​Some observations from public!
Thanks @cappo.ski.tweedie for the balcony report!
We found similar results but 3 buried layers of surface hoar and slightly deeper snow.

1. Wind
"Wind is the builder of avalanches". Wind transports large amounts of snow and because wind destroys and reduces snowflakes while moving, it's the cause of so-called 'wind-blown snow'. Wind is not good. If the wind is strong or has been strong over the past few days, there is an increased risk avalanche risk.

2. Corniche
Large corniches are a clear indication the wind was strong. A corniche is always away from the wind (Lee) and gives you an idea of the prevailing wind direction. Paradoxically, the first fracture rarely arises directly on or just behind the corniche. There is so much snow here that the chance that you hit a weak layer is very small. It is just a few to tens of meters below it where it becomes dangerous, because the snow cover there is usually slightly thinner and you hit the weak layer more easily. 

3. Rocky faces
Wind stills arise in the vicinity of rocky faces due to the ruggedness of the terrain. You will always find wind-drifted snow near rocky faces (also smaller rocky faces) and especially below rocky faces. And that means an increased avalanche risk. Descend above a rocky face? An avalanche can throw you off with all its consequences. Take wind-blown snow and terrain traps into account!

4. Loose snow avalanche
A loose snow avalanche starts at one point and then takes the form of a cone. A snowflake decides to roll down (often triggered by your skis or snowboard) and a chain reaction takes place. A loose snow avalanche is the ultimate example of the snowball effect. The loose snow avalanche is a variant that is generally not as dangerous for freeriders, but should not be underestimated. The biggest danger of loose snow avalanches is that you get out of balance and possibly slide off a cliff that's too big to huck.

5. The sun
The direct radiation of the sun ensures that the snow cover can set itself after a period of time, which makes the snow cover stronger. But the sun does not reach every part of the mountain. Especially in the middle of winter the sun is so low that it does not shine directly on many faces. Where the sun can not reach the mountain it remains cold and weak layers in the snow cover can stick around for months. On the other hand, the sun can provide a crusty layer that can serve as a sliding layer after new snowfall.

6. Surface hoar
Surface hoar doesn't fall down from the sky, but is created on the snow cover itself and consists of large crystals, often in the form of feathers, wedges or some kind of icy flakes. Surface hoar is therefore not a form of precipitation, but rather a consequence of a cloudless sky during the night. Surface hoar itself is not dangerous, just like hail and Graupel, when it forms the top layer. It immediately becomes dangerous when a new layer of fresh snow falls on top of it. The layer with surface hoar is no longer visible. Layers with surface hoar are extremely weak and are a typical sliding layer for an avalanche. The biggest problem with a thick layer of snowed in surface hoar is that it can take weeks and sometimes months before the situation is stabilised.

7. Riding tactics
Before you ride down, it is good to determine the safe zones on the face. Safe zones are useful so that you can keep an eye on each other. A good riding tactic prevents you (and the whole group) from getting into trouble.

8. Slope angle
The ideal slope angle at which avalanches come down is 38 degrees steep. In any case, most avalanches take place on slopes between 20 and 55 degrees. Those slopes are perfect to ride. These are the types of slopes in which we cause the deadly avalanches ourselves in 90% of the cases.

9. Slab avalanches
Small slab avalanches can cause the snow cover to destabilise even more. Small cracks can continue to move invisibly and trigger large(r) slab avalanches.

10. Terrain traps
Terrain traps, or the 'traps' plotted by the terrain are those places on the mountain where you 'fall into the trap'. If you come in an avalanche and it comes across a terrain trap or when an avalanche ends up in such a terrain trap, then the chance of survival is considerably lower because the snow piles up high.

11. Avalanche gullies
Closed forests in which white channels flow down. These openings in the forest are a direct danger to you. These paths are not 'gladed' so that you can go skiing or boarding. These are the paths of spontaneous avalanches that descend every now and then. Small, young, widespread trees, especially those with branches that only grow downhill, are a typical sign that avalanches are regularly coming down here.

12. Save your buddies after an avalanche? Practice, practice, practice
Avalanches that end up on flat sections are made of hard chunks make it difficult to carry out a rescue. It's simple: practice, practice, practice!


13. Convex slopes
The snow cover is often not so coherent on a convex slope, also called a rollover. The combination of gravity - to pull the snow down - in combination with the curvature of the slope ensures that we regularly see avalanches at the point where the convex is the strongest.
​

She got slammed by an avalanche set off above her by an anonymous skier (who skied away...) It was two weeks ago on the first powder day (80cm & high winds) after a month and a half of sunshine - so everyone was pretty excited, to put it mildly.
Thankfully She is safe (as is her friend), thanks to the rescuers (gopro footage) who were able to get to her so quickly and knew exactly what to do.
A good lesson to all of us, me included, to take it easy out there, have the right gear, know how to use it and always continue to learn so that we can stay safe and come home with big powder grins after another great day in the mountains.

​Laura Kosakoski, A 34-Year-Old Family Doctor Who Lived In Canmore, Alta., Died After She Was Buried In An Avalanche In The Mount Hector Area Of Banff National Park On Jan. 10.

