What I Learned in Avalanche School (2019)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
When I read it last year, I shared it with some experienced friends. Their consensus was similar, and we were grateful for it. It's often difficult to communicate the lengths we go to keep ourselves safe in avalanche terrain to folks unfamiliar, and this article captures the nuance well.
Looking at the paper, it talks about people choosing to take risks (vs the education changing their behavior):
It appears that formal avalanche education did not make victims in this study less likely to be in accidents. Across all levels of avalanche training, overall exposure scores remained about the same, suggesting that these individuals were in the business of trading off the risks of being in avalanche terrain with the perceived benefits of engaging in their chosen activity. In other words, these victims were apparently using their training to access avalanche terrain during dangerous conditions so they could more fully enjoy their sports. For these people, courses aimed avoiding avalanche hazard would have little utility, and would probably not affect fatality rates in this population significantly. This group would benefit most from courses that provided risk management tools for balancing hazard exposure with recreational objectives. A sobering implication is that such courses might be more successful at extending students’ mobility in avalanche terrain than at reducing the total number of accidents.
PDF at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264877015_Heuristic...
And I'm perhaps being tedious, but safety is a topic where it pays to think and state things clearly.
So for instance, the instructor, rather than joking (if that is what they are doing), should state that the education often does not result in a reduction of accidents. If it is actually the case that taking the course increases accidents, they should work to revise the material.
It’s kind of like the ‘joke’ that goes:
“How do you become the best climber in the world? Become the second best and wait for the best to die.”
It isn’t funny because if you hang out at the ACC clubhouse and our official pub in Canmore often enough, you will meet some of the best climbers on earth. And there is no feeling quite like finding out that an amazing climber you had pints with the year before was swept off a mountain and died.
It’s not really a joke. It’s closer to a dark sense of near humour. But if you’re experienced enough outside to gain from more advanced survival courses, you know how dangerous your hobby is and you’re presumably intelligent enough to know that the only way to eliminate risk is to stay in town. Most of the people in my courses read incident reports as avidly as I do. We all know the commonalities and know that outdoor enthusiasts like us match the profile of the ‘typical victim’.
I don’t know if that helps because it’s a very common mindset. It’s not really a joke just more an admission that we go places that are incredibly efficient at killing us.
And I'll still repeat myself. Someone leading a safety activity should avoid making misleading statements, regardless of whether they are serious, humorous, darkly humorous, or whatever.
Having read the paper a bit, it seems likely that people choosing to take a safety class are at a point in their activities where the familiarity and consistency heuristics are a bigger pitfall than an awareness of dangerous conditions. Of course I don't know this, my first comment is posed a question for a reason.
Heck, my wilderness survival course increased my risk of dying outside. That’s true both because of inherent risk in what we do and our entire culture. It’s dark but it isn’t misleading.
Ultimately, good outdoor leaders equip you with both skill and respect for the outdoors. Knowledge comes with responsibility.
> The problem — the primary human problem — is that people are susceptible, prideful, bullheaded, egotistic, dumbstruck and lazy. Add to this doomed slurry a little avalanche training (or what used to qualify as avalanche training, and its focus on analyzing snowpack), and people make terrible decisions with greater frequency and confidence.
Sounds like a little knowledge is dangerous
"There are old climbers and there are bold climbers but there are no old bold climbers."
That's the point.
It's very easy to travel through the snow without exposing yourself to any avalanche risk: just stay away from snow that's steep enough to avalanche. If you're going "hiking on skis", that's all you need to know.
It's not quite so easy if you want to go climbing, but it isn't that hard. If an avalanche sweeps you off the mountain, your immediate problem is falling off a mountain. Being caught in an avalanche is a comparatively minor issue. So you're going to be conservative: if any kind of subtle analysis is called for, you stay in the hut, and wait until the snow is obviously stable. In climbing season, that will happen soon enough.
What's tricky is going skiing. In winter, either you're willing to take some calculated risks with avalanches, or you'll be limited to pretty boring skiing. People don't do avalanche courses to be safe (you can do that without a course). They do them to take more risks, skiing in less obviously safe conditions, and get away with it. Which is all good, provided that you're honest about what you're doing.
Maybe a good comparison is a pilot getting an instrument rating. The safest option will always be to stay on the ground in bad weather. The reason they'd get the rating is to travel reliably, but less safely, by flying through bad weather when the rewards justify the risks.
Approaches for winter day climbs involve skiing or snowshoeing. The calculus of avalanche risk is part of the game for climbers too else, as you put it, we'd also be limited to some pretty boring climbing.
