The record storms that swept the West Elk Mountains over the last week have blessed area residents with epic ski conditions, particularly in the backcountry. Yet the flip side of those conditions — as evidenced by a large slide Thursday morning that buried part of a parking area in a popular backcountry ski area near Marble — is that avalanche danger grows more dire with each inch of new snow.
On Wednesday night, about 40 backcountry skiers — including many local veterans — gathered at the Cripple Creek Backcountry Ski Shop in Carbondale to discuss the mounting avalanche danger. The group was led by local backcountry buff and former Climbing magazine editor Michael Kennedy, along with Blase Reardon, the Aspen zone avalanche forecaster for the Colorado Avalanche Information Center.
Inevitably, there was some discussion of smart backcountry safety tricks, like packing Kool-Aid in case of a whiteout snow storm so you can make a fluorescent snowball and roll it down the slope to learn the terrain. But while the group could easily have focused exclusively on shop talk and snow science, they zeroed in instead on a less tangible aspect of avalanche risk: the psychology of backcountry travel.
Despite the fact that the snow totals this winter are head and shoulders above last winter — and perhaps any winter since 2007/08 — the Colorado snow pack always has been dangerous, according to Kennedy. How skiers decide to move about in the backcountry, he said, is just as important as the snow underfoot.
“The Colorado snow pack is just a really bad snow pack, and it always has been,” Kennedy said, referencing the alternating periods of snow and sun that create persistent weak layers and dangerous slide conditions across the state every winter. “The more you’re out there, the more you realize how little you actually know. Certainty is a very dangerous thing in the backcountry in Colorado.”
Pitkin County is the most lethal avalanche area in the most lethal avalanche state in the nation. Two people died in avalanches in the county last year, and avalanches have killed 44 people here over the last 60 years.
Avalanche deaths have increased across the country in recent decades, thanks partly to improvements in backcountry gear — new lightweight alpine touring equipment, for instance — that makes it easier for more people to venture outside of the ski area boundary.
Avalanche fatalities in the U.S. have risen from an average of between 10 and 15 per season in the 1980s and 1990s to nearly 30 per season today. So far this season, two people have been killed in avalanches in Colorado.
On Wednesday, Kennedy and Reardon reviewed several dangerous mental traps that backcountry skiers can unconsciously fall into, including the fallacy that if they’ve skied something before — last week, for instance — it’s safe to ski it now. Other common errors include assuming that if the expert you are skiing with thinks conditions are safe, so should you, or the notion that if your group agrees that something is safe to ski in the morning, you ought to ski it in the afternoon regardless of conditions.
Lou Dawson, a veteran backcountry skier and the founder of the popular website Wildsnow.com, said one of the most common roots of poor decision making among backcountry skiers is the herd mentality, characterized by a fear to form or voice your own opinions about the snow pack.
“So many of the largest avalanche accidents that we’ve seen in the last couple of years have been as a result of funny group dynamics,” said Dawson. “It’s important for people to think for themselves. I see a lot of the herd mentality in the backcountry, and I would ask people to really work on the American ideal of being an individualist.”
A critical part of avalanche safety, Kennedy said, is choosing your backcountry companions wisely and ensuring that their tolerance of avalanche risk matches your own. Group size also is a critical factor, since unconscious competitive tensions often surface in large groups.
“Three to four people is an ideal group size,” Kennedy said. “Anything larger than that and someone really has to take charge.”
When one person takes the lead, Reardon said, someone else often unconsciously resists their authority, perhaps by slowing down or speeding up the group or seeking their own route up a slope. Such unconscious competition can be dangerous because it causes unnecessary fatigue and distracts skiers from focusing on the snow conditions.
“If you are breaking trail and you can hear the people behind you carrying on a conversation, you are probably setting a well-angled skin track,” said Reardon. “If no one is talking [because they’re fatigued], that’s a ‘watch out’ situation.”
Kennedy and Reardon both emphasized the importance of relentless self-examination in the backcountry, and of evaluating your decisions even when they don’t lead to near misses or avalanche events.
“When you get in the car [at day’s end], it helps to ask yourself: at what point today were we at the most risk?” Reardon said. “Don’t mistake the fact that you didn’t get caught for a good decision.”
nelson@nelsonharvey.com