Avalanche, A Life Saved from Trent Meisenheimer on Vimeo.

I thought one of the more educational moments in this video was that when you first see the victim go down, it doesn’t seem that bad.  The avalanche doesn’t look that large and from a distance you have a fairly good idea of where the victim might be.  All of this suddenly changes when the rescuer arrives on the debris pile and you suddenly lose all sense of where the person might be and simultaneously realize how large and deep the avalanche is. Even with 4-6 fit people digging as fast as they could, they barely saved the victims life and he was “only” buried about 4′ deep.
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There’s a joke among sailors concerning seasickness that’s usually told as the victim is puking over the railing:

Q:  Do you know the only proven cure for seasickness?
A:  Lie down in the shade of a palm tree.

The point of the joke is that the only guaranteed way to prevent seasickness is to remove yourself from the churning environment, which is the same with avalanches. The punchline for the avalanche version of this joke might be “Sit in the day lodge and drink hot chocolate.” but even day lodges have been hit. If it is steep enough to turn on, in just the perfectly wrong conditions, it is steep enough to avalanche. Avalanches have killed people in some of the most bizarre circumstances imaginable including tiny road cuts, low angle slopes, rock hard snow, roofalanches and everything in-between.  A friend triggered a slide and went for a ride on the last remaining patch of snow in the middle of a talus slope in August.  Entire mogul fields have ripped out. When we triggered the dramatic avalanche in the movie “Steep” I would have called the avalanche danger “Low” or “Below Low” if such a category existed.

A cruel aspect of avalanche accidents is that they are always so obvious in retrospect. After the fact you can measure the angle, find the bed surface, identify the weak layer, see the tracks leading into them and usually get a first hand account from a survivor about exactly what happened. But beforehand, due to spatial variability and test interpretation, you could dig pits to the ground every 100′ and still not be 100% certain. You also wouldn’t get very far.

This avalanche took place inbounds at a ski resort right in the middle of a ski mountaineering race. It took out a cat track full of skiers and spectators, but luckily nobody was hurt.

Ruedi Beglinger, who has a near perfect safety record as a guide in high consequence terrain described the illusion of safety as “Two parallel lines which look like they converge in the distance, but never really do.” There will always be the risk of avalanche danger, and if you spend 1,000 days in the mountains, even 1:1000 odds means that your number will come up. It might be the first day, or it might be the last. If you ski enough it will eventually happen, and the best way to stack the odds in your favor is to constantly be on the alert for avalanche danger and don’t get lazy.
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Bro’ing down in the mountains with your buddies is a big part of what makes backcountry skiing so fun. There’s an intensity that comes from trusting your friends to rescue you if things go wrong (and vice versa) that leads to strong relationships, which may, or may not extend beyond the mountains. It’s common to exchange dialog along the lines of “I’m okay with skiing this. Are you?” while skiing with your partners, but it actually extends way beyond this circle.

After spending hours on the skin track with a buddy and hearing about his family and friends, the worst place to actually meet them in person for the first time is at his funeral. “Oh, you’re Steve’s mom. He talked about you all the time. It’s great to finally meet you. I’m so sorry.” At that point skiing looks incredibly stupid and you’d do just about anything to turn the clock back.

The aftermath of a dual fatality accident.  Avalanches happen quickly, but their effects last a lifetime.

Even if a certain amount of risk is acceptable between you and your partner(s), think outside of that circle and consider the bigger picture of family and friends. If you truly care about your brohams, you’ll care about their families as well, who may not be okay with the idea of dying doing what you love.

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Skiing big, exposed, scary lines is incredibly addictive, satisfying and thrilling, but the real crux to doing them is in the timing. Knowing where to go is easy – knowing when to go is much harder. Avoiding steep lines for an entire season took a different mindset, but the challenge aspect of it was made up for by sniffing out long tours where you never got on terrain over 30 degrees. It was a fun challenge, but in a very different way than the standard issue challenge of steep skiing.

Skiing Challenge 101 – Find a big, high, steep, exposed slope and go ski it. Sometimes finding an alternative to this can be even harder.  Fred Marmsater skiing the Sultana Ridge in Alaska.

It’s a variation on the “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade” adage, but in the case of skiing, when life gives you a shitty snowpack, take up ski mountaineering racing, kiting, low angle farming, long distance touring or something less exposed. There’s plenty of challenge, just in a different way.

Skiing challenges with low avalanche danger.
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After going on a financial disaster reading bender for the last three years, I started noticing a lot of similarities between investors and skiers:

• Risk versus Reward
• Smart people getting whacked
• Dumb people getting lucky
• Greed
• Herd instinct
• Competition
• Tons of underlying information available.

Perhaps the biggest similarity is that both financial markets and snowpacks are too complex and too connected to ever be able to forecast them with 100% accuracy. There will always be “one-in-a-million” events in both. Where they do differ is in the end result of getting it wrong – instead of getting bailed out and emerging richer than ever, with avalanches you die. It’s quite unfair.

Noah and Lloyd – aside from a few hundred million dollars, not really so different.

With this in mind, it is a good idea to always hedge your avalanche bets. The best way to do this is to develop excellent safe travel protocol (one at a time, spread out, don’t stop in run out zones, etc.) until they become ingrained habit. Safe travel habits have saved me many times that I know of, and many, many more that I don’t.