Her husband, Adam Campbell, was skiing with her that day. It took hours to locate her, dig her out and evacuate her.
After Laura’s eulogy and obituary, this accident report is the hardest thing I have written. I have been putting off writing it for weeks, but it has been eating at me. I did check with our partner on the day, Kevin, before sharing it and had him review it for accuracy. We hope that by sharing this that someone can learn something that may save them from enduring the horror that we, as well as our families and friends, the search and rescue crew, the first responders and the medical staff have endured.
Kevin Hertjaas and I had been trying to coordinate schedules for a few months to ski together. We finally made plans to meet at the Fenlands Recreation Centre in Banff on Friday January 10th at 8:30am to carpool. My wife, Laura Kosakoski joined us too.
Kevin is a well-known and internationally respected ski guide with accreditation with the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides and the Canadian Avalanche Association. Laura and I both have operation level avalanche certification and training and both logged over 80-days of backcountry skiing in each of the past 3-years, with extensive experience before that as well as a lot of summer mountaineering. I am also a member of the Avalanche Canada Foundation Board of Directors. We were all very experienced and well trained. Despite Kevin being a guide, this was not a guided day out, this was a recreational ski day for all of us.
There was new snow that week, but temperatures were forecasted to be cold, around -15 Celsius and the avalanche conditions were considerable in the alpine and at treeline and moderate below treeline. There was a deep persistent layer in the snow that was reacting unpredictably that we all knew about.
We wanted a more casual day of powder skiing, with Kevin needing to get home early, so our options for where to ski were limited. After a good discussion, we agreed to go and check out the Hector South area in Banff National Park along the 93 North. It is an area that has increased in popularity this past year, but one that none of us had been to yet.
After locating the likely access point in the trees from the highway, we pulled over and sorted our gear. We had two inReach Minis with us, as well as a siltarp, a small emergency bivvy bag and full avalanche and cold weather gear. With the equipment sorted, we began climbing the ridge through the trees around 9:30am. We all commented on the surprising ease of access and quick travel up the trees. It was also warmer than anticipated, so we stopped to de-layer.
When we finally reached treeline, we opted to start by climbing a west facing slope. As we climbed above treeline, we noted that there was a solid windslab that had a drum-like feel and opted to transition before committing to bigger terrain above us. The wind had also picked up at this point and we put on warmer clothes.
We noted a small slide path to skiers right of where we were. We identified that there was a risk we would trigger a small wind pocket as we entered it. Kevin went first and, as we suspected, he triggered a small pocket of snow that he was able to ski away from easily. I followed a line more to the right of where he was, trying to avoid thin spots that were a concern. I skied without issue and then Laura joined us. We regrouped in a small cluster of trees and decided to go and look at a south aspect instead.
We climbed up through the trees to the ridge, happy that there was no obvious overhead risk. Once on the ridge, we traversed up to the high point. The wind was starting to pick up and the visibility was limited. We transitioned from there and skied back along the ridge to a bowl/chute a little farther down to skiers left of where we were. Kevin and Laura skied first and enjoyed great snow. I entered farther left of them and also had great powder skiing. We had no signs of any instabilities in the snow on that run. We did observe big wind lips and wind loaded areas on skiers left of the lines.
Since there was a track in already, we decided to do one more lap before heading out. When we ascended back to the ridge, we noted that the wind had really picked up and it was cold. We were happy to call it a day.
We stood at the top of the run, to skiers right of the chute we had just skied and identified a possible creek hazard below us. We also tried to spot a nice access across the creek to exit onto the lower slopes. There was a cluster of trees at the bottom to the right of the path that we said we’d regroup at.
At around 11:30am we gave Laura the honours of skiing first. She skied skiers right of the line and then enjoyed great powder turns down the 400 meter or so line. When she was about two-thirds of the way down, Kevin dropped in a few meters left of her line and started skiing. Wanting to keep my eyes on them, and wanting to watch Kevin ski for pointers, I moved forward onto the ridge crest. I was a further few meters left of Kevin’s entrance and as I moved forward onto a possible entry point, the slope below me gave away. I fell off the slab I was standing on that was starting to move at my feet. I secured myself, yelled avalanche as loud as I could and watched the avalanche pick up speed and move the whole length of the slope. I followed it, trying to see if I could spot Kevin and Laura until I saw a big powder cloud shoot through a small bench at the bottom into the creek. I was shocked at the size of the slide.
As Parks Canada Visitor Safety noted in an accident report posted on December 12, 2020, it was a “slab avalanche 80m wide[…] The crown tapered dramatically along the crest of the ridge from nearly 2m in heavily wind-loaded drifts to as little as 40cm. The avalanche ran approximately 550m. [It] ran on a weak layer of facets and depth hoar near the base of the snowpack. The avalanche caused most of the snow to be removed along its path, exposing the ground and scrubby trees in many places”. They rated it as a size 2.5 avalanche.
Once the powder cloud settled, I moved as far right as I could, to the other side of a small ridge, so that I wouldn’t trigger anything else on top of Kevin and Laura below me. I skied very cautiously down the line. I could see Kevin below me, so I skied towards him. When I was approximately 50 meters above him, he told me that he saw Laura shuffling out of the way of the path into the trees and that prompted him to do the same which saved him from being caught in the slide. He told me to start yelling her name. We both yelled “Laura” approximately 3-times without a response. Kevin then instructed me to put my beacon into search mode and to get out my shovel and probe. Being below me, he initiated the beacon search and was quickly drawn into the gully. The steep angle of the slope and the debris made doing the search complicated. As Kevin yelled out the reading on the beacon, the best reading we got was 3.8 meters. We both knew instinctively that the situation was very serious.
Due to the depth and angle of the slope, we began digging at that reading. We had to clear some snow before we could start probing. After removing over a metre of snow, Kevin probed and I deployed the SOS on my inReach at 11:45am. When he finally got a probe strike, we started moving snow as quickly as we could.
With the angle of the slope, we had to start tunnelling from almost 10 meters back of where the probe was to avoid more snow falling into the trench that we were digging.
As the time ticked away, I was trying incredibly hard not to panic and Kevin was doing everything he could to give me tasks to keep me focused. It took us almost 45 minutes, or more, to get to Laura. We were pulling out small broken branches, as well as very large and heavy slabs of snow, which slowed our digging.
When we finally got to Laura’s head, there was no obvious sign of trauma, but she was very blue and non-responsive. Kevin checked her airway, but there was no breath, although he told me there was one to keep me on track. Due to the position of her body, we could not perform CPR, so we had to keep digging to remove her from the hole.
Kevin left briefly to correspond with the Parks team via his inReach to state how serious the situation was. I continued to try and dig Laura out. Kevin soon joined me and after a further 45 or so minutes of difficult digging we were finally able to free her. We cut off her pack and hauled her out of our deep tunnel. Due to the steepness and depth, I would sit up slope of her and drag her up my body and across my chest as Kevin hoisted her legs from below. We had to do this about 5-times before she was clear of the entrance.
There were no obvious signs of serious trauma on her head or body, but there was a deep laceration on her thigh likely from a ski. I removed all the warm clothing I had in my pack and the bivvy bag. Kevin started five rounds of CPR without any response. We opted to cease CPR and put her in the bag with all our warm clothes to try and keep her as warm as we could.
We then prepared a possible landing area and waited for the Parks team to arrive by long-line. I was trying not to panic and Kevin kept making up tasks for me to do. When the team finally arrived, around 1:30pm, they packaged Laura out and then flew Kevin and me out by long-line and I collapsed into a screaming crying mess.
We later found out that Laura’s core temperature had dropped to 24 Celsius and that she had no heartbeat. She was flown to Foothills Medical Centre on Calgary where they slowly began trying to warm her core temperature and revive her. We do not know how long she was like that. They were able to revive a faint heartbeat, but she never regained consciousness. After receiving very professional care, she succumbed to internal injuries and was declared dead just after 6:00pm on January 11th.
Assessment of the day:
We were well trained, well equipped and despite it being our first day out together as a group, we had communicated well about our objectives, what we wanted from the day and our observations. Despite that, we made mistakes that had fatal consequences.
Mistakes we made:
We knew that the forecast was for considerable danger, but we were likely too complacent with that forecast and were not cautious enough. We often ski in that rating, or higher, but we let our guard down. We knew that any avalanche would likely trigger on a deep layer with serious consequence and that the layer was unpredictable.
There were also signs that we should have paid closer attention to. We had earlier reactivity on a different aspect, there was obvious wind loading along the ridge and we underestimated the terrain’s potential. Given the avalanche bulletin for the day and our earlier observations, we should have skied safe zone to safe zone and not skied until the person was clearly in a safe area.
I likely moved forward onto a wind-loaded convex roll that triggered the slide. I should have approached the line further right where there was less loading. I know this, but because I wasn’t getting ready to ski into the line, I didn’t think about it properly.
Based on where Kevin remembers last seeing Laura, it appears as though she was standing on the edge of the safe zone, but was not well placed in it. I speculate that she was taking a photo because we never recovered her phone, so she may have not been as well protected as she could have been to take the pictures. She was either knocked by the wind, debris, or part of the slide and pushed into the gulley below her, which compounded the effects of her burial. It is also possible that the part of the trees that she was by were taken out because of the branches and deadfall we were digging out around her.
Laura was not wearing a helmet that day, which was unusual for her. I do not know if this had any impact on her survival, but given that there were trees around, as well as the density of the blocks around her, it might help in a different situation or scenario. There isn’t a good reason not to wear one.
Performing a beacon search in complex terrain is difficult. Digging and moving that much snow is incredibly hard. Despite having done deep burial practices, being fit and motivated, it took a very long time to move that much snow. The tunnelling required to get to her was much more complex and difficult than I was ready for. It would be even more difficult if there was only one partner skiing. A factor to consider.
This was a worse-case scenario, on top of a worse case scenario. Even if statistically low, the worst can happen. It is a reminder that the mountains don’t care about your level of training, preparation, or how casual your days are. They are dangerous and demand full attention and respect and discretion is always warranted.

