Answer: The Stettner Chockstone
Monthly Archive for July, 2008
Page 2 of 3
It would be ideal of avalanche education was like driver’s education, where you studied and learned about the activity before physically doing it. But alas it is not, and some skiers go their entire lives without taking a class. Bad idea! A lack of avalanche education should not be considered a backcountry badge of honor. To make matters worse, the longer a skier goes without taking a class, the less likely they are to do so. Someone who has been skiing for fifteen years is not going to be seen dead in an Avalanche Level 1 course.
- Pitting out. Like a college degree, the actual information you learn in an avalanche class is secondary to learning the terms and methodology.
Avalanche education has a constantly changing curriculum that is worth keeping up on. It is important to get in the habit of continuing education with avalanches, and the pros do it all the time through seminars, meetings and trade journals.
More than anything, classes force you to think about avalanches, practice safe skiing, familiarize yourself with your beacon and look critically at snow. Plus, they are often good places to meet partners with similar levels of enthusiasm and skills.
Avalanche education also helps to develop your vocabulary, which in turn is useful for deciphering avalanche forecast reports. Learning that a “westerly front produced significant cross-loading on mid elevation ridgelines” doesn’t help you much if you have no idea what they are talking about!
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Snow is stable roughly 95% of the time, but the remaining 5% is often the most desirable time to go skiing, like right after a big phat powder dump on a bluebird day. Avalanche safety takes years of practice and as much as anything else, it is about developing avalanche eyes for what will slide, how far it will go and what are your options. Ernie Buehler, a guide at the prestigious Canadian Mountain Holidays heliskiing operation has guided thousands of clients through millions of feet of notoriously tricky terrain for over 30 years and only been caught in one slide. How? Patience, responsible terrain selection and more patience still. You have to want to avoid avalanches.
- Taking the morale high ground on avalanches by staying above their starting zone. Thunder Mountain, Alaska Range, AK. 2003
Between new safety technology and changes in attitudes, people are venturing into more committing avalanche terrain than ever before. In times past, avalanche education was as simple as telling skiers to stay out of avalanche terrain, which is still taught in parts of the world. It’s not a bad idea, but also not reality. What was once considered insane terrain is now skied before breakfast without a second thought. Skiers are becoming much more educated about avalanche danger, but at the same time they are cutting the safety margins down to the bare minimums.
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This is one of those cases where the actual skiing was crap, but the location was so amazing it didn’t matter.
- Doug Byerly skiing the Orient Express on Denali (Mt. McKinley) around 10:30 at night. 1995
Having never skied above 11,000′, Mark Holbrook and I decided it would be a good idea to try skiing Denali (20,320′) for some reason. We made it to the 14,300′ camp (visible in the basin below right at the sun/shadow line) and within a day started up the Upper West Rib for an acclimatizing hike. We didn’t expect to get far, but were also joined by Doug Byerly, two climbers from Colorado and two Park Rangers who were looking for some lost Spanish climbers. Much to my surprise, we ended up making it a lot higher than I ever would have guessed. The Rangers and Mark turned back at around 17,000′ while Doug, the two Coloradans and I continued on.
Just as we were about to crest an area called “The Football Field” we came across the lost Spanish climbers huddled in their tent. It was a grim scene and all the wanted was “rescue, rescue” – no food, water or anything else. Doug and I decided to ski down the way we had come up while the two Colorado climbers were going to descend the Messner Couloir. The first group to the bottom would start the rescue.
Because we were on a mission, we didn’t have a lot of time to think about the skiing, snow quality or the fact that this face was named the Orient Express in honor of all of the Asians who had fallen to their death down it while trying to take a short-cut off the peak. But at one point, I was able to snap a few photos.
As a trivia note, Doug is skiing with $5 poles he got from a rental shop on the extended loan program. :)
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Avalanche safety is a blend of art and science. The artful part has to do with route finding and safe travel protocol, while the science aspect is concerned with testing the snowpack and tracking the weather. Both elements are important and ski mountaineers mix and match them according to their own personal interests.
- Professional Avalanche Forecaster, Bruce Tremper, applying some science to the snowpack.
The science aspect of avalanche safety is akin to a college degree; something that is good to have, vital to understand, an excellent background and looks good on your resume, but the information is usually forgotten as soon as you graduate unless you go into avalanche academia. Sticking to a ridgeline for an ascent is a far more practical way to avoid avalanches than calculating (T10-Tgnd) / (HS/10) =cTG. As Bruce Tremper says in his excellent book “Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain
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You know what an avalanche is, huh? It’s what’ll kill ya.
