Avoiding Avalanches in Remote Alaska

Skiing far from the road, in areas without a professional avalanche forecast, is the essence of backcountry skiing in Alaska. In these remote areas, uncertainty is high and the adventure dial is on max. Compared to the relative safety of roadside skiing, more technical knowledge, more experience, and a different mindset are needed.

I’ve been skiing in remote Alaska for thirty years and trying my best to avoid avalanches the entire time. So far I’ve been lucky, but it’s not wise to depend on luck for safety. To avoid avalanches, my goal is to ditch the luck part and rely more on knowledge, experience, and a better understanding of uncertainty to manage avalanche risk. This is a work in progress. I’m perpetually questioning and rethinking the avalanche problem. So please get in touch and share your ideas if this article resonates. I’d love to hear from you.

In this article I present a process for avoiding avalanches in remote Alaska. It’s a series of steps to go through on each trip. The process starts with training in the years before your trip, and planning in the weeks before the trip. Once in the field, it’s an ongoing cycle of observing conditions, forecasting avalanches, building route options, and adding margins for safety. A mindset of embracing uncertainty ties this backcountry cycle together in the field.

The Forecast

At roadside backcountry ski regions of Alaska, like Turnagain or Hatcher Pass, the professional avalanche forecast is a baseline of information before going into avalanche terrain. A team of highly skilled avalanche professionals build the forecast, like at the Chugach National Forest Avalanche Information Center or Hatcher Pass Avalanche Center. Their job is to assess avalanche conditions, consolidate observations from the community, and to present the information to the public in usable form. In regions without a professional avalanche forecast, you become the forecaster. You must do all the work of a forecasting team. Skiing in regions without a professional forecast is a different mindset and way of operating.

Training

The first part of skiing in remote Alaska is training. Skiing in remote Alaska requires a lot of training. Of course you need good fitness and riding ability to move around. Gain backcountry skills through a progression of backcountry trips, so going into remote Alaska isn’t a big jump. You also need avalanche skills. The Recreational Level 2 avalanche course is geared toward being your own forecaster. It is said that without a Rec 2 you’re like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

Nick D’Alessio teaching Rec 2 avalanche students how to assess a weak layer in a pit. Rec 2 snowpits are more for forecasting whereas Rec 1 snowpits are more about learning.

With the training you also need experience and practice. Experience adds data to your mental database allowing you to make better decisions by recognizing situations. Deliberate practice is where the learning really happens though. Deliberate practice is painful, type two fun. An example of deliberate practice is turning around before the summit because of avalanche conditions, or digging a two-meter hole in hard snow for rescue practice, or taking an avalanche course rather than going skiing. It isn’t exactly fun at the moment, but it’s how we learn best.

The second part of skiing in remote Alaska is planing your trip. This starts in the months and weeks before the trip. There is a surprising amount of information about weather and snow conditions in remote Alaska including remote weather stations, aviation cameras, trip reports, etc. Alaska adventurer Luc Mehl has a great weather resources page on his website (thingstolucat.com/ddtp-weather-resources). Pilots are another great resource as they know current conditions in remote Alaska better than anyone. I often won’t decide exactly where to go until we’re leaning up against a loaded plane and I’m drilling the pilot for information.

Remote Alaska Conditions

• NRCS Mountain Snowpack Maps: wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/cgibin/ak_snow.pl?state=alaska

• Bush Pilots: They know remote conditions the best, even if they don’t ski or climb.

• NWS Alaska Snow Data: weather.gov/aprfc/Snow_Depth

• FAA Aviation Weather Cameras: weathercams.faa.gov

• AOOS Real Time Sensors: data.aoos.org/maps/sensors/#

Part of planning is forecasting the avalanche danger and problems you may encounter. Make a guess based on the information you found. Was there a big recent storm that may have dumped five feet on top of a persistent weak layer? Was it a drier than normal season? Spring is the ideal time to ski in remote Alaska because the days are long, snowpack is deep, temps are warmer, and there are less persistent avalanche problems.