The elusive fat-tailed black swan. This slide took place during a backcountry safety class when 4-5 avalanche experts (including me) swore on a stack of AMGA Handbooks that you couldn’t buy an avalanche on that day.

Also, be conscious of being too greedy. If you’ve skied a bunch of great lines in a day, don’t push that dicey looking last one.  Look at skiing as a lifelong investment, not a get rich quick scheme.
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Deciding to ski an avalanche slope based on gut instincts alone is a bad habit to get into, but there is one occasion when you definitely should trust your avalanche instincts: when they are telling you NOT to do it. This is akin to Spiderman’s spidey senses which buzz when danger is imminent, but are more like avalanche senses. If it is a green light day, low danger, nice slope, etc., and something just doesn’t feel right, it is worth listening to.

The one that got away…  There was something about this chute that seemed weird to me, so instead of skiing it I took a photo and went elsewhere.

This phenomenon of something just seeming off is described in Malcom Gladwell’s book entitled “Blink” where among other examples, he details antiquities experts who recognize a fake statue at a glance. Gladwell describes this process as “thin-slice” filtering which helps focus in on the few factors that matter when you are overwhelmed with variables. In terms of snowpack, this could be anything from the surface texture, the way a certain slope is shaded, an odd looking lump or anything else that subconsciously sets off an alarm.

It is a fine line between confidence and stupidity, but if there is some nagging feeling, come back another day when it isn’t there.
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If you’ve spent time skiing in the Wasatch Mountains, you’ve most likely crossed tracks with Bob Athey, aka The Wizard of the Wasatch. Bob has excellent snow science skills and observations, but more than that he is the grand master of avalanche avoidance through terrain management/route finding. After decades of skiing here, he not only knows every little ridge and pass, but he also knows how and when to connect them all up. Like rats supposedly being the only survivors of a nuclear war, when avalanche conditions are high or extreme, Bob is still out scurrying around in the mountains dodging the apocalypse.

A large part of this comes from being intimately familiar with the terrain, but the basics apply anywhere; stick to the high ground, watch out for run-out zones, move from safe-spot to safe-spot, work the ridgelines, watch your aspects and make the most of any naturally protected areas.

Another component of this is to not get lazy. I was once trading off trail breaking with a friend who finished the climb by wrapping around a peak and cutting directly through a fat, wind loaded pillow right in the starting zone. It didn’t slide on us, but when I asked him why he went that way instead of taking the longer and safer route up the ridgeline, he said “I was so f*cking tired that I just didn’t care.” Like Wizards and rats, you have to care.

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The late, great Doug Coombs was well known for skiing bold lines, but he also had a lesser known strategy for avalanche avoidance. One day when we were talking about steep skiing and the importance of easing into a new area, he said “I’m a nibbler. I like to nibble around the edges first to get a feel for things.”

The idea with nibbling is to avoid center-punching the biggest line right off the bat and instead work your way up to them by skiing smaller, peripheral lines first. Choose lines that stick close to ridges and have lower avalanche consequences to help get a feel for the snow. In places like Alaska, skiing a diagonal line nibbling line first serves the dual purpose of both cutting sluff curtains and keeping you out of the major strike zone.

In the above photo, the green lines represent primary “nibble” options if you are thinking of eventually skiing some of the bigger lines, as shown in red.
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These traumatic experiences gave me an appreciation for Lou Dawson’s feat of skiing all 54 of Colorado’s 14’ers in such a notoriously treacherous snowpack. Coming from the intermountain snowpack of the Wasatch, I mentioned to Lou that at times he must have had to wait weeks, or even months for conditions to stabilize, to which he replied “Oh yeah, sometimes it lasts all season and you can’t ski anything big.”

This idea of persistent instabilities was a revelation to me as we seldom get that in the Wasatch, and in areas with maritime snowpacks (Pacific Northwest, California, Patagonia, etc.), locals often get away with invoking the “24 Hour Rule” – wait 24 hours after the storm and it is good to go.

Persistent instabilities are akin to building a skyscraper on a sand foundation. Just because it hasn’t fallen over yet doesn’t mean that it is therefore stable, and until something drastic happens (gushing rain, prolonged heat) there is no reason for it to miraculously heal. The moral of the story is to be extra careful when traveling to new snow climates and that deep instabilities deserve deep respect, even if it means waiting an entire year.

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Most skiers are familiar with the concept of owning a quiver, or variety of skis.  Quivers often include powder skis, rock skis, fatties, all-around, racing, resort, tele, twin tips, etc..  The idea is to have the correct ski for the ever changing conditions.

This same concept applies to avalanche avoidance, except instead of a quiver of skis, it is a quiver of partners for different conditions.  I have some friends who I know not to call if the project du jour involves anything less than a short approach, 45+ degree skiing and a rappel. Others are into expedition skiing, long approaches and/or low odds of success.  Others are content to take a few safe, fun runs and call it good. Some are all around partners.

Skiing steep lines requires partners who are comfortable with a certain amount of risk, but heading out on a considerable or high danger day with a partner who is hard-wired to only ski the steeps is a recipe for disaster. Even if you make a Scouts Honor pledge at the start of the day to be mellow, each run seems to notch it up a bit, until, voila, you trigger a slide.

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