​Author. Adam Campbell

Do you want to go on a hut trip to the remote backcountry of British Columbia with your buddies? How about an expedition to ski from the summit of Denali? If so, you’ll need to be your own avalanche forecaster. And if that sounds like work, it’s because it is. But don’t let this scare you. With practice and persistence you can use avalanche forecasting techniques to make smart calls in the backcountry, even in foreign terrain.
Avalanche Forecasting is all about making educated opinions about what the likely avalanche hazards will be. This involves looking into the past to interpret a complex set of details (or lack thereof) and formulating an opinion on how future weather will affect the avalanche hazard. It’s a bit like a game of high stakes poker, and it’s an intimidating prospect to recreational backcountry travellers and industry professionals alike. Luckily, the dirty secret of avalanche forecasting (not decision-making in the field) is that you don’t have to be right… but you can’t be wrong.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE RIGHT BUT YOU CAN’T BE WRONG?!
Yup. Let us remember that high stakes game of poker and think about our decision making in bets. We can lose a few bets here and there and not lose the game, but if we go all-in we’d better be right… because the stakes are high. Our small bets are our snow-pit tests and test slopes. It’s ok to be wrong here. We actually learn from getting it wrong. What matters is how we look at that mistake and incorporate new information to form an updated opinion (or in this case a better avalanche forecast.) Like most things, this is better practiced in your home mountains before trying to forecast on your first big expedition.
In order to start avalanche forecasting we need to learn a few basic principles regarding snow metamorphosis (how the structure of snow changes within a short time), snow mechanics (the forces and displacements of snow), and how changes in weather can affect these aspects. Recreational avalanche 1 and 2 classes will provide the best foundation for learning these skills. Find local avalanche education courses here.

GETTING STARTED
First things first – get a notebook and develop a routine. A write-in-the-rain notebook is the norm, but some folks are also using phones successfully. Whatever you choose, make sure you can use it in the worst of weather. Your notebook will serve as a reference tool for you both in the field and at home. Start a routine of recording this information before you leave home:

• The weather and snow info from the last 24 or 48 hours
• The weather forecast
• Your avalanche forecast

The weather history and forecast can include many things but at a minimum should include:

• Snow amounts
• Snow Water Equivalent (SWE)
• Wind speed and direction
• Max and min temperatures
• Cloud cover

As your system develops you can add or subtract information as you see fit. This notebook is essential to improving your forecasts, so do your best to keep it well organised.
As a forecaster, I find it easiest to break this information down in terms of avalanche problems. These problems classify avalanches not only by type, but also by the weather pattern that forms them, their distribution in the terrain, the possible size, and what observations might be useful or alternatively unreliable. 

AVALANCHE PROBLEMS: NON- PERSISTENT

Typically, non-persistent problems stabilise in hours to days.
​
STORM SLAB
Storm slabs are generally formed during storms with a warming trend. These are soft slabs. This problem can be elevation-dependent due to different snow amounts. Tests are generally reliable. It is commonly accompanied by a wind slab

WIND SLAB
​Wind slabs are formed by wind compacting snow into a slab over weaker snow. These slabs can be soft and/or hard. Wind slabs can be formed in winds as light as 10mph, but wind averages of 25mph typically get my attention. This problem is aspect and elevation-dependent and can be formed on clear days with moderate wind. Tests are generally reliable.

DRY LOOSE
Dry loose avalanches are formed by cohesionless snow on the surface. Typically formed during storms with low winds and low-density new snow these point release avalanches are generally small but can be troublesome in more exposed terrain. This problem is generally elevation-dependent

AVALANCHE PROBLEMS: PERSISTENT
Typically, persistent problems stabilise in weeks to months.

PERSISTENT SLAB
​
Persistent slabs are formed when snow forms a slab over a persistent weak layer (PWL). The PWLs are typically formed in three places; at the base of the snowpack, around crusts, and on the surface during periods of high pressure. An understanding of snowpack metamorphosis that includes near-surface faceting processes, surface hoar formation, and faceting around crusts is crucial to understanding the distribution of these avalanches. Information on these subjects can be found by searching the ISSW library or in a local avalanche class. Tests are generally less reliable.

DEEP SLAB

Deep Slabs are persistent slabs’ big brother. As the name implies, Deep Slabs have a PWL buried at least 1m below the surface. Tests are generally not reliable.

AVALANCHE PROBLEMS:

WET
Typically, wet problems stabilise with below-freezing temperatures.

WET SLABS
Wet slabs are the product of a loss of strength due to liquid water in the snowpack collecting in a particular layer a.k.a. “the funny business.” The funny business is usually an old PWL, and the liquid water can come from warming from the sun or air temperature, or a rain event. This problem is aspect, elevation, and time-dependent. Tests are generally less reliable.

WET LOOSE
Wet loose avalanches are the product of a loss of strength at the surface of the snow. This can be caused by warm temperatures, the sun, or rain. This problem is aspect, elevation, and time-dependent.

PUTTING PEN TO PAPER

As forecasters, our weather info gives us much of the information we use. Weather history can give us an idea of our current snowpack, and weather forecasts can help us predict conditions before going out skiing.

SCENARIO
If a storm came in with no winds and cold temperatures and finished near freezing the night before and you want to go skiing, what avalanche problem would you expect to find? If you’re having trouble, try reading through the list of avalanche problems again. Which one does this sound like?

MORE DATA
The answer to the last question is storm slab, but since we have simple data all we can issue is the simple forecast of, “there might be storm slab out there.” We still haven’t pinned down where in the terrain the potential problem lies, nor how big or how sensitive it might be. This is where more data will be useful…

• The storm came in with no wind and started out at -10 deg C and finished at 0 deg C. Weather stations at tree-line reported that snow amounts over 24 hours were 40cm.
• At tree-line, how big do you think these storm slabs will be? Big enough to bury a person (Size 2)? A car (Size 3)?
• How sensitive do you think these avalanches are? Will they run naturally, or will they need a human trigger?
• How would you adjust these answers if we moved into the alpine and snow totals were greater?
• 
  
  

DISPROVE OR VERIFY

Eventually, it’s time to take your avalanche forecasting skiing with you and test it. Use your observations from the day along with information from the avalanche center. Did you think this weather could produce natural avalanches? Are there any natural avalanches? How deep is that weak layer? How does that compare to your forecast?
If your forecast was off, why? Is the weather station in a snowier or drier area compared to where you skied? Did the wind gauge get frozen and not report the wind? The more questions like this the more insight you can gain into information you might have missed or not given enough attention too. That said, be mindful of hindsight bias (knowing about an avalanche and thinking you would have been able to predict that avalanche). Keep track of your errors and adjust your forecast for the next day accordingly.
This might not go so well for you at first. Keep at it. Seek mentorship and opinions from people with different avalanche backgrounds and don’t be afraid to reverse engineer your local avalanche forecast. As avalanche and weather conditions become more numerous and complex, an avalanche forecasting worksheet can help organise your thoughts. You can ask your local avalanche education organisation for these worksheets. However, some people use homemade spreadsheets or keep everything in a field notebook. Play the devil’s advocate while you’re out skiing: seek to disprove your forecast and then learn from it. Do your best to be objective with new information and be mindful to avoid confirmation bias. Remember that your forecast is just a guess. Observations (such as recent avalanches, cracking, whumping, and propagating ECTs) should take priority when making the decision to ski or not to ski in avalanche terrain.

AVALANCHE FORECASTING AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Avalanche forecasting can be a tricky, and backcountry skiing can pose dangerous conditions. Use this information cautiously and at your own risk. Be smart and stay safe out there! Obviously, coming home after a day in the mountains is always the top priority!

“You ain’t gonna learn what you don’t want to know,” Bob Weir.