Before the trip, be armed with several entirely different trips options. Alaska adventurers know that staying flexible with trip options is fundamental to trip success in Alaska. For example, your first choice may be the central Chugach, but if it’s a raging storm there be ready to shift to the central Talkeetna Mountains. Fixating on one trip option is setting yourself up for disappointment. Select places that have a range of terrain options. From simple terrain for elevated avalanche danger, to complex terrain for low danger.

Even as you head into the backcountry, things will not go as planned. My favorite is when flying into a remote area that we’ve been planning on for months and the pilot says, “Sorry, we can’t land there.” That means I get to window shop for a new place. The adventure level just went up another notch. Embracing adventure, the unknown, and uncertainty is what feeds the Alaska adventure addict. If you want things to go as planned, ski somewhere besides Alaska.

In the Backcountry

After training and planning, it’s time to move into remote Alaska by air, boat, snow machine, or good old human muscle. To avoid avalanches while in the backcountry, use an ongoing cycle of observing conditions, forecasting avalanches, building route options, and adding margins for safety. These steps build upon the planning you did before the trip: it’s a continuum of studying conditions and routes.

Jeff Conaway driving his personal adventure machine into the backcountry. He’s looking at the snow cover, checking for recent avalanches and wind loading.

Embracing uncertainty is the common theme that ties this backcountry cycle together. In the snowy mountains we don’t know exactly what going in the snowpack. In remote Alaska, without a professional forecasts, we know the least. Like life in general, we rarely have a clear choice when making a decision, unless we only use data that supports our bias. Eliminating bias is impossible, even says the world authority Daniel Kahneman, so we need to adapt ways to work with bias to minimize its negative effects.

One useful technique to embrace uncertainty in remote Alaska is to say “I’m not sure.” Often. This statement from poker champion Annie Duke1 acknowledges uncertainty and promotes open discussion in the group.

Another useful technique for embracing uncertainty is Roger Atkins’ strategic mindset for avalanche decision making under uncertainty. Begin your trip in remote Alaska with a strategic mindset of Assessment where “There is a high degree of uncertainty about conditions, such as when…entering new terrain….” The operating strategy is to “Select conservative terrain in which to operate confidently while more information is gathered to gain confidence in the hazard assessment.” This means maintaining big margins for safety and making a lot of observations.

Assessment strategic mindset with typical conditions and operating strategy. From Yin, Yang, and You. Roger Atkins. ISSW 2014.

Observe Conditions

Observing conditions is the first part of the backcountry cycle. As soon as you get into the mountains you can get your hands on the conditions you forecasted during trip planning. This is called ground truthing. Look for red flags for unstable snow. Test the snowpack with slope tests, feel underfoot, extended column tests, etc. An Observation Worksheet helps learn this process.

The probe is especially useful for learning about the new snowpack in a remote area. Get out your probe as soon as you get there. Feel for snowpack depth and layering. Is there a strong slab over a weak layer? Keep your probe out as you make your first track, probing the layers along the way.

Florian Wade measuring snow depth in the Alaska Range last spring. This trip was to the normally crowded Pika Glacier, but this year it was dead: no air traffic, no planes, no other skiers, just us.

One of the biggest differences about remote Alaska is I don’t have professional avalanche forecasters like Wendy Wagner and Aleph Johnston-Bloom digging a bunch of pits for me. I have to dig the pits myself. In pits, as with the probe, focuss on searching for a deep slab avalanche problem. These are the big and deadly avalanches that are hard to identify without an avalanche forecast. Nobody wants to get surprised by a deep slab.

Forecast Avalanches

The second part of the backcountry cycle is to forecast avalanche danger and problems based on the observations you made. This process is laid out in the pithy paper entitled Conceptual Model of Avalanche Hazard.

The structure of an avalanche problem is defined by its type, location, likelihood and size. From the Conceptual Model of Avalanche Hazard.

