When Craig Gordon got off the ski lift in Utah in 1979, he saw ski patrollers doing avalanche work.

“I realized that my fate was sealed,” he remembered. “I saw a few ski patrolmen throwing bombs (avalanche mitigation) and skiing powder. And I thought, ‘I’m coming back to do that.’”

It was a moment that set his life in the direction to be one of the most respected avalanche forecast experts in the country.

Gordon, now 58, had been on LBI every summer since 1964 when he was 2 years old and then his family started splitting…