Thrill-seekers warned after deadly avalanches.

But with a deadly avalanche season already under way on the nation's slopes, many are asking if winter thrill-seekers are skating a fine line between adventure and foolishness.
"It just comes down to ignorance," said John Rogers, a sales manager with Wasatch Touring in Salt Lake City. "We have people come in day in and day out saying, 'I'm going to take some snow shoes and go out there,' and that just isn't smart."
Seven people have been killed in Utah avalanches so far this winter, more than any other year since the state started keeping records in 1951. The latest was a 27-year-old Idaho man whose body was recovered Sunday near Park City.
That same day, two snowboarders from Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., were killed in an avalanche while snowboarding in northern Idaho, the Shoshone County sheriff's office said.
The U.S. Forest Service had rated the avalanche danger in the Idaho area as moderate to considerable over the weekend. The National Weather Service posted a winter storm watch for the area for Monday.
Both the buried snowboarders were wearing locator radio beacons, equipment that outdoor experts say is critical. The proper gear and a bit of training, they say, is the nuts-and-bolts of surviving the backcountry.
"Anyone going out should at least have a beacon, a shovel and a probe. That's the bare minimum," said Rogers, who encourages his customers to take classes before venturing out and to check out tools to determine snow consistency and weak layers.
"We have our little stories about experienced backcountry skiers who have died," Rogers said, "and that usually convinces them to take an avalanche course."
In the last 10 years, the number of backcountry avalanche deaths annually in the United States has averaged 27.1, with a high of 35 reported for 2001-2002. In 2003-04, there were 23 fatalities nationwide, according to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center.
The Utah avalanche occurred in an out-of-bounds area near the resort that had been marked with a skull and crossbones and a blunt warning: "YOU CAN DIE." Authorities initially thought as many as five people were caught in the slide, but on Monday said probably only one person was trapped.
After such accidents, authorities face two problems: asking volunteers to risk their lives to recover victims, and spending thousands of dollars from already tight budgets on massive rescue efforts. Summit County officials Monday said they had not yet tried to assess the costs of the latest recovery.
Several Utah counties have considered passing laws that would recoup recovery costs from victims or their families, a move critics have said could hurt tourism and might cause some people to keep aimlessly wandering in the wilderness instead of calling -- and paying -- for their rescue.
Because authorities can't close off access to public land -- the site of Friday's slide sits in the Wasatch-Cache National Forest -- they can do little more than plead with backcountry enthusiasts to be prepared and know what they're dealing with.
But not everyone is easily coaxed into a classroom, and outdoor adventurists are getting bolder with better technology. Fat skis, well-designed snowboards and more powerful snowmobiles make it easier to tackle the riskiest slopes.
That technology, however, doesn't necessarily translate into a reduced rate of accidents.
Drew Hardesty, an avalanche forecaster with the Utah Avalanche Center, calls it "risk homeostasis" -- a theory that holds that whenever improvements in design reduce overall risk, a similar increase in risk-taking will occur so that the accident rate remains constant.
"It's like, with seat belts, people got into the same amount of wrecks," Hardesty said. "With proliferation of communications technologies, like cell phones, people are willing to go a little farther."