One way to distill the Conceptual Model into a usable format, and to learn the process, is with a Forecasting Worksheet. This helps describe the components of each avalanche problem that are present, come up with an overall avalanche danger, and determine what observations will most reduce the uncertainty.

A useful forecasting tool for remote locations is the Dangerator developed by the Canadians. The Dangerator says your starting point when arriving in the remote backcountry is considerable. Considerable means “human-triggered avalanches are likely.” That’s the real deal. Avoid avalanche terrain when you first arrive until you make observations that may reduce uncertainty.

Another problem with a considerable danger rating is this is where uncertainty about triggering an avalanche is often highest. At moderate and considerable you often don’t really know what’s going on in the snowpack and decisions are difficult. On the other hand, decisions are easy at low danger where it probably won’t avalanche. Decisions are also easy at high and extreme where it probably will avalanche.

Uncertainty compared to avalanche danger. Graphic by Joe Stock and Kirsten Cohen with help from Keith Robine and Karl Birkeland.

Build Route Options

The third part of the backcountry cycle, after making observations and forecasting avalanches, is to build route options. Notch back all of your route options during the entire trip to account for uncertainty and lack of rescue resources. Start on simple, non-avalanche terrain for the first day or two as you make observations and assess conditions. As observations reduce uncertainty, you might step out into more aggressive terrain, or your route options may stay mellow and simple the entire trip.

In this photo we have a variety of route options, from this low angle powder slope to steep and committing lines if our danger rating and uncertainty go down.

Add Margins For Safety

The final part of the backcountry cycle is to add margins for safety. These margins are travel techniques to help asure we don’t get caught in an avalanche, and to increase our odds of survival if we do get caught. In remote Alaska these margins need to be bigger than normal to account for high uncertainty and the lack of rescue resources. Rescue won’t be coming any time soon.

We planned our entire trip around getting this glory chute. Halfway up the snow began feeling slabby. In doubt, we turned around. Turning around is my favorite margin for safety. I use it all the time. Everyone in the group knew that we were ready to turn around if things felt at all weird. The chute is still waiting patiently for us to come back for another crack.

The margins of safety we use in everyday backcountry skiing are important such as spreading out, stopping in a safe zone, and spotting our partner. In remote Alaska, other margins also become more important such as starting on small terrain, turning around if in doubt, ski testing before committing to a slope, and slowing down. Habitually using fat margins of safety will save your ass more times that you will every know.

There’s a Time and a Place

Getting into big complex terrain in remote Alaska requires a unique combination of conditions and people. You need to have found low danger after searching everywhere. And your group needs to be in agreement and feeling good about the conditions. Don’t expect this perfect combination on your first trip. You’re on nature’s schedule.

Mike Schmid on the run of dreams. We’d been on numerous trips to remote Alaska to nail this perfect combination of avalanche conditions and group. Every trip had been a wild and memorable adventure into the unknown.

I figure I nail conditions on one out of every five trips. The trick is to enjoy every trip. Those that go on many trips into remote Alaska enjoy the process more than the goal. Learn to enjoy terrain that is low angle and has low consequences. Enjoy camping and the simple life. One trip we flew into remote Alaska and dug for nine days straight, trying to stay afloat in a colossal snowstorm. It took us back to our simple roots of survival: dig, eat, sleep, read, talk, repeat. Boredom is precious these days.

It may seem like I’ve turned backcountry skiing into a laboratory research experiment. You can ignore all of this and just go skiing, and you’ll probably be okay, but it is more sustainable if you have a method to the madness. Avoiding avalanches in remote Alaska is simply learning how to think like nature. We have these skills engrained in our DNA from five billion years of programming. The trick is to slow down and apply those engrained skills to think like the mountains.

More Reading

1 Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts, Annie Duke, 2018.

2 Yin, Yang, and You. Roger Atkins. ISSW 2014.

3 A Conceptual Model of Avalanche Hazard, Statham and Others, Natural Hazards, 2017.

Thank You

Aleph Johnston-Bloom, Cathy Flanagan, Karl Birkeland, Keith Robine, Molly Stock, and Wendy Wagner.

