How To Plan an Amazing Ski Tour ⛷☀
From gathering data to getting out on the trail, plan better tours this spring.
Why Is Planning Important?
Planning a ski tour in the backcountry well before you clip into your skis offers a host of advantages. Even if you intend to drop into some of the familiar back bowls at your favourite resort, doing some planning can provide valuable rewards. It allows us to choose the right objective for the current snow conditions. That equals not only safety but it also gives us a much higher likelihood of skiing the best snow on the mountain.
Athletes, ski guides and experienced local experts have all learned to plan their day with experience and training, but not all of us have the same amount of time to gain this level of proficiency and skill. However, if you avoid the planning part of your day because you’re not confident in your abilities, then it can lead to problems on the mountain. This article is going to walk through how we can increase our confidence by knowing what to look for when planning a ski tour.
For a great example of the how important the planning process is check out part 6 of our ‘How To: XV’ series. Snowboarding icon Xavier De Le Rue goes through the process, gear and the tools he uses that can help you increase your safety and ensure you have the best possible time on the hill.
When Do I Start?
The detailed planning for a day’s riding in the backcountry usually starts the evening before a ski tour. But that’s commonly combined with baseline information that we should have about the snowpack right from the beginning of winter. We should be collecting as much information as possible about the snow conditions and weather as soon as we decide we want to tour in a particular area.
For most of us who don’t live in the location where we’re going to be skiing, we won’t have such detailed knowledge of the season’s snow conditions, but it’s important you try to gather as much information as you can. From the internet, social media, local ski guides or trusted friends who live in the area. This will help you understand if there are any key underlying issues in the snowpack such as persistent weak layers, for example.
If you’ve been lax in gathering this information, then at the very least you should follow the avalanche forecast and weather reports in the week leading up to your trip. Some helpful questions to ask yourself are:
- Has the weather drastically changed?
- Has there been a lot of recent strong winds? What aspects may have been affected by the wind? Has there been recent snowfall? How much snow?
- Have temperatures risen suddenly?
- How much avalanche activity has been reported recently?
These are some of the questions that will add to your overall understanding of what’s been going on regarding the potential avalanche hazards and get you thinking about where the available options are that will reduce your avalanche risk on your trip.
Detailed Planning
By now, you should have a reasonable understanding of the weather and snowpack history of your planned area, but before you choose what route you would like to take, then you will need to combine it with the most recent avalanche forecast and apply this new information to determine what options you have available.
An avalanche forecast, after all, provides us with time-relevant and high-quality data from a qualified expert. We’re always in information deficit when it comes to the snowpack, so this trusted information source will help you fill in the gaps — what aspects are most affected by recent weather events? At what altitude will the hazard change — if at all? What is the prime avalanche hazard concern on the day of your tour?
Remember, aspect, altitude and slope gradient are all critical pieces of information to consider in route planning.
Looking at the avalanche rose will give us a good snapshot of the information, but the devil is in the detail. What type of avalanche concern is the issue right now, and how big a concern is it? Perhaps it’s a recent storm slab, or maybe it’s wet loose avalanches on southern aspects from solar warming. How will that avalanche concern affect our planned mountain or our route? Will it snow? Will there be wind? Will there be visibility? Knowledge is powder. By using the avalanche forecast both as a planning tool and and examining past reports as a historical record we can build up a strong mental image of the snow conditions we’re likely to encounter before we step onto the mountain.
Plan the day
Let’s imagine we’re planning our ski day. We’re going to use the weather and avalanche forecasts to filter down to the best place to ski. We are thinking primarily about safety and second about general conditions including snow quality. We’ll use the forecasts to decide if, where and when to ski.
For example, the weather forecast says it will be snowy with low cloud and poor visibility, this means we will stay around the tree line and avoid the high alpine terrain. If the snow is coming in on an east wind, then we will be keen to ski the westerly aspects, because that is where all the fresh, high-quality snow will be deposited, and we don’t want to ski wind scoured slopes. A northerly aspect would also be good as it is springtime and that is where the cold snow will be protected from the sun. Now we have decided the elevation and aspects that we wish to ski; it is time to consult the map and guidebook to choose an appropriate route.
Using FATMAP
FATMAP and traditional guidebooks will give us several options at tree line on westerly and northerly aspects. That is great, but we are not familiar with the area, so we will load up FATMAP and have a closer look at the terrain to see how these routes interact with the terrain.
