Backcountry Snow
How to read an avalanche forecast properly
Most people read the danger rating and stop. The rating is the least useful part of a document that, read properly, tells you exactly which terrain to avoid.
Jonas Lindqvist
17 articles by Lindqvist
Backcountry Snow
Spring snow: wet slides, timing, and the shrinking window
Spring touring runs on the clock rather than the snowpack. Get the timing right and it is the best skiing of the year; get it wrong and the slope you climbed at dawn is moving by noon.
Backcountry Snow
Your first season of ski touring: what nobody warns you about
Resort skiing prepares you for roughly a third of what backcountry touring demands. The other two thirds are uphill technique, snow judgement and self-sufficiency.
Gear & Kit
Electronics in the cold: keeping the things you depend on alive
Batteries lose a large fraction of their capacity in winter conditions, screens stop responding, and the device you were relying on for navigation goes dark at the worst moment.
Backcountry Snow
Cornices: the feature that breaks further back than you think
A cornice is a chunk of snow held out over nothing by cohesion alone. People walk on them, ski under them, and are surprised by both outcomes.
Gear & Kit
Waterproof shells: what breathability can and cannot do
People buy expensive jackets and then get wet inside them and conclude the jacket failed. Usually the jacket was working exactly as physics permits.
Backcountry Snow
Persistent weak layers: the problem that does not go away
Most avalanche problems settle within a few days. A persistent weak layer can sit in the snowpack for months, waiting, and it is responsible for a disproportionate share of fatalities.
Backcountry Snow
Skinning efficiently: the technique that saves hours
Uphill travel on skis rewards technique far more than fitness. Two people of equal fitness can differ by a factor of two in how tired they are at the top.
Backcountry Snow
Wind slab: the avalanche problem that builds while you sleep
You do not need new snowfall to get a fresh avalanche problem. Wind alone will move enough snow to build slabs, and it does it on the aspects people most want to ski.
Backcountry Snow
Terrain traps: why a small slide kills and a big one does not
Avalanche size matters much less than what is underneath the slope. The same modest slab is a nuisance in one place and a burial in another.
Gear & Kit
The avalanche transceiver: buying one, and the practice nobody does
The device is not the hard part. Modern transceivers are excellent. The variable that decides outcomes is how many times the person holding it has done a real search.
Risk & Rescue
Hypothermia: recognising it in someone who says they are fine
The dangerous stage arrives before anyone is dramatically cold, and its main symptom is that the affected person stops being able to assess themselves.
Backcountry Snow
Trip planning the night before: the hour that saves the day
Good decisions in the mountains are mostly made at a kitchen table, warm, unhurried, and before anyone has emotional investment in a particular line.
Gear & Kit
Layering that works when you are moving hard
The classic three-layer model was designed for standing around. Aerobic mountain travel produces enormous amounts of moisture, and managing that is a different problem.
Backcountry Snow
Companion rescue: the minutes that decide it
Nobody is coming in time. Survival after a burial depends almost entirely on the people standing on the slope, working fast, with equipment they have practised with.
Backcountry Snow
What a snow pit tells you, and what it very much does not
Digging is the most photogenic part of avalanche practice and the most misused. A pit answers one narrow question well and several important questions not at all.
Backcountry Snow
Slope angle: the number that decides whether the snow can slide
Most avalanche terrain sits in a narrow band of steepness. Knowing where you are inside that band, in real time, on real snow, is the most useful skill in the discipline.