Double Glacier

Glenn, James, Paul and I needed an adventure. A place with no information. Where we could just go and see what happens. We asked our man Steve Gruhn for trip ideas. From a list of options, we picked a remote corner of the Neacola Mountains, a sub-range of the Aleutian Range. A region I'd neglected since 2011. 

We didn't go to the Neacolas. 

Getting to remote is Alaska is the first obstacle. At Sportsman's Air Service at Lake Hood we checked the FAA weather cameras with Joe Schuster. Marginal weather, but we decided to get in the Super Cub and give the flight a shot. The problem was Schuster said, "It's your call." That means I would pay the bill for a botched flight. Flights to the middle of nowhere Alaska are not cheap.

We found out mountaineers are not priority at Sportsman's. This flight was taking wine-tasting caterers out to the Tordrillo Mountain Lodge. What's just out of sight in this photo are two pallets of skinned beaver carcasses, waiting to be transported to hunting lodges for bear-baiting.

Entering the Neacolas, above the Blockade Glacier and the McArthur River, riding the Super Cub like a bucking bronc in pounding wind. Our first choice landing zone wasn't happening. Pilot Ben Knapp and I turned east toward Cook Inlet. Looking for another zone. Recently, I've grown to enjoy picking base camp locations on the fly. Just looking out the window, then pointing over the pilot's shoulder and saying into the headset, "Right there!" And anyway, trips are not supposed to go as planned in Alaska. If they went as planned, it wouldn't be an adventure.

Ben landed the Cub on a broad glacial ridge surrounded by numerous peaks and extruded himself from the plane. Fortunately, back at Lake Hood in Anchorage, minutes before getting on the plane, I downloaded a low-res map of the entire Neacola and Chigmit region onto my phone. When I located myself on the phone, I learned our location: Double Glacier in the Chigmit Mountains. Oh yeah!

The Boys, as my wife calls us. I've been going on trips with Glenn Wilson (blue jacket) for 20 years, James Kesterson for 15 years and Paul Muscat (right) for 10 years. These trips include: Mount Baker, Denali, Mount Marcus Baker, Mount Bona, Iliamna Volcano, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Mount Logan, Mount Chamberlin, Mount Isto and now the Double Glacier. Many memories.

On this trip we climbed peaks every day. All of them with no sign of humans. I didn't even get a chance to knock down cairns. On this trip we had a lot of rain and snow. That’s the weather necessary for 4,000-foot mountains to be draped in thick glaciers.

We managed the marginal weather with hours and hours and hours of BSing. Like only long-time friends can do. Here's Glenn, James and Paul having the twentieth impassioned BS session of the day. Beyond is Cook Inlet with the oil and gas platforms barely visible.

Our most significant peak was the first known ascent of Peak 6,402. Remote, wild and waaay out there.

This peak we turned around on due to avalanche conditions.

On our last day we woke at 11:30pm for a crack at Double Peak. At 6,818 feet Double Peak looks down on the entire zone. We made it to a few hundred feet from the summit, but were denied by steepness and avalanche conditions.

After a week of climbing many summits, and hours of fascinating conversation, we flew back to Anchorage over the Cook Inlet tidal wetlands and duck-hunting shacks.

Yet another trip of 100% success with best friends. I can't wait until our next installment James, Glenn and Paul!

Close Calls with Avalanches

“A close call is a free lesson. ”

— IFMGA Mountain Guide Larry Goldie

The fastest way to learn about avalanches is to almost get nailed by one. Not killed or hurt, just really scared. Where you can brush off the dust, thank Ullr, and analyze the shit out of what happened. 

Psychologists say we learn best from instant feedback. An example of instant feedback is pulling on a small handhold while climbing. If we don’t fall off, we get instant feedback that we made the right decision. They also say—notably Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers—that we need 10,000 hours in an instant feedback environment to become an expert. That means you can become an expert sport climber after 10 years of clipping a lot of bolts. 

