In 2019 I was searching for the next thing. I’d finished the second edition of The Alaska Factor. We had the Alaska Guide Collective sorted out. Guiding was going great. What do I do now? I was trolling for ideas, walking out through the frozen Fred Meyer parking lot, when I realized maybe I was ready to start writing an avalanche book. I’d thought about it for years, but I felt like I didn’t understand the topic well enough. Then, after teaching a bazillion avalanche courses, I finally felt ready.

You may ask, why another avalanche book? Bruce Tremper’s Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain is an incredible book. Listen to this:

We go out into avalanche terrain; nothing happens. We go out again; nothing happens. We go out again and again and again; still no avalanches. Yes! There's nothing like success! But here's the critical fact: from my experience, any given avalanche slope is stable around 95 percent of the time. So if we know absolutely nothing about avalanches, we automatically get a nineteen-times-out-of-twenty success rate. It's like playing a slot machine where the quarters jingle into your cup on every pull, but on the twentieth pull, that one-armed bandit not only takes all your quarters back, it charges your credit card $10,000, and three big goons throw a blanket over you, pummel you with baseball bats, and throw you into the street. After you recover, you think it must have been a fluke. You were winning on every pull. So you tiptoe back in the game, and the quarters jingle away, but eventually, here it comes again: the credit card charge, blanket, and baseball bats. It takes a lot of pulls to learn the downside of the game. Thus, nearly everyone mistakes luck for skill. I certainly did.

Wow! That’s tough to follow. Tremper is a super hero in the avalanche world. Still, I felt there was room for another avalanche book. Something different. I’ve never ski patrolled and I’ve never avalanche forecasted like Tremper, but I have spent a lot of time avoiding avalanches in remote Alaska. I wanted to write a book that was full color, fun to look at, and contains the way I think avalanches.

Writing The Avalanche Factor took four years. One year to get the whole thing down. A year to revise it into something presentable. And another two years to solicit edits from anyone willing to read it and then incorporate those edits. Any day I wasn’t up to guide at 5am, I’d be up to write. For some reason my brain is fully tuned at 5am in the quite dark.

Like The Alaska Factor, I self-published this book. For the first two editions of The Alaska Factor I used a print broker. I paid the print broker for four hours of work to get the indesign document in order. Last summer I decided to skip the print broker middle man and work directly with the printer for the third edition of The Alaska Factor. Then I found out what the print broker did in those four hours of work. It took me three months to sort out the corrections. Turns out there’s not one type of black and a GRACoL really messes with the colors. So I was pretty nervous when I sent off The Avalanche Factor this summer. It came back with two comments: “The spine width is off, but we fixed that for you”, and “Please add the ISBN number to the title page.” I guess I learned something.

Kirsten Cohen got me started on the graphics. And well over 50 people edited chapters or the whole book. The Avalanche Review editor Lynne Wolfe edited the entire book. I found out that Anchorage local Jason Kwiatkowski is a critical thinker. Every one of his edits, I thought, “Oh shit, he’s right,” and it would take me hours to sort out.

Being a good editor takes serious skill. I’m not talking about typos and punctuation. I’m talking about structure, content, telling me to delete entire sections that took days of work, and then suggesting whole new sections that will take days more of work. Big time book writers have professional editors for this editing process. I could have hired one of those for thousands of dollars. But it turns out, I know a world-class editor really well. That’s my Mom.

Molly Stock is a retired science professor who has a passion for editing. She could could take my Dad’s papers on particle dispersion and make them readable. She is an avid learner and furiously curious. She’s never been a backcountry skier, but she understands logic and science and the mentality of backcountry skiers. Her profession evolved through entomology, artificial intelligence before it was hip, and then onto teaching graduate students how to be graduate students. She went through two full drafts of this book, sending me hundreds of pages of comments. Some of these comments took weeks to fix. Her favorite comment was “This make no sense!” and “Non sequitur!” It was so fun gaining her knowledge through countless phone conversations and edits. And I feel so lucky to have shared this experience with my her.

I’ve enjoyed writing for many years, so I know when an article is getting close. It has good flow between paragraphs that are clear and concise. After three and half years of work on this book, the Intro was close. But Mom was itching for a third edit. So I sent the Intro to her. She returned 15 single-spaced pages of edits. I used 90% of those edits.

During the writing I battled my avalanche demons that kept saying, “You’re wrong,” and “Who are you to be writing about avalanches?” Over the years those feelings waned. Writing this book has helped me get over that hump now, I hope.

Another common thought I had was, “Why is this so complicated?” Why does it need to be a 300-page book? Mom kept reminding me that everything gets more complicated as you learn more about it. Everything seems easy if you know little. Ignorance is bliss. The Dunning-Kruger effect. And that’s okay. You can keep avalanches simple by simply avoiding avalanche terrain. Then this book would be just ten pages long.

