Cold! An Introduction to Avalanche Education for Those New to Winter Hiking or Mountaineering
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Avalanches. Well, we are into the high-consequence stuff, now.
Like I said in the video, avalanches and lightning storms are the two natural phenomena that I don’t mess around with. I’m willing to accept certain objective hazards like seracs and crevasses and rock fall… within reason. But with avalanches and lightning, I don’t mess around.
I think that’s a product of my location in Colorado, though, for sure.
For lightning, it just seems so ubiquitous. The afternoon thunderstorms are almost always around after noon in the late spring and summer months. And it’s not like a serac in that you can avoid it by altering your route. A thunderstorm that is centered even miles away can still strike you. So, I just don’t go up high in moderately likely lightning conditions.
And the snowpack in Colorado is always highly unstable. Colorado gets loose, faceted snow with the early storms up high in the late fall. So, in essence, the base of every snowpack every year is unstable. That doesn’t mean that every snowpack will slide, but it means that the risk of what are called “persistent slab” avalanches is almost always greater here than any other place in the country.
So, rather than play the game of constantly assessing iffy slopes, I stick to ridge backs in winter and then move out onto the slopes in late spring, when consolidation of melting snow and “freeze-thaw cycles” have greatly improved the snow’s stability.
My avalanche solution, then, is to avoid the slopes that can slide until the likelihood of unstable snowpack goes way down.
Sure, that means I’m not going to be doing gnarly steep face ascents in winter, but I’ve got other things I care about a lot more than my tick list. My boys being just two of those things. And, it’s not like it keeps me “grounded” all season. There are plenty of ridge runs that are technical and scrambly and a whole lot of fun.
Your tolerance with avalanche risk is going to be a product of your own feelings about risk as well as the relative risk of your locale. It doesn’t have to be the same as mine, for sure.
But regardless of those individual vagaries, having an accurate (ish) understanding of the risks if vital. And my video is just a simple introduction and initial exposure to the resources that are staffed by experts in this space.
To that end, I put a bunch of links in the video description for pointing towards additional educational and avalanche forecasting resources; I wanted to repeat them, here. None of these links are affiliate links (those are for some equipment links, further down this page). These are public-serving organizations and I treat them as such.
Avalanche education resources:
American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education - United States
Avalanche Canada - Canada
Syndicat National Des Guides De Montagne - France
WSL- Institut fr Schnee- und Lawinenforschung (SLF) - Switzerland
Snow and Alpine Awareness Camps (SAAC) - Austria
AINEVA - Italy
Die Bergfuhrer - Germany
Mountain Safety Council - New Zealand
APRENDICA - South America
And here are the links to the forecasting hubs I mentioned:
Another good resource for continuing your education is to contact your local guide service. Just make sure they are offering courses that are certified by the organization with responsibility for setting the education standards for your region. That’s how I got my avalanche education. The certified courses are great. Not only is it quality classroom instruction, but you also get out into the field. You make snow observations and practice the decision making you would use in the real world. And then there is the search and extraction practice. This stuff is absolutely crucial. You just can’t easily replicate the experience of running a beacon search in a pretty realistic environment.
And speaking of searches and rescues, lastly I wanted to provide some links to the newer versions of the shovels, beacons, and probes we use in my family:
Black Diamond PIEPS Probe Carbon Tour
Backcountry Access Tracker 3 Avalanche Beacon
And just as a bit of a buying guide, the tradeoffs in shovels come down to this: a) the bigger the blade the more snow you can move quickly - which very much matters when attempting an extremely time sensitive extraction; your climbing partners is suffocating in that snow. But the bigger blades are weighty and take up a lot of space in your pack. b) longer shafts are easier to use without fatiguing as quickly, but suffer from the same weight and volume penalty.
For probes, it’s about probe length and material. The longer the probe, the deeper it can do its job, but the harder it is to pack, unfurl, and wield. Carbon fiber is lighter but more expensive than aluminum.
And for beacons, the cost is usually built in to features like the casing, the display size, range, the ability to do multi-victim searches, and motion detecting (to automatically switch from search to transmit based on your movement). There is a lot to consider, so here is a product-to-product comparison and recommendation from the excellent group over at Outdoor Gear Lab.