
“John’s price beat all of (the competitors’) out and the way he built the gun had all the requirements we need in an avalauncher,” said Ray Mumford, avalanche coordinator for CDOT’s Region 1, which includes Loveland and Berthoud passes as well as areas along I-70.
CDOT has identified more than 522 known avalanche paths in the state and crews regularly monitor and/or control 278 of those,said CDOT spokeswoman Nancy Shanks. The agency’s avalanche mitigation program triggered 189 avalanches and handled 178 more in the 2008-2009 winter season—resulting in 719 hours of road closures.
An avalauncher is ideal on short-range avalanche paths where CDOT can’t use artillery, said Mumford. And it’s a tool that ultimately helps minimize closures of high mountain passes due to avalanche danger.
A-Basin snow safety director Leif Eric Borgeson, who has known Brennan for years through the “tight fraternity” of ski patrol, said that in addition to the improvements he’s made, and the price, “I appreciate that he didn’t think it would be the next gadget to make him rich. His purposes are a little more noble than that.”
In the case of Montezuma Bowl, patrol was faced with an area that, like Highland Bowl, needed to be controlled with explosives, said Borgeson. And the way the 400-acre bowl is shaped, it would have been nearly impossible to control with hand-thrown explosives. An avalauncher allows patrol to send the charges midway down the avalanche paths, where they need to be, and it saves a lot of hours, he said.
“Like other ski areas in Colorado, we’re trying to open more and more above-treeline, adventurous terrain,” said Borgeson. “Ski areas are pushing the boundaries. (The avalauncher) made it easier to open Montezuma Bowl.”
Borgeson uses three different avalaunchers at A-Basin, from the three different eras of the cannon. It’s nice to be able to pick up the phone anytime and talk to Brennan about projectiles, he said, and have a short drive to his shop for any other needs.
On the other hand, what Brennan does makes him an interesting neighbor in a small town. Although he tests his machines far away from civilization, he keeps a workshop at his home in an Aspen neighborhood.
“My kids know what a projectile is and they chase each other around with it,” said Brennan.
