Touring, avalanche craft and reading terrain.
Backcountry Snow
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.
Backcountry Snow
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
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.
Backcountry Snow
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.
Backcountry Snow
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
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
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
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.
Backcountry Snow
Good decisions in the mountains are mostly made at a kitchen table, warm, unhurried, and before anyone has emotional investment in a particular line.
Backcountry Snow
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
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
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.