By Aaron Diamond

Let’s first take a look at how the transceiver works. When transmitting (“send” mode), each transceiver emits an electromagnetic pulse at the industry-regulated frequency of 457kHz. A transceiver in search mode receives that pulse and interprets it using the internal antennae, which is outputted to the searcher as a direction and distance. But the searching transceiver also picks up other signals that occur at the same frequency. These polluting signals are known as radio frequency noise. If there’s enough said noise in the 457kHz range, the interference can cause false signals and/or erratic readings on the searching transceiver’s display.
The concept of radio frequency noise is much like the audible noise we encounter in a busy public space like a pub or bar. When you get there early before the crowds, you can have a conversation with a friend without the background noise posing a problem. Later on, however, the room is filled with other people around you talking and the music has probably gotten louder, hearing your friend across the table from you becomes all the more difficult.

There are two types of interference that can cause errors with a transceiver signal. Active interference comes from electronics that actively transmit frequencies such as phones, iPods, GPS devices, cameras, and headlamps, pretty much anything with a battery in it.
It’s important to note here that Airplane Mode does not reduce the amount of radio frequency noise. The phone needs to be turned off and stored a sufficient distance away from the transceiver.
Passive interference comes from sources that can partially block or warp the transceiver signal, usually in the form of metal or magnets. This includes but is not limited to shovel blades, aluminum foil, granola wrappers, magnets on the pockets of your jacket and your seasons pass with that Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip embedded inside. While these items don’t interfere as much as active or powered transmitters, it’s better to keep them inside your pack or the requisite distance from your transceiver.
​

The best way to keep your transceiver doing its job properly is to keep all sources of active and passive interference as far from it as possible. That means storing your phone or camera in your pants pocket or pack, not in the chest pockets. Turn off all electronics completely that you’re not using, otherwise try to store it at least 20cm from the transceiver. If and when you do need to perform a search, remember to use the correct method and keep the transceiver outstretched from your body. If you suspect there’s interference and can’t quickly find the source, reduce your search strip widths to around 30 metres.
Want to know more about advanced avalanche search technique? Our ATL 2 course covers multiple-burial searches as part of its curriculum. For more technical analysis of transceiver interference, check out these industry blogs from Mammut and BCA

​By Vince Shuley

The party of eight set out to ski the southern slope of Microdot Peak, located in Alaska’s Hatcher Pass, on the morning of March 1, 2003. All were experienced skiers. Some had spent more than 100 days in the backcountry that winter. They were familiar with the properties and behavior of snowpack. They’d refined their safety assessment and prediction skills, sometimes through negative outcomes. A few had triggered and survived avalanches. One had witnessed an avalanche fatality.
The southern slope of Microdot averages an angle of 35 degrees. Avalanches are most prevalent on slopes with angles of 30 to 45 degrees. When the skiers began their ascent, the sky was blue, and the winds were calm. The week before, four feet of snow fell on Hatcher Pass during a storm that, given the wind direction, covered Microdot’s southern slope with an additional burden of blown snow. Snow and wind create “slabs,” which in turn create weakness in the snowpack. When subjected to stress — like the stress that a skier, carving over the surface, might exert — rapid shape-shifting can occur. A slab can detach from the stable snowpack beneath it and career downhill like a runaway tectonic plate that transforms, within milliseconds, into a many-ton, half-frozen wave, subsuming whatever is in front of or on top of it, before instantaneously seizing, when it settles, into a substance resembling cement.
Midway up the slope, the eight skiers paused to dig a pit in the snow. They discovered the existence of storm slabs and wind slabs, confirming the “considerable to high” avalanche danger determined by the local rangers. They continued their ascent.
Solar radiation and rapidly increasing temperatures cause melting and weaken the snowpack’s top layer. Beautiful weather causes skiers to disregard warning signs, or take risks beyond their comfort zone. Once the skiers reached the summit of Microdot, they descended the southern slope one at a time. Four reached the bottom safely. The fifth triggered a slab avalanche that carried him 700 feet over a rock ledge, partly burying him and two others.

My Level 1 avalanche course started early on the fifth day of 2019. So far there had been zero avalanche fatalities and one partial burial in the Eastern Sierra, the mountains visible through the windows of the storefront where we met. Ten men and three women, including me, sat in folding chairs around a C-shaped arrangement of collapsible tables. Because the temperature inside was around 55 degrees, most people wore hats and high-tech layers — some form-fitting and bright, others worn to a black sheen and multiply patched — and held travel coffee mugs between their hands. The room’s broody, slightly misanthropic mood fit the occasion: Over the next three days, we’d be learning how not to be buried alive.The instructor, an amiably intense man in his 30s named Ryan, asked us to introduce ourselves and answer the question, Why am I here? (“Why am I here?” we’d soon learn, is the question backcountry skiers must repeatedly ask themselves as they encounter new pitches with new conditions.) Most people lived on the West Coast and had summited famous peaks. A pair of men in their 20s were members of a locally itinerant rock-climbing community that truck-camped during the winter in a place called the Pit. People, on the whole, were here for two reasons: Half the room wanted to become less scared of avalanches; the other half wanted to become more.

I was here for neither reason. I don’t often ski avalanche terrain. I don’t venture into areas unpatrolled by ski-resort crews that, in the middle of the night and after dawn, drop hand charges onto “loaded” slopes or shoot rounds from a 105-millimeter howitzer, forcing the mountain to shed its menace before people line up at the lifts. I pretended, when it was my turn, to be part of the “wanted to become less scared” group, because my real reasons weren’t reasons so much as prompts. But had I stated them, there were two.
One: Because I had been an indiscriminately fearful child — and, despite repeated exposure to “considerable to high” dangers over many decades, that child failed to be eradicated and replaced by someone braver — the act of preparing for every type of unknown, even one I’m unlikely to encounter, began as a coping mechanism and evolved over the years into a passion. Preparing for hypothetical terrible events (a terrorist attack involving high-speed elevators in a Vegas hotel; the dismasting of a sailboat while rounding Cape Horn) provides a creative high to which I’ve become addicted. Acrobatic feats of problem-solving and projection make the future elongate and then bend back around the present. Time becomes spherical and exudes the deep glow of cogent busyness. Possibly as a result of — or as forecast by — this beloved hobby, I became a novelist; I’ve reconfigured this oft-pathologized “catastrophic/paranoid/neurotic” tendency as a peril of my trade. Out of professional necessity, I obsessively engage in outcome empathy.
“Prepare for the worst,” the avalanche course manual advised, “and know what to do.”
Two: Among the deaths I do not wish, being buried alive is the one I do not wish the most. Edgar Allan Poe published a story called “The Premature Burial” in 1844. (Poe most likely suffered from taphophobia — technically the fear of being mistaken for dead and then sealed in a coffin and buried in a grave — but I imagine he’d be equally inspired by the live-burial potential of avalanches.) After listing a number of horrors, including plagues, earthquakes and massacres, Poe’s narrator asserts: “To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.”
Learning how not to be buried alive, however, turned out to be a little bit boring. Ryan opened a snowpack PowerPoint while we took notes about storm slabs and wind slabs and persistent slabs, all of which sounded like subcategorical psychiatric disorders from the D.S.M.

When Ryan shifted the conversation to “avalanche problems,” we perked up, maybe because the term would seem provocatively redundant, the avalanche itself being the primary problem. But no. Ninety percent of human-avalanche encounters, Ryan said, are triggered by humans, making humans the primary avalanche problem. Nature doesn’t kill people with avalanches. People kill people with avalanches.
Then Ryan revealed a second twist: By entering the storefront two hours earlier, by taking an avalanche-safety course, we had statistically increased our chances of being killed in an avalanche. We were more likely to die now than we were at 8 a.m.
The room absorbed this information. It felt like being in a movie in which you thought you were at a normal dinner party, but just by showing up, you’d implicitly agreed to fight the other guests to the death.
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.
I already knew about the human problem, because I did some of the recommended reading before class, including “Human Factor 2.0,” a seminal 2016 article about avalanche education published in Powder magazine and written by David Page (who also happens to be an ex-boyfriend from long ago). Page’s article tracks the shift in avalanche education away from snow-pit forensics and toward human forensics, a change in large part attributable to Ian McCammon, an engineer and avalanche researcher. McCammon dryly states the learning-death paradox in his 2004 paper “Heuristic Traps in Recreational Avalanche Accidents: Evidence and Implications”: “The blatancy of the hazard in avalanche accidents would be understandable if most victims had little understanding of avalanches. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case.”

