Avalanche Safety Series Part 1: Decision Making, Communication & Creating Margins
Making decisions that involve risk in high-stress situations are rarely as good as those made in the cold light of day. 90% of human-involved avalanches are set off by the victims themselves. It’s a powerful statistic, because ultimately it means we actually get to decide if we’re going to get avalanched or not.
Decision Making
The way we behave in the mountains has become an ever-increasing component of what the avalanche education community focuses on. Educators now recognise that it is our own poor decision making that invariably results in avalanche incidents, not the ‘bad luck’ that the media would have the uneducated public believe.
Good decision making is reliant on good quality information. Guidebooks, weather and avalanche forecasts, a friendly ski patroller in a bar along with maps are all useful planning tools. Getting a detailed digital mapped representation of the route you are planning from the comfort of your sofa, the evening before a ski adventure, is an incredibly powerful tool. And it’s particularly important to pay attention to the key points that pass through challenging or complex avalanche terrain. Using map tools that have avalanche risk and gradient overlays means we can see in detail if the wind-loaded bowl we’re hoping to drop into is under or over 30 degrees — the critical gradient above which most skier triggered avalanches occur.
Planning and creating a route through the mountains on a GPS device (a mobile with FATMAP for example or a conventional GPS device) and having them with us as we travel means we don’t have to spend our time in the mountains focused on navigation. That’s important too; if 80% of our focus in a whiteout is on navigation, there’s very little left to focus on the avalanche hazard or communicating our thoughts and concerns with our companions. Advance planning and having it with us digitally frees up extra time on our route and gives us a margin of both safety and fun.
Communication
Silence is not golden. Not in the backcountry at any rate. There are many impediments to communication in the backcountry…excitement, fatigue, stress, weather, task overload. That’s a problem, because we operate much stronger as a team in avalanche terrain than as a group of individuals. More eyes looking for warning signs that the mountain is trying to give us: signs of recent avalanche activity, changing weather, wind loading. Together we can confirm or challenge our thoughts on stability as the day unfolds and provide a sounding board for our concerns.
At this point we should differentiate between talking and communication. People have a tendency when excited about skiing fresh powder to talk a lot without communicating anything of relevance. When it comes to talking through our avalanche concerns within our team we need to be able to express ourselves clearly and precisely. The ability to eliminate the white noise of chatter whilst negotiating complex avalanche terrain is a fundamental avalanche skill. If we’re going to be serious about having fun, we have to be serious.
There is zero room for miscommunication in the backcountry. Which rock does he mean we should ski to? Who did we decide was skiing this line last? Active listening is a huge part of communication. It’s a skill to be practiced, because when we’re stepping into our skis on the summit of a mountain the stoke is high, and more often than not our ears are turned off. Take a minute. Talk it out. Pause. Repeat your thought process and get verbal confirmation: Does that plan sound good to you? Yes? Ok?
My regular ski partner is naturally quiet and reserved whilst I am naturally grumpy and always think I know best. This is not a good recipe for effective communication in the backcountry. Fortunately, we have recognised these biases within our team of two and we make time to counter them by having a rule to have an avalanche conversation at natural transition points in our ski day; such as stripping skins or taking a water break. We create a space during a natural break in the day to ask each other the questions that we have been mulling over in our heads. Have you seen anything weird with the snow…how do you feel about the stability today? Is our plan for the day still a good idea now we’re in the terrain or should we go for the low angle option? Incorporating these discussions into our day helps counteract our biases. It’s a simple and effective way to confirm or deny observations and by so doing increase our margin of safety.
The best backcountry ski teams are a democracy. Everyone is working to the same goal and discussing their snow, weather and terrain concerns as the day unfolds. For this reason, I don’t like skiing with strangers. I don’t like skiing with friends of friends who have asked to tag along for the afternoon. I don’t know their avalanche skills should things go wrong nor their tolerance to risk, and skiing in the backcountry isn’t the place to find out. The inclusion of strangers turns your team back into a group. By skiing with people we know and trust we facilitate effective communication. Either way it’s hard to ignore key words and phrases:
This isn’t safe.
This feels dangerous.
I’m not happy with this decision.
Can we please stop for a minute?
Why is this a good idea?
These phrases are actually hard to say, that’s because they’re extremely powerful. They are almost impossible to ignore regardless of the group dynamics such as the expert halo heuristic or the level of stoke about the skiing that’s about to unfold. Keep these phases tucked away in your avalanche tool box and be brave enough to pull them out if you need them.
A quick note from FATMAP…
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This post was written by Mike Austin of Avalanche Geeks. They are the avalanche safety partner of FATMAP, an avalanche education company that provides courses and training for the public and mountain professionals in the European Alps & Scotland.
