The mountains have become a treacherous place to be in these days as fluctuating temperatures and multi-layered snow packs raise the spectre of avalanches. The three recent fatalities remind us all that even the best equipped adventurists can be caught by their
unpredictability.
 Of all the avalanche areas I have read about the Rogers Pass has to be the deadliest, at least in the early days of the pass' development.  Avalanches or "the white executioner" as the Pass railway workers referred to them, were a constant hazard there and despite construction of 6.4 km. (4 miles) of massive snowsheds in 1885/86 the Selkirks and their ancient worn slopes took a terrible toll of men and equipment in the years to come. 
On January 30, 1899 an enormous avalanche swept through the old Rogers Pass train station killing the station master, his wife and two children, a night telegraph operator, a section foreman and two workmen in the nearby roundhouse. The woman was found with a rolling pin in one hand and pastry in the other, testimony to just how fast and powerful an avalanche can be.  Later that day a second slide at the summit smashed through a snowshed and killed a Italian workman inside.  These events were an ominous preview of worse disasters to come.  Some winters in Rogers Pass were relatively peaceful but not in 1910.  Hundreds of slides in late January and all through February continually blocked the tracks.
C.P.R. rotary plow crews and extra gangs of Japanese and Italian labourers were continually called out in the middle of the night to attack new slides and open up the tracks for the train traffic. 
In late February and early March the Selkirks were hammered by a storm that left two meters of snow at the Pass in nine days.  On the afternoon of March 4, 1910 a transcontinental passenger train waiting at Bear Creek station got word that a slide had come down off of Cheops Mountain opposite snowshed seventeen burying the tracks up to 20 feet deep.  A rotary plow was dispatched and cleared the bulk of it away and then the extra gang of 63 men, 32 of which were Japanese, went to work assisting the rotary with picks and shovels.  At 11:30 PM another monster slide roared down off of Avalanche Mountain (on the opposite side of the valley) over the plow train and workers, engulfing a quarter mile of track.  The second wave of white death buried the relief workers in the twenty- foot- deep trench they had just excavated.  
Watchman Joe Godfrey who had just called from his telephone shack that the first slide would be clear in a few hours discovered the second disaster and immediately ran to call it in.  
A relief train of 200 men, nurses and doctors was sent out from Revelstoke.  C.P.R. officials, afraid that a rotary plow would cut through bodies trapped in the slide called upon the nearby logging and mining camps and 600 men responded. By morning the enormity of the tragedy was apparent. The avalanche tore apart the locomotive and snow plow and tossed the plow onto the roof of the snowshed which was forty feet higher and sixty feet away from the line.
The findings of these men in the nearly 30 foot deep snow as they dug were macabre in the extreme.  Some men were found in the hard packed snow with their own picks and shovels still in their hands.