In class, Ryan identified McCammon’s six decision-making or “heuristic” traps. (Per McCammon: “Most of the time, the consistency heuristic is reliable, but it becomes a trap when our desire to be consistent overrules critical new information about an impending hazard.”) The traps that interested me most, because they were traps against which I was typically guarded — and so was happy to have them validated as specieswide frailties rather than personal quirks — were Familiarity (failing to remain vigilant when faced with the known), Social Facilitation (everybody’s doing it, so it must be O.K.) and Expert Halo (the experts must know what they’re doing, and so it’s safe to unquestioningly follow them).
The others are Consistency (or “commitment” — every moment you don’t turn around for home, it becomes harder to do so), Scarcity (powder fever) and Acceptance (peer pressure). The broad solution, Ryan said, to avoiding all heuristic traps is group decision-making, constant communication and the regular practice of emotional vulnerability.
McCammon’s findings, and Ryan’s curiously detached and uneasy way of talking about emotional vulnerability, confirmed my working theory: The curriculum of preparedness, no matter the cataclysm, isn’t only about the concrete knowledge and skills a person must acquire to survive. Often these curriculums make legible human contradiction and weakness.
We broke for lunch. When we returned and sat in our seats and waited for Ryan to emerge from the back office, I looked around and did some math. Seventy percent of our student body fell into the demographic that, according to Ryan, was most likely to die in an avalanche: male, late 20s, intermediate-to-expert experience level, some formal avalanche training.
A man at the end of the table asked the class if anyone had seen the 2014 movie “Force Majeure.” I was the only person who had. Another man asked what the movie was about. I didn’t say it was about the ongoing shame and denial experienced by a husband who abandoned his wife and children during an avalanche scare. I didn’t say, “Much like this course so far, it’s a referendum on masculinity.” All-female groups, Ryan told us before lunch, make better decisions in risky situations than all-male groups or mixed-gender groups. When asked why women became less smart in the company of men, Ryan speculated that “women, around men, feel uncomfortable speaking up.” I did not say, and not because I was uncomfortable speaking up, that in my experience as a midlevel skier who had more than once been taken up slopes I could not descend — for example, a deep-powdered backcountry slope under which lurked many cliffs, that two male friends, insanely enough (in retrospect), insisted I could ski — I do and did speak up, often repeatedly. I was just never heard.

The wilderness-death or near-death “case study” is a literary genre unto itself. Not unlike an Austen novel — in which, among other things, readers of the time could learn, via the characters’ calculations and miscalculations, how to navigate the treacherous early-19th-century social terrain — the wilderness case study allows readers to learn from others’ (sometimes mortal) mistakes. The American Avalanche Association, based in Bozeman, Mont., publishes semiregular compendiums of human-avalanche encounters called The Snowy Torrents. I own the second and the latest issues (subtitled, in turn, “Avalanche Accidents in the United States, 1967-1971” and “Avalanche Accidents in the United States, 1996-2004”). While written for educational purposes, the case studies don’t lack for narrative flair. “Sally Chambers had just picked herself up from a fall when she heard someone say, ‘Oh, no!’ She turned around just in time to see a wall of snow descending upon her.” The methodology is both causal and objectively speculative. The analysis breaks into five sections: weather conditions, accident summary, rescue, avalanche data, comments.

Ryan might have used a synopsis of “Force Majeure” as an in-class case study, because shame and denial inhibit the reporting of human-triggered avalanches, which subsequently reinforces a culture of silence and impedes the sharing and disseminating of instructive stories in which the main characters do not choose wisely. Instead, during the second half of class, Ryan distributed a case-study synopsis about a party of experienced skiers on Microdot. (He didn’t use a case study from the latest Snowy Torrents, intuiting, perhaps, that many in our course had already scrutinized it cover to cover.) We divided into smaller groups to discuss what “stood out” in terms of the party’s preparation, safety, teamwork. The incident was notable less for the body count (zero) and more for how, even though several members of the eight-person party had previously triggered avalanches and even, in one case, witnessed a fatality, they had ignored the many obvious dangers, suggesting that these skiers had become dazzled by their own expertise, falsely brightened by luck.
The case study didn’t include — as the case studies in The Snowy Torrents don’t include — the psychological factors that led these skiers to continue when the signs against it were so compelling. Here’s where my skill set came in handy. Here’s why all avalanche courses should include at least one novelist. In my head, I imagined the real “avalanche problems” on Microdot.
Skier 1, an avalanche survivor, hadn’t slept well for weeks because his business, which he hadn’t run scrupulously, was being audited by the I.R.S. Skier 2, a past witness to an avalanche fatality, was dating Skier 3, who had recently expressed doubts about their long-term compatibility prospects, and so Skier 2, though worried by the ranger report, said nothing when Skier 3 insisted they keep climbing. Skier 4, a tech executive, learned over the years that she could gain the respect of her male co-workers by behaving in a cavalier manner, and so, wanting the same respect and acceptance from her male skiing friends, she employed this strategy on mountains too. Skier 5 wanted to appear “committed to the plan” to Skier 6, creator of a successful series of life-coaching videos for aspiring C.E.O.s, and for whom Skier 5, an unemployed filmmaker, hoped to work. Skier 7, also an avalanche survivor, had lost his father, a Libertarian, to bone cancer in January, and his father’s final admonition was, “never cave to the mediocrity of groupthink,” which Skier 7 took to mean that caution equals cowardice. The sun was temptingly warm. The sky was temptingly blue. A wolverine crossed their path. Skier 8, a folklore scholar, said that wolverines, in Finland, signaled safe travel.
We’d never know, of course. But Ryan encouraged us to be empathetic, because empathy helps us learn, and judgment does not (the Microdot case study warns, “This story underscores the fact that all humans are capable of making poor decisions”), which I believe to be superficially true, though it strikes me as a conclusion drawn from data sourced from the Bible, not actual data. Regardless, we didn’t judge, if only because we were going into the mountains for the next two days and, based on whatever biblical or superstitious story math we did in our heads, we didn’t want to curse our outcomes. As we packed up our notebooks and travel mugs, however, I wondered why these case studies were called accidents. To call these deaths and burials accidents implicitly perpetuated the idea that the randomness of nature was the killer, not the shortsightedness, cowardice or hubris of people. It acquitted the subject and the object of the action: “Damage was done.” In the interests of vulnerability, growth, shame-reduction and clear communication, The Snowy Torrents might revise their subtitle: Timeless United States Avalanche Mistakes.

