Norway’s Avalanche and Outdoor Conference
The value of community
The late autumn sun breached the horizon, shining horizontal morning light across the Voss valley. Already, on the first day of November, snow has blanketed the high summits keeping guard over Norway’s extreme sports capital — leaving us, the attendees of Norway’s Avalanche and Outdoor Conference, staring up from the dry valley floor, making our season’s first turns in our mind.
To our left and right, leaders from avalanche reporting, planning and prevention, education, decision-making, search and rescue, and guiding communities assembled to share and synchronize the community’s avalanche knowledge. From predicting the path and impact of the next thousand-year avalanche, to detailed accounts of the last winter’s most complex and devastating avalanches — like last year’s tragedy on Tamokdalen’s Blåbærfjell — to explorations of the conflict between stoke and smart decision-making in the backcountry, this council of avalanche experts continued to circle the main goal of the community: to understand, mitigate, and communicate avalanche danger in Norway’s highest risk geographies and communities.
As they always are, these discussions were a reminder of the unbelievable amount of passion, effort, and energy that this community puts into keeping people safe before going out into avalanche terrain, and also responding when the worst does happen. This was outstandingly clear in the case of Tamokdalen, where 4 lives were lost this January. Even after a heroic effort from over 15 independent organizations to secure the avalanche danger for search and rescue, locate the bodies, and recover them, questions still remained about decisions made by these skiers which put them in harm’s way in the first place. Why this line at this time? What led them to choose the steeper route?
“It is clearer and clearer every year, that the avalanche community we have here in Norway is unique in the way that it relies on people in every part of the country and community to contribute,” said Torstein Skage, longtime backcountry skier and Sknow board member, “What’s difficult, is that even with a community approach, people are still putting themselves in danger at the same rate as before.”
With every presentation, we felt more and more excited and honored to be invited to share our ideas with this group.
Bringing our findings from recent Sknow product tests, and vision for what this data can tell us with a network of Sknow devices, we were excited to open conversations about how this innovation can inform safer decision-making in planning, touring, and riding lines in the backcountry.
“We are working hard to develop the Sknow device and app to be tools for better decision- making in the backcountry, using geological techniques we know well,” explained Monica Vaksdal, our CEO, “building on the immense knowledge and experience that the experts in this room are contributing.”
“From our testing in Chile over the summer, we have been able to collect and confirm that the device is capturing snow layers which align with the profiles I analyzed personally in snow pits, allowing us to build our algorithms to search for similar layers. This season, we will continue building on this knowledge, with more devices out in the field than ever before,” continued Lars Christiansen, the team’s leading Geologist.
As the conference drew to a close, we could be nothing but excited for the progress that we expect to come from this winter’s testing, and the opportunity to make our own contribution to improving decision-making in avalanche terrain.