Gabe – Alta Ski PatrolThe avalanche path and the skier can never truly be friends. In the backcountry, the skier wants what the avalanche path has (steep & deep) but the avalanche could care less about the skier and always has the upper hand. It’s an uneasy relationship at best and it is important not to get too cozy with slide paths as they have a temperament of their own and should never be trusted.
- An early morning avalanche. At the time, avoiding getting swept down in the debris seemed like it was based on skill. 18 years later, I think it had as much to do with luck as anything! Photo by Doug Hall.
As a base concept, avalanches are best avoided to begin with as it’s rare to win a fight with even a small one. If you find yourself thinking that a slope will probably slide, but that it won’t go very big, or you’ll be able to outrun it, that is a classic Red Light. Once you are caught, all bets are off and anything can happen, including terrain traps, shallow burials and stepping down. Avalanches are difficult to accurately forecast in advance, yet painfully obvious in retrospect. For this reason, I prefer to focus on avalanche avoidance instead of prediction. Assume slopes are guilty until proven innocent and always watch your backside.
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“Weight, strength, cost. Pick any two.”
Joe Skrivan, Black Diamond Design Manager on designing outdoor products.Equipment design is a series of trade-offs between function, weight, strength and cost. Hitting any two of those is easy, any three is difficult and getting all four is what constitutes a “classic design.” A super-strong, lightweight set of ski poles which costs $500 isn’t a viable product, nor is a $20 pair which break on the first day. More than most industries, climbing and ski equipment favors a less-is-more, form-follows-function philosophy. The best designs are the ones where if you to remove any single part, no matter how tiny, the product won’t work. Given any two approaches to a design problem, the simpler one is almost always the best.
Lightweight, strong and very, very expensive! Two out of three is close enough for World Champion Stephan Brosse.
Changes in the sport will often drive new gear design, and new gear designs will at times change the sport. The desire to go light and fast drove a whole new generation of extremely lightweight equipment, but shaped skis changed the way people actually skied. It pays to keep an open mind about new gear, but at the same time avoid the sales hype and use equipment that actually works for you.
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StaightChuter.com now has a sleek, sexy new phpBB forum! It still needs some tweaking, but the basic structure is there and it appears to work. If you get a chance, please stop by and check it out. It supports avatars, photos, etc.. The forum can be accessed by clicking on the “FORUMS” tab on the main straightchuter.com page, or by going directly to it at:
To layout a tour, begin with the basics–where you are starting from and where you want to go. Next, mark out any passes that lay between these two points.
The first steps to laying out a day tour begin with a trailhead, an objective and any low or safe spots in between.
Next, identify (and avoid) any steep avalanche terrain. Going up is a slow process and it is important to minimize your time in the “strike zone.”
Identify steep avalanche terrain… and avoid it whenever possible.
Third, look for low, safe ground leading up to your high point.
Once the basics passes, dangerous spots and low angle terrain has been indentified, layout a route.
Forth, identify any areas where steep, exposed terrain is unavoidable and correlate these areas with your avalanche observations. If the snow seems unstable, find a safer route up the Peak du Jour, or modify your plans.
Identify trouble spots – almost every tour has a few of them and they are where almost all accident happen.
Once you have marked out these options, creating a day tour is a matter of connecting the dots between trailheads, valleys, passes and summits. This is a simplified version of the process, but it is a start. From here, you need to “fact check” your route to see if the terrain you’ve chosen is skiable, or a huge cliff. This is done by measuring the contour lines, or looking at photos. Postcards are often some of the best aerial photos available and not only that, they are cheap, travel well and you can mail them when you are done.
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Most day trips in North America are simple enough to forego detailed trip planning. If it doesn’t work out, well, you can always just follow your skin track back to the trailhead. Guidebooks and local knowledge are the best navigation tools out there, as someone has already made all of the mistakes for you. If there is a guidebook to an area, use it! That said, they can be notoriously inaccurate (like the one I wrote...) as the author may be so familiar with the terrain that they focus on minute details and leave out the large ones.
Simplicity is part of the beauty of day tours – it’s as easy as point n’ chute like the photo above. Derek Weiss pointing out the Cortex Couloir, Great Basin, Nevada.
Some areas have a strong and misguided ethic of not reporting descents, discouraging visitors, giving out false information and harassing any attempts at a guidebook. These regions are generally not nearly as good as the locals seem to think they are and it’s their loss. What goes around, comes around.
On longer tours or multi day trips, the penalty for poor planning is getting lost, benighted or suffering through poor terrain. Trip planning is not hard, but it does take time, especially to do it correctly. Maps and photographs are the basic tools of the trade and a good place to start.
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