Not so easy with avalanches. 

The problem with avalanches is they rarely provide instant feedback to the backcountry skier. If we ski a 35-degree powder slope during considerable danger, and it doesn’t avalanche, we get feedback that we made the right decision. But what if we skied within a meter of a trigger spot, that would have ripped out the entire face? Then the feedback we got was wrong. And we learned wrong. 

For us backcountry skiers, our best instant feedback on avalanches is when we actually start an avalanche. If you can accept that you’ve made a mistake, it’s time to debrief and learn. In the past couple years, I had three of these close encounters with avalanches. I survived, and learned. 

Lesson #1: The Coffee Avalanche

In mid-April 2015 I was on my third Denali Ski Base Camp in a row. This trip was with the Eagle Ski Club to the Coffee Glacier area. It was our third day of skiing in a zone I’d also skied the week before. The weather was clear, calm and warm. 

We started the day with a low angle glacier run to a steep moraine headwall. I stopped on the flat crest of the moraine and looked down to the powder field below. A client skied up to me on the flat moraine bench and said, “That looks good! Should we ski it?” I struggled with the desire for powder and a feeling the slope was not right. After all, I stood at this same place the week before and not skied the slope, but the powder looked so good….

Another client skied up and joined us on the moraine. We heard a small whoomph and the moraine wall below us fractured a meter deep. The avalanche sliced around the top of the moraine, ripping out of sight around the corner, spilling deep and heavy into the valley below. “Yeah, I guess we won’t ski that.”

After the avalanche we skied on northerly aspects, away from the runout of sun warmed slopes. The following days cooled, allowing us to ski steep chutes and powder fields with no more signs of instability. 

What the Coffee Avalanche Taught Me 

This was one of those situations where it’s normal, normal, normal, then boom! it’s not normal. It’s easy to become complacent when conditions remain the same for days on end. The problem occurs when there’s a subtle change in conditions, such as wind from a different direction, when we’ve let our guard down. Active backcountry skiers have all experienced those “I didn’t expect that!" moments. 

So how do we stay mindful to changing conditions? One technique that Todd Guyn suggested at ISSW 2016 is to say, “What am I missing out here?” The statement promotes discussion and thought. I've seen this statement work miracles while teaching at the Alaska Avalanche School. It often gets the quiet person to speak up and the unseen is made apparent.

Another learning point from this avalanche was to watch the first warm day after a storm. What is warm? It’s when you drag your skip pole and the snow lumps around your basket instead of piling like dry sand. It’s when snow powder plops off solar aspects rather than puffing down as spindrift or dry loose avalanches. 

This first warming and wetting of the snowpack from warmth—warmth from either solar or air temperature—can re-activate dormant weak layers. The wetted snow creeps and pulls downhill like a glacier, magnifying stress on weak layers below. 

Lesson #2: Flattop Mountain Avalanche

In March 2015, two teenage brothers from Florida joined me for skiing around Anchorage. We first tried Turnagain Pass, but it was pouring rain. We drove back to Anchorage and tried the Chugach Front Range from the Glen Alps trailhead. 

To introduce the brothers to the backcountry, we toured to the left edge of a 150-meter long wind slab to look at snow layers. The slope was about 15-meters high and tilted to 20 degrees, a full 10 degrees less than what’s normally considered avalanche terrain. I probed the pencil-hard slab with my probe, feeling a hollow layer of facets at the base, between the slab and rocks. A good place to show the brothers a weak layer. 

As I dug a meter to the ground, I felt a collapse and the entire slab began to move, slowly breaking into massive blocks. One brother was off the slab. I stepped off the moving slab, only to realize the other brother was sitting on the moving blocks, laughing, like a rabbit in the car headlights. I stepped back onto the moving slab and drug him off. The massive blocks moved five meters and stopped. Riding out the moving blocks might have worked, but getting sucked under would have sucked. 