Bad winter weather in the Sierra is nothing like bad winter weather in the Northeast, where I’m from. Snow falls so quickly in the Sierra that you can barely keep up while shoveling it. If you’ve never seen snow like this — and I hadn’t, not until I moved to California in my 20s — you might realize, upon first experiencing it, that you never understood why the Donner party couldn’t just walk out of the mountains when winter hit.
As always, before starting the course, I enthusiastically prepared for the worst. Preparing for the worst, when you’re not on an avalanche course, can earn you the label “catastrophist.” To some, ceaselessly scanning a plain day for big and little dooms is a highly optional and neurotic activity. David Page, who lives in the nearby mountains and who met me for dinner the night before the course began, told me that he prefers to call otherwise-pathologized attentiveness “heightened situational awareness.”
I preferred this term, too.
Because I knew how quickly the weather in the Sierra could turn, I reserved a four-wheel-drive car weeks in advance. Right before my flight, I called the rental agency to confirm that my car would have four-wheel-drive. When I arrived, and was given the keys to a vehicle, I checked with the lot attendant before putting my bags in the trunk: Does this car have four-wheel-drive? He said he didn’t think it did. I returned to the desk. The clerk apologized for the error. On my way back to the lot, the same attendant said, “Oh, you’ll be really happy, that’s a good four-wheel-drive car.”

Avoiding the Expert Halo Trap is my most innate gift. I never let somebody, or a fleet of somebodys, reassure me that a persistent and inexplicable irregularity should be ignored, just because they say it should. I suspected my car didn’t have four-wheel-drive soon after I left the rental lot. But I was late to meet a friend for a drink (Consistency Trap), and as I’d already pointedly asked two people at the rental agency, I was too embarrassed to return and ask them, are you really, really sure (Acceptance Trap).
Because it was more convenient and less awkward to do so, I let it go.
But now, looking at the weather report, I re-engaged my skepticism. (Though my hotel would receive no more than a dusting over the next day, in the mountains — a distance of only 42 miles — it would snow five feet.) I was desperate to conserve my analytical resources for the mountain, but I didn’t want to commit the confirmation-bias error we learned about the day before. 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.

The first, second, and third looks online suggested the rental car had four-wheel-drive. I kept searching for instability. I finally found it.
Because my two-wheel-drive car wouldn’t make it past the chain patrol, stationed on the highway midway between the valley and the mountains, I caught a ride with a 20-something man from Los Angeles. He was giving a ride to another 20-something man. I asked them personal questions from the back seat, because we were supposed to be vulnerable with one another and practice our communication skills, but all conversational paths quickly led us back to the day’s sobering avalanche advisory. “Bottom line: considerable avalanche danger will exist throughout the day.”
At 8 a.m. we met Ryan and a second instructor, Mike, at a trailhead and performed a gear check. One student — a trauma medic who had amputated the black, dead fingers and toes of avalanche survivors, and who confessed to being claustrophobic — took me aside. The avalanche report, he said, really concerned him. Most accidents happen when the avalanche danger is “considerable.” (There are five danger ratings: low, moderate, considerable, high and extreme.) Oddly, when the avalanche danger is “high,” fewer people are killed, because people on high-danger days are certain about their uncertainty. “Considerable” danger, on the other hand, requires that people deal with their uncertainty about their uncertainty; on a “bluebird day” with clear sky and fresh powder, the two uncertainties can conveniently cancel each other out. The survivor of a 2013 avalanche in the Yukon, when asked about her group’s decision-making process, said: “For me, the word ‘considerable’ was not dangerous. I don’t know why. You just ‘consider’ it.”
At this particular moment, however, I was less scared of avalanches and more worried about a pop quiz. Obviously we were being tested about the six heuristics! We should we speak up and veto the trip!

Nobody said anything. Instead we huddled in a low-wattage sun patch near the parking lot and resisted the wind that noisily whipped the snow around, making it impossible to hear Ryan and Mike’s lecture about avalanche beacons. We practiced strapping the beacons like a gun in a chest holster under our jackets. We practiced turning them from “transmit” to “receive” mode, which, because the dial was finicky, required that we remove our gloves. Every second of skin exposure registered to the brain as a stupid and optional risk, and so we learned firsthand how skiers commonly commit the puzzling oversight of wearing an avalanche beacon yet failing to turn it on.
Then we practiced finding fake buried people on a low-angle slope. Mike hid a plywood board and a beacon two feet below the surface. He yelled, “Avalanche!” and we switched our beacons to “receive mode.” We held our beacons to the snow like metal detectors, but because we were mildly freaking out, the straightforward (in class) “grid method” failed to ruler the slope into manageable patches of unknowability. Before digging, we tried to locate the “body” with our probe, but poking down through the snow — soft, hard, soft, hard — it was impossible to tell plywood from depth hoar, a layer of crunchy, large-grained snow.
“In a real situation,” Mike reassured us, “you’ll feel a squish.”
We paused to talk about what was happening, somewhere beneath our feet, to our pretend friend or pretend partner or pretend child. Unless a victim is with others, and those others brought shovels and probes, which give them 10 minutes to dig the victim out (after which the chance of survival declines by 80 percent), the victim probably wants death to happen as quickly as possible. The victim does not want to be one of the unlucky 2 percent who die of hypothermia over the course of hours, rather than of trauma instantly (25 percent of deaths) or of asphyxiation within roughly 15 to 45 minutes (75 percent of deaths). Unless the victim is buried at the surface (unlikely, as the average depth of burial in the United States is almost four feet), the chance of escaping, without help, is basically nil. The snow, as it slides, heats up and becomes wetter. When it stops, it freezes instantly. If a victim is caught inside the churn when this happens, they’re effectively sealed inside an ice coffin. Instead of fighting, a victim could take a tip from the survivor of the Yukon avalanche: “I tried just to relax a little bit,” she said in “Rescue at Cherry Bowl,” a video posted on Avalanche Canada as part of its online education. “I was actually O.K. with dying — I was happy with the life I lived.”
But how to learn any of these skills via actual experience when the stakes are so high? A climbing friend — he camped, for a while, in the Pit — once complained to me about the hypocrisy of the mountaineer’s version of The Snowy Torrents, called Accidents in North American Climbing, and what he identified as its “moralizing” tone. One case study, for example, cited “exceeding abilities” as a reason for a climber’s death. “How are you supposed to learn if you don’t push yourself?” my friend asked. “The people writing these reports have been doing that their entire lives.”
It was a conundrum. In many nonavalanche-terrain scenarios, if a person falls into a heuristic trap, the outcome isn’t death. Most people, on a daily basis, engage in what Mike called “kind learning.” Kind learning allows a person to make mistakes. “Wicked learning” does not. (An avalanche course, assuming no mistakes are made along the way, is kind learning about wicked learning.) A kind learner, for example, because she had written a novel, could believe that she understood how books were written (Familiarity Trap) and so, enthused by a new project, obsessively storm ahead for years (Consistency Trap), and refuse, because of the shame involved, to reassess when doubt threatened (Acceptance Trap) before realizing the excursion was ill fated. Time is killed, and a bit of ego, but nobody tends to perish while learning how to better write a book, or build a boat, or smoke a brisket. Because my life wasn’t typically on the line, I’d become an enthusiastic, mistakes-based learner. I tried to make mistakes. I learned best by messing up, sometimes badly, even expensively, but never mortally. I could figure out what went wrong and better prepare the next time, even if that preparation included “make more mistakes” as one of the necessary steps.
The snow and wind intensified, the sky dimming to near-dusk levels. By 1 p.m., the day felt over. Yet we still had to dig a pit. One to two feet of snow had fallen since we had arrived. The lee slopes were loaded. Nonetheless, we lined up behind Mike and snowshoed or skinned to just below 9,000 feet. (“Skinning” — the act of ascending a mountain on skis — refers to the removable, sticky strips of nylon and mohair, stretched and affixed to the skis’ underside to prevent backsliding, called “skins,” because they were originally made from animal hides.) Forty-mile-per-hour gusts knocked us around. Nobody seemed particularly happy, not even a guy who climbed Mount St. Helens earlier that winter. He looked dazed and hypothermic. Mike’s mustache froze.
We dropped our packs on a 23-degree angle slope (seven degrees below the optimal avalanche angle) and started to dig. If a person tried to create, in material form, a pause, it would look like a snow pit. Its negative space is square, and only after Mike shaved the walls to perfect 90-degree angles did it start to look like a mass grave that could easily fit us all. Mike scuffed the wall with a plastic card, and we listened to the sound of round snow versus faceted snow. (The sound of snow is crucial. A sign that an invisible weak layer has collapsed beneath you, meaning the layer on which you are skiing is no longer attached to the mountain, is an audible whumpf.) We punched the snow. Then with four fingers we pushed. Then with one finger. We noted the resistance variation between the layers.