Just how steep is the terrain in reality? By adding the avalanche angle filter feature, we can see slope angles and see how much of the terrain on the tour we are considering will be either avalanche prone or threatened by avalanches from connected slopes above them. We can also take the historical snowpack information and combine it with the latest avalanche forecast, then apply it to the map with simple terrain overlays. In this way, we will start to develop an understanding as to how appropriate the terrain is we are preparing to commit to.
Create a ‘Plan B’
While exploring the map, we should also look at other options — creating a ‘plan B’. This backup route should be on a different aspect of our preferred route with plenty of simple low angle terrain so as not to have as many avalanche concerns. We will keep that tucked in our back pockets as our get out of jail card. We should always have options because if we plan just the one route, then it is hard to deviate from it, even if it turns out to be a poor choice on the day.
Navigating a route as we move through unfamiliar mountains is hard and prone to error. While we are in the digital mapping phase of our preparation we should mark some key waypoints onto our digital map; perhaps draw our route for the day on the map and export them all onto a GPS device or download the area offline onto your phone. That way we get all the heavy navigational lifting out of the way while sitting at our desk, so reducing our chance of a navigation error.
Even if we’re confident about our ability to navigate by map and compass without error, we don’t want to spend all of our energy navigating when we are in the mountains. Navigation will significantly reduce our mental bandwidth for other tasks such as keeping an eye on the snowpack or talking through our options and observations with our ski partners as we move around the mountain - or ski powder!
Once all that is done, we can get our kit together and packed. Like the waypoints transferred to the GPS or adding them with the FATMAP app, doing this the night before as part of our preparation gives us another small margin of safety. We don’t want to be packing when rushed, sleepy and stressed in the morning when items could be forgotten. Because we have already done our route planning, we already know if we’ll need an axe and boot crampons or glacier kit. The next morning all we need to do is eat, get caffeinated and we are good to go.
Implementation
As we finally head into the mountains on the morning of our ski tour, we have to be mindful that we have to work around any avalanche concerns we have flagged during the planning phase. So for the first few days of a trip we’ll have planned routes that contain ski lines that are mellow and simple in fairly low consequence terrain, that way we can begin to address the information deficit we mentioned earlier in a reserved manner and start to build a picture of any instabilities in the snowpack as we explore our new surroundings. Starting off by being conservative in the choice of our terrain gives us good margins of safety.
Terrain Progression
This conservative approach to skiing in an unfamiliar area or a place that we’ve not visited for several weeks is called terrain progression. In the first couple of days of a trip we should start by skiing low consequence terrain that lacks complexity. Using FATMAP, we can see the shape of the terrain easily from our laptop in detail before we’re on the ground, giving us another margin of safety.
As our confidence grows from what we see and experience in these early days it will allow us to plan routes that progress from an ‘assessment’ phase to a ‘stepping out’ phase where we can slowly become bolder in our choice of terrain and start pushing into bigger, more committing lines that have a higher consequence should they avalanche.
Eventually after many days of positive feedback from the snowpack and an absence of avalanche activity we can consider progressing towards a mindset of ‘open season’, where we can be confident in the stability of the snowpack and plan to ski the boldest of lines.
Utilising terrain progression along with a methodical planning process that we use routinely requires a disciplined mindset. We don’t associate the freedom of skiing with methodical planning and discipline, but we should be mindful that the mountains are not a benign forgiving environment. The two go together, being a disciplined, organised backcountry skier allows for a lifetime of freedom in the mountains and powder turns.
Planning Summary Tick-list
- Track significant weather and avalanche events several days/ weeks out.
- Detailed planning starts the night before.
- Closely examine the avalanche and weather forecasts, not just the headline hazard rating.
- Plans routes to fit the conditions — don’t start off with a route you wish to ride & make the conditions fit.
- Examine the terrain you are considering on FATMAP for elevation, aspect & avalanche terrain.
- Always create a Plan B — a simpler, low angle alternative.
- Do the navigational heavy lifting the night before. Drop waypoints onto your map at key places & export them to a mobile GPS device.
- Terrain Progression — plan routes that start your week simple and build up a picture of the snowpack stability before jumping into bigger lines with higher consequences.
Avalanche Geeks 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.