What the Flattop Avalanche Taught Me 

This was my big wakeup call about hard slab avalanches. They let you get out in the middle with no feedback, then they crack far uphill from you. They seem to catch more avalanche professionals than any other avalanche type. 

This wind slab on Flattop seemed to have collapsed on the 20-degree slope where we stood and propagated 100 meters to where the slope steepened enough to move. The slab’s rigidity allowed it to pull out all the way back to the 20-degree slope where we stood. 

Being so close to a popular trailhead, I immediately worried people would find out it was me who was involved. I worried people would question my decision making. Bystanders tend to judge the abilities of the people involved in avalanches. This phenomenon is a natural instinct known as the attribution bias, better known as Monday morning quarterbacking. This causes us to judge rather than learn from avalanche accidents. The attribution bias has another side. When an accident happens to yourself, you tend to blame the circumstances rather than considering the mistakes you made. Either way, the attribution bias prevents learning. It's like shooting yourself in the foot. 

The Utah Avalanche Center has worked to shift away from a culture of blame in avalanche accidents. As former UAC director Bruce Tremper said to Sportgevity: 

“At the Utah Avalanche Center, we have a strict policy to not criticize the decisions of people who tell us about their incidents. We don’t care who they are and what decisions led them to it. We just want to know about the avalanche activity and snowpack conditions because that can help to save other lives.”

— Bruce Tremper

As bystanders to avalanche accidents, we need to take the it-could-have-been-me approach. As someone involved in an avalanche, we need to realize we made a mistake. Whether bystander or someone involved, the objective from each avalanche should be to learn and be better prepared next time. 

I met the Florida brothers the next morning for our second day of skiing. We actually nailed perfect conditions at Summit Lake. They told me they came to the conclusion that the avalanche was a rogue event. After thinking about it, I realized they were right. It was a rogue event. An outlier. They say snow is stable 95% of the time. That means avalanches are outlier events. Avoiding avalanches is about having an outlier mindset: to move a bit further out in the valley from the runout, to give the cornice a wider berth than is needed, to imagine the fracture line cracking higher than expected. 

That wind slab was five days old. Wind slabs often stabilize in a day, but not when they’re over persistent weak layers like a thick layer of advanced facets—an outlier situation that I hope to recognize next time. 

In a captivating youtube, Gordon Graham describes high risk/low frequency events in the fire service. He says these dangerous situations can be broken down into two groups: 

1. High risk/low frequency events where you have time to think. The solution, Graham says, is to “Slow down. Slooow down. Sloooooooooow down.” Slowing down has become one of the points in my 2017 system for avalanche avoidance.

2. High risk/low frequency events where you have no time to think. The solution: Graham says, is “They can be addressed through serious training.” Train for worst case scenarios.

Lesson #3: Ski Hill Avalanche

The end of March 2016 was storms, rain and avalanches in Southcentral Alaska. A return client, one that I really cared about, came for a week in the Alaska Range. Despite a horrendous weather forecast, we flew into the Alaska Range for the experience. Pilot Paul Roderick took us to our first choice location, it was too windy to land. He took us to our second choice location, avalanches had ravaged the slopes. Eventually, we landed near the Mountain House in the Ruth Gorge, a place best for climbing, and not so good for making turns. One small slope, called Ski Hill, rises above the Mountain House. 

Despite the gnarly weather, we had a blast camping and pumping 100-vertical meter runs on Ski Hill. The driving snow and raging wind made Ski Hill exciting and welcomed exercise. At the high shoulder of Ski Hill, where the slope steepens up to Mount Dickey, I probed with my ski pole and felt a hollow layer 50 centimeters down. I looked up and wondered if I was too close to the steeper slope above. 

The next day, in the raging storm, we avoided avalanche terrain by climbing a rocky ridge in the raging storm. We went to bed that night with the tent banging around like a bear wanted to be let in. The morning dawned clear, calm and cold. North America’s most rugged mountains glowed white under a deep blue sky. I looked toward Ski Hill and saw a fracture line cutting across the slope above on Dickey. The debris has splattered across