Or, to push it a bit further, you could avoid avalanche terrain when there are red flags. That’s going back back to the basics of avalanche avoidance like people have been doing for thousands of years.

One warm week during the Klondike gold rush in 1898 none of the locals would go into the mountains because it was too warm. That’s a red flag for rapid warming. In the Palm Sunday Avalanche, 69 stampeders were killed, but not a single local. The locals knew the basics of avalanche avoidance.

The problem is we’re skiers. We’re like the stampeders. We want that gold, really badly. It gets complex because we want to push it. We want nice snow at a nice angle. That means we need to know more. And so the book gets thicker….

This book is also 300+ pages because avalanches are complex. We’re dealing with nature here. There’s a lot going on. It would be easier if we lived closer to nature, outside in a tent in the mountains, so we could be connected. It would also be easier if we had generations of family knowledge passed down to us about avalanches. But most of us live in houses cut off from the weather. We drive in cars and work in offices. So we need to learn and pay attention when we’re outside, and try to connect back to nature. The good thing is we all have that ability to connect to nature. It’s programmed into our psyche. But we need to work at it. I know I have to!

There are hundreds of thousands of things going on in this photo. We have to sort through it all and figure out what’s important.

Avalanches are also difficult because it’s an intangible problem. You often can’t get your hands on the problem. It looks like a beautiful powder slope, but there’s an insidious little layer of flat crystals poised to knock down the entire snowpack like a house of cards.

That looks like nice snow. I don’t see anything dangerous….

It’s not simple like rock climbing—hold on like this and don’t fall off, or ice climbing—thwack in the tool like this and don’t fall off, or mountaineering—walk like this under a deathly huge pack at a deathly slow pace. Avoiding avalanches takes more. We need to shift our mindset from inside mode to outside mode. So how do we do this?

My single best piece of advice is to just stand there. Stand there, look around, and give it time to soak in. I started noticing I have many photos of my avalanche professional friends who are just standing there, looking around. Observing nature. Sorting through the complex environment.

Professional ski guides Brad Cosgrove and Henry Munter at Turnagain Pass.

When beating my head against this book for four years I had countless epiphanies. Little ideas where pieces of the puzzle would match up. My favorite epiphany came in the frozen FedEx parking lot. It’s funny how frozen parking lots are good places for epiphanies. I visualized the Avalanche Avoidance System. It’s a simple graphic that shows how we avoid avalanches during a day of backcountry skiing.

The Avalanche Avoidance System starts with planning your trip at home. Once at the trailhead we do a series of checks: group gear, radio, airbag, beacon, and communicating at this first decision point. Once in the backcountry, it’s an ongoing cycle of communicating with partners, observing conditions, and applying margins for safety. At the end of the day, if we want to improve decisions on future trips, debrief with yourself or partners.

I also learned that avoiding avalanches is not about managing risk. There’s too much uncertainty to manage risk. And what is risk anyway? Instead we’re managing uncertainty. It’s acknowledging that we never fully know what’s going on in the snowpack. So we must add margins for safety because we don’t know exactly when or where it will avalanche. We think we know, but we don’t really know. So we take three steps back from that invisible line. A margin for safety between you and the potential avalanche.

I’m excited to get this book out there and start getting feedback. Backcountry skiers are a passionate bunch who are dealing with an intangible problem. This is prime breeding ground for strong opinions. I’m prepared to swallow my pride and listen to the feedback. Any strong opinion can only improve my knowledge and this book. I even hope some of my ideas are forward enough that people will say "You can't say that!" All the the world’s great ideas came from genius' working extremely hard and not caring what other people think. The problem is, I’m not a genius, and I care way too much about what people think. I can still dream big about Joe’s Avalanche Paradigm Shift.

My Dad talked about his research in particle dispersion. Because there was so much unknown about particle dispersion it bred a lot of strong opinions and attitudes, “Oh, I do know what’s going on.” But then suddenly computers could model particle dispersion. It leveled the playing field. The posturing went away and they could get on with their research. I hope I’m not around when the snowpack is modeled and projected onto our goggles so we know exactly where to turn to avoid the avalanches. I’d rather understand and think like the snow.

A month before sending the book off to the printer, and four years after starting this project, I was still coming across sections that seemed obviously wrong in hindsight. "What the fuck was I thinking?" But I’ve learned to cherish those moments. They’re why I love avalanches. I'm constantly learning and having my thinking turn upside down. And if I don’t get any comments, and people think I have it figured out, well, then I guess I should switch to golf or curling or walleye fishing.