Then I stopped paying attention. I watched the spumes of snow spiraling upward from the nearest peak. A giant shard of marble and granite loomed a thousand feet above us, looking like the prow of an ocean liner emerging from the fog. We could have been weathering the sea during a hurricane or blinded by a sandstorm in a frigid desert. The material substance of our isolation — frozen water, saltwater, sand — ceased to matter, save how it dictated our survival strategy, and thus our thinking, if we could actually think and refuse to be hypnotized, as I was, by the sumptuous terror and beauty.
I sat on the floor of the snow pit, where it was 10 degrees warmer. Because I was either dying or about to die of hypothermia, I found myself falling into a Nostalgia Trap — not yet coined by McCammon, but a human factor nonetheless — wherein a person is tempted by the bluebird days of the past, and the sense of loss she feels for the person she might have been, had she been, from the start, a different person. Snow pits are no longer the primary focus of avalanche-training courses, in part because human beings are the more erratic variable but also because of a phenomenon called “spatial variability,” meaning that a snow pit provides information only about itself and says nothing about the stability a person might find in a different snow pit, dug two feet away in any direction. Snow pits are self-reliant loners. But snow pits are useful because they insert, into a day where Scarcity Traps abound, a moment of reflection. You can stop and listen and touch and appreciate that you are fully alive, but depending on your choices, by the end of the day, you might not be.
​
For the third and final class, I hitched a ride again with my two 20-something friends. We’d gone out to dinner the night before and by now were pretty chummy. Neither of them, however, was interested in the game I proposed over tacos: Which of our two instructors, Ryan or Mike, was more likely to die someday in an avalanche?
The 20-somethings found death speculation macabre. I countered that analyzing “experts” was essential practice. We’d be in situations, in the future, in which we’d have to psychologically sum people up, deciding which ones to trust with our lives.
We met Ryan and Mike in the atrium of a failing mall. We sat on a pair of abandoned couches around an abandoned coffee table and read the online daily avalanche advisory, which predicted “avalanche problems” that would produce slides both “very large” and “likely.”
“Bottom line: high avalanche danger exists this morning where 1-2ft of new snow fell overnight accompanied by the most extreme sw winds of the season.”
We unfolded our maps to plan our day, but the danger was so prevalent that there was practically nowhere safe to go. Ryan said that we’d be fine if we stuck to the few low-angle slopes. We’d need to constantly assess and reassess the conditions as we ascended, however, and “relentlessly think about the consequences.” We’d need to regularly ask ourselves whenever we encountered a new pitch: Why am I here?
The claustrophobic E.R. doctor who yesterday was scared of dying was eager to get outside, despite the advisory’s being drastically worse. One day of survival, and he had either learned what he had come here to learn — how to safely, and without being pointlessly terrified, travel through avalanche terrain — or he’d experienced the first of many instances of another human frailty we’d learned about, called “normalization of deviance.”
I felt a snag of dread but talked myself out of it. (I was traveling with Mike, who I had decided was less likely to die in an avalanche than Ryan.) I was being neurotic, not highly situationally aware. Mike and Ryan were both certified. They had both skied this terrain hundreds of times. I considered ways in which a heuristic trap could actually help in a situation like this, how a trap could promote prudence and sagacity. Because of the Acceptance Trap — the desire not to be seen as a fool by others — neither Ryan nor Mike would want to kill his students on an avalanche survival course.

We divided into two groups. I didn’t have a lot of experience on backcountry skis, and confessed as much to Mike. I offered to snowshoe, but Mike reassured me that I’d be fine on skis, and besides, everyone else was on skis (two men had “splitboards” — a snowboard that splits in half to create two skis for climbing); he also implied that on snowshoes, I would be unhappy and slow, and I would hinder where the group could go. I told him again — because I didn’t want to recreate past experiences in which, despite my detailed and increasingly exaggerated descriptions of my inabilities, a man took me up a mountain I could not, without risking injury or a total loss of affection for him, get down — that I was essentially a beginner. Mike again reassured me: I’d be fine.
We attached our skins and followed a gradual incline along a ridge. It was a bluebird day for sure. Warm, sunny, an abundance of new powder. Along the way, Mike quizzed us. We found a vertical crack in the snow layers on a low-angle slope. Mike said, “What do I think about this slope?” I said, “That you should not go over it.” He said, “Well, I’m about to.”
We hung out at the top of a dome and then headed back down and then again up. We kept among the trees to reduce our risk of becoming buried in a slide starting above us (trees can act like the teeth of a comb, thinning an avalanche into weaker rivulets). We took turns cutting track through many-feet-deep snow. At one point, the claustrophobic E.R. doctor disappeared to his waist in a wind hole.


Just after lunch we found what, in some respects, we’d traveled to see: an avalanche. Mike estimated it to be eight hours old. We stood 25 feet downhill from the toe (the edge of the debris field) and discussed the conditions that created the slide, like the slope’s angle. I asked Mike why none of us were scared. I definitely wasn’t. The absence of fear was a peculiar sensation, akin to coolly scrutinizing my own amputated hand. He said that the slab had already slid, and that if there were to be another, which there wouldn’t be — based on the wind direction, the slope hadn’t reloaded — it wouldn’t reach us; also, he was familiar with this area, and knew we weren’t in any danger. Still, we were breaking a few rules. We had stopped directly in the avalanche’s “run-out” path. We were relying on familiarity as an indicator of safety. In neither case did I think Mike made a poor decision. But our avalanche autopsy left me wondering: When is a trap a trap, and when is it wisdom?
As we continued to ascend steeper and steeper terrain, I started to get nervous. Skinning up mountains requires endurance. Getting down them requires skill. We climbed all the way to the base of the formerly storm-enveloped granite-and-marble shard, its crags and facets now sharply highlighted by the sun. We detached our skins and flipped our bindings so that our uphill skis became downhill ones. The two splitboarders connected their two halves to make a single plank. Mike warned, as we paused at the top of the slope, “these are gnarly conditions.” The snow, after hours of absorbing solar radiation, had thickened to what one student referred to as “elephant snot.” A two-foot layer of sticky, dense snow lay atop a few more feet of loose, grainy hoar. Unless we moved quickly over the surface, our skis would punch through the top layer, which would then trap us up to our thighs. Our turns had to be fast and tight, near the trees, because it wasn’t safe to carve more widely into the open.
Mike was right. It was gnarly. Half the students, myself obviously included, wiped out over and over again. The scene was deemed by another student “a yard sale.” The pair on splitboards abandoned verticality and instead rode their splitboards through the trees like sleds.
And then, what we planned in the failing mall would happen, did: We survived. We sat between the twin ruts of a Sno-Cat trail and debriefed. Had we planned well, or were we just lucky? Mike asked if we would have done anything differently. We said we wouldn’t have. He said, contemplatively, “I might have better taken into account people’s skill levels.” Then we dispersed.
I returned my skis at the rental store and met a local friend at her house, an A-frame with a giant triangular window, beyond which 6 feet of wind-sculpted snow obscured what, in spring, became a porch. Now snow wasn’t a substance I could trigger and so kill myself. Now it was a refrigerator for our beer. My friend and I drank and laughed. I hadn’t done any laughing over the last three days, while my classmates and I pretended our loved ones were asphyxiating beneath our skis. At around 8 p.m., one of the 20-somethings texted me a newspaper article posted that afternoon. The headline read: “Colorado’s first avalanche death of 2019 came during an advanced avalanche-safety course on Red Mountain Pass.”
I clicked on the article. Earlier that day, six avalanche students were caught in the slide they had triggered. Five lived. The avalanche danger was considerable-to-high. No further analysis was available.
On the first day of class, Ryan made it clear that we were not eliminating risk — we were “managing” it. If we wanted not to die in an avalanche, that goal was easily accomplished. “The simplest way to mitigate avalanche hazard,” the course’s manual advised, “is to avoid avalanche terrain altogether.” But “risk” to some is “just another day” to others. Risk, in the backcountry, is an occupational hazard, no different from the risk assumed by astronauts or explorers, save that backcountry skiing, for most practitioners, isn’t a career; their risk-taking isn’t considered noble or newsworthy (unless they die doing it), and it has no greater ambition save to make a single person happy. When people are together, their individual risk thresholds become destabilized, and some assume a degree of risk that, alone, they never would. But there is never no risk. Death is statistical, not eradicable. When I was pregnant, I was told my chance of having a child with Down syndrome was 1 in 400. My father-in-law, a mathematician, called my risk “functional zero.”