Recently while clearing some snow off of a roof, I was really surprised at how much the density and consistency of snow can change after dropping from a 10 ft roof. From something light and fluffy to something that a buried person could scarcely wiggle a toe in.
That one hits close to home. When I was about 20 yo my friend and I were almost killed in an avalanche.
It was an early spring slab climb, after a hard New England winter. Sunny, blue skies, unseasonably warm. As we hiked up to the mountain we had to traverse multiple debris fields with downed trees and burried approach trails. We finally found a clear area under a route, and started up. We were on our second pitch, first hanging belay when we heard it coming. Thankfully the edge missed us by maybe 20 feet. A tree dragged by the snow almost nailed my partner who was on lead. I got hit with a spattering of snow, and rocks, and ice, giving my helmet a good ring.
It's impossible to fully describe what came down the mountain. It's like standing on the highway shoulder as a tractor trailer whips by, but x100. It's loud, and fast, but also kinda slow because it just keeps coming down the mountain.
We left gear on the wall, and simultaneously repelled down as fast as we could. Made it out without a scratch.
Thing is, we should have never been out there. We were familiar with the risks, but after a long winter, with spring having stopped all the snow/ice sports, we were antsy to get out and climb. We walked through multiple debris fields looking for that "safe" route. We both knew better, but we fed off each other's energy and ended up taking a risk that we shouldn't have.
Yet, that same mentality also pushed us into some of the most spectacular outdoor moments in my life. They mention it in the article, but there is this idea that it's exceeding your limits recklessly is what gets you killed. But Backcountry sports are all about pushing your limits to do something fantastic that is fundamentally unsafe. The risk is inherent to the experience.
I think most serious rock climbers, base jumpers, mountaineering, big wave surfer, wing suit, etc. enthusiasts understand this. Every serious climber I've ever met has personally known someone who has either been terribly injured or killed. You can accept and/or mitigate the risk in these sports, but it's always going to be impossible to transfer.
As I've gotten older, I've made the choice to avoid that risk by leaving behind most of those sports. I'm torn how I'll react if my children decide to pick up these hobbies.
“When testing snow, Ryan said, you should never look for proof of stability. With stability the goal, you’re testing for permission to do what you want to do. Instead, you should test the snow for proof of instability. You should look and look and look until you find it.”
I learned somewhat similar risk analysis as a student pilot. When on your final approach to landing, descending through 500 feet, then 100, then 10, you should always be on a hair trigger, spring-loaded to hit the throttle, abort the landing, and go around. If you’re doing it right, actually making the landing should almost be a surprise!
Then again, my flight instructor said a Piper J-3 Cub is best to learn in, because “it goes just barely fast enough to kill you.”
The danger AFTER an avalanche is near zero. There are very rarely second avalanches in the same place, their whole mechanism for sliding is more or less and all or nothing scenario.
After an avalanche, the snow is extremely dense and compacted this is part of the problem looking for survivors. It’s hard to dig, you aren’t doing it with hands, it’s not fluffy snow, it’s ice the moment it stops moving.
It’s a pain in the ass to look for people in an avi, but it’s not typically some life risking scenario for the people on the correct side of the snow.
I live in Switzerland where we have a ridiculous number of avalanche fatalities, which means our rescuers are exposed to mountain risk when they should be sitting back at base waiting for a call to a road traffic accident, or a pediatric inter-hospital transfer, or something actually worth risking their lives for. Off piste skiers who put others at risk are a disgrace, and if my children do it, I will consider my education of them a failure.
(An avalanche that arrives onto a maintained ski slope is a different story. Skiers and ski area operators have decided to make the effort, collectively, to mitigate the risks in a scalable manner, and that's fine.)
Do you think people who sign up to work for mountain rescue, in Switzerland, secretly wish for a life of sitting around and occasionally driving an ambulance to the next town? Boring jobs are also available... but some people want to be out there, summer and winter, with teamwork, helicopters & adrenaline.
It seems that your qualms with "off-piste" skiing are primarily as a result of an uneducated public, unable to make these risk-management decisions.
I can certainly understand that frustration. But, wouldn't you agree that the solution is in education, rather than judgement?
I choose not to ski backcountry but have nothing against people who do. They’re athletes doing their thing. But I met a couple of backcountry snowmobilers my last time at the ACC hostel in Canmore and I have never heard such stupidity in my life. I was just about as angry as you are in these comments! :)