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Tourist avalanche deaths: Are visitors uninformed about mountain dangers?

The avalanche happened on Mount Fairview in Lake Louise, Alta., as seen in the background.

The avalanche deaths of a Montreal man and his young son while tobogganing near Chateau Lake Louise resort in the Alberta Rockies underscores a seemingly insoluble problem of keeping visitors to Canada's backcountry safe.

On the one hand, we want tourists and our fellow Canadians to enjoy the unsurpassed beauty of our wilderness. But we don't want it to kill them, something it frequently does.

Experts have been struggling for years to raise awareness and warn people not to take the risks lightly. Yet every year the roster of people grows of those who pay with their lives for enjoying the outdoors.

Gabriel Mironov and his 11-year-old son, Oliver, were staying at the 125-year-old mountain resort when they apparently rented a toboggan at the hotel on March 9 and set off to have some fun. No one realized anything was wrong until they missed their March 14 checkout.

A search discovered their bodies Saturday, buried in the snow in an infrequently used area along the lakeshore, CBC News reported.

"We do have a lot of users that go for a walk or travel up and down the right hand side," Bill Hunt, a resource conservation manager with Parks Canada told CBC News. "These folks had wandered over to the left hand side of the lake under some fairly steep slopes."

It's not clear what information the pair had about the avalanche danger at the time but it's easy to think a tourist would assume an area within sight of the long-established hotel would be safe.

But the Mironovs were among four tourist avalanche fatalities that week. Two tourists from Calgary and Edmonton snowshoeing at a small lake near the resort died March 8, the day before the Mironovs disappeared.

The Calgary Herald reported the two were among a group, all originally from Spain but living in Canada, that was hit by an afternoon slide. None were carrying avalanche gear and the survivors were forced to use their hands and snowshoe poles to dig out those who were buried.

[ Related: Father and son killed in avalanche on the shores of Lake Louise ]

"Once again, it appears tourists may have been lulled into a sense of false security by the proximity to the hotel, and the number of people doing the same," Calgary Sun columnist Michael Platt wrote Monday.

"And once again, despite a high avalanche threat, there were no signs telling novice visitors to beware."

Avalanches have claimed almost 200 lives in Canada since 2000, the vast majority in the B.C. and Alberta mountains, according to data from the Canadian Avalanche Centre.

A large number were snowmobilers often familiar with the terrain where they died, though some were tourists, like the Saskatchewan man killed last week while snowmobiling near Blue River, B.C.

The worst single incident occurred in 2008, when eight snowmobilers were killed at Harvey Pass, near Fernie, B.C. They were among a group of 11 who were high-marking – seeing who could get their machine furthest up the slow – when they were hit by successive slides. The group was equipped with avalanche rescue gear but only three survived.

The year 2003 was a particularly deadly one. Seven Calgary high-school students died on a trail near Rogers Pass, B.C., while back-country skiing on a school excursion. Just a week before, seven other back-country skiers died in a slide on nearby Tumbledown Mountain.

[ Related: Saskatchewan man, 36, dead after B.C. avalanche ]

In all, 29 people were killed in avalanches that winter, 25 in B.C., Metro noted last year in a look back at the tragedies.

The snowy carnage led Parks Canada and other backcountry stakeholders to drastically revise avalanche public awareness and warning systems. But people still die, seemingly for a want of information.

The Sun's Platt wrote that the Lake Louise deaths likely will trigger a fresh push for public education, especially ensuring hotel guests are aware of potential danger.

But how to get it into visitors' heads that their proximity to civilization should not lull them into a false sense of security? It is real wilderness and it can kill you.

I live in Vancouver, where North Shore Search and Rescue volunteers regularly pluck skiers – and in the summer, hikers – from dangerous cliffs and snowy gullies after they've skied out of bounds on the slopes overlooking Vancouver, or gone off a marked hiking trail.

Most of the rescues end happily, with chagrined visitors admitting they didn't know the terrain was so dangerous. But some end badly, like the case of British tourist Tom Billings, who vanished after apparently going for a day hike, alone and unequipped, on the North Shore mountains last December.

Billings likely died within sight of Vancouver's city lights.