Functional zero is zero, but — to the imagination, at least — it is also not zero, just like the fear of being buried alive is both 100 percent irrational and also not. Within those narrow gaps (between irrational and rational, functional zero and zero), creative ingenuity — not just neuroses — can thrive. The pursuit of joy, even if that joy begins as fear and takes the form of preparation against an irrational outcome, is a death wish, maybe. Or it’s a life wish. Or there’s no difference. Texture, at a minimum, better distinguishes days spent this way, and that texture becomes the record of the idiosyncrasies of an individual’s mind. Were it not for the irrational fear of being buried alive, George Washington wouldn’t have requested his corpse be kept on his deathbed for three days, or Schopenhauer on his for five. Poe wouldn’t have written “The Premature Burial,” not to mention “Berenice,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Black Cat.” John G. Krichbaum, in 1882, wouldn’t have invented his Device Indicating Life in Buried Persons, which involved a coffin fitted with a pipe extending to the surface, and Albert Fearnaught (truly, his name) wouldn’t have invented a “grave signal” in which a rope around a buried person’s wrist, if tugged, released a flag above the plot. Alfred Nobel wouldn’t have written a will that stipulated, first, that his money be used to create an eponymous prize, and ultimately that his veins be opened and drained, after which he would be cremated. No one would have founded or joined the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial. I wouldn’t have taken a course to learn to survive a danger I would rarely encounter.
I stepped into the drift to grab another beer. The wind had picked up. A clump of snow shook loose from a tree bough and barely missed my head. Had anyone in my class died that day, I wondered whose deaths would have been seen as the most pointless by outsiders, and thus the most harshly judged. Probably mine. I was the only person with no actual business being there. “This story underscores the fact that all humans are capable of making poor decisions.” But I hoped that if I had been buried and, if luck were on my side, asphyxiated within minutes, people who knew me would understand: By learning to do something I didn’t love, I was doing what I loved.
I slid the porch door shut. The snow against the glass gave me a cross-sectional view of its layers. The house was a snow pit, but a warmer one, with booze. From my apartment windows back home, I’d learned to read pedestrians, and their outfits, as a way to gauge the weather. Here I read the snow. It was buried time. The layers told me what had happened since the winter began. Events like storms, and cold nights followed by warm days, were stabilized in material form, until a person, crossing the surface, released them.

By Heidi Julavits

1.
It falls upon my keyboard to begin with a definition. In avalanche terrain, when a group agrees to ski a run “one at a time,” the exact meaning is that only one person in the group, at any given moment, is exposed to avalanche danger (on the uphill or down.)
2.
Item 1 above does not mean standing in the middle of a slide path, snapping photos of your buddy’s face shots, thinking “if it slides, I’ll just ski to the side…” Instead, OAT means each person runs out the entire pitch, one-hundred percent, from one entirely safe zone to another.
3.
Aha, “safe zones,” or “islands of safety.” What are they? Year after year, the reports roll in. Too often, skiers hang at what they perceive as an island of safety—and a big avalanche overruns their archipelago like a Class 5 hurricane. These tragic events show that identifying truly safe zones is as important as identifying avalanche slopes, and yes, it’s the same thing. The most common unsafe safe zone is the small island of trees you’re “pretty sure is safe, because otherwise they wouldn’t be there!?” Second to that, the side of the avalanche path—where did that myth come from? Also watch for the common noob mistake of simply not stopping far enough beyond the runout zone. See our alpha angle post for more about determining how far a slide can slide.
4.
“But I watched a guide ski down with three clients at once!” Why? Most often money is the reason. While a group of three total is perhaps the ideal, the economic reality of guiding is that more than two clients per trip might be necessary. Separating a larger group and skiing OAT causes major time issues. Say you have a guided group of six, and skiing something OAT requires eight minutes each (hey, the clients are not auditioning for Matchstick). Just that one section adds an hour to the day! Guide tries to do OAT, clients enjoy happy hour in snow cave.
5.
​Cons to OAT? The biggie: Consider a nautical analogy. Man overboard. Your throw rope isn’t long enough, no rescue swimmers are in the water, and you’re too tired to dive. Shift the thought experiment to ski touring. You’re on a 2,000 vertical foot run that you ski top-to-bottom OAT, the last person down is injured, or caught in a slide that doesn’t run full path. You are exhausted, weather is looming, sunset is dropping like a theater curtain. Apply skins, climb, hope your headlamp has fresh batteries and the InReach is working.
6.
Excuses to avoid OAT are many. Some in the nature of heuristics, some involving group dynamics, some just plain whacked: “I took a Level 3 course and I tell you this will never slide,” or “We don’t have time,” or “Bill isn’t a good skier, someone should pair up with him,” or “Come-on, just once let’s gang ski and make a video,” or “To save time, just count to 30 then launch after me.” And then what might be the clear winner of the Darwin award: “We all have airbags!”
7.
And, worthy of its own spot on the listicle, we have no-OAT excuse number 672: “We have radios and we ski REALLY FAST.” That’s like a barn cat scattering a family of mice. At least one is sacrificed to appease the feline predator. Works with cats I guess. Avalanches just keep rolling— they hunger not for meat, but for souls.
8.
How do dogs change the picture? To avoid incurring the wrath of our valued pet owning readers, please ladies and gentleman, have at it in the comments. If you’re OAT skiing with the care of a pathology lab technician, how does Fido the Wonder Dog fit in?
9.
This is where I get to equivocate. Yes Sir, there are times in the grumpy old mountains when they want you to move, get out, charge home fast, because: the snow is warming so it’s better to get everybody off the slope NOW; rockfall is due to increase because of sun hit; you can see the blank wall of a whiteout headed your way like an apocalyptic desert sandstorm. Fill in the blank. (At least for some of us, isn’t figuring this stuff out part of the appeal?)
10.
To sum up: • OAT is not a made-up rule that curmudgeons spout off to ruin the fun, it is real. • Smaller groups might be the most important key to skiing one-at-a-time. • If you ski with a guide who does not OAT, watch out for your own behind. You should be comfortable the guide has a darn good reason for keeping everyone in lockstep. • Beware group dynamics such as the expert halo: “Dude, this thing could never slide!” • Safe zones and islands need to be 100% reliable. • Consider skier skills and gear issues. Stronger skiers go last to help the less fortunate who might be stranded in the middle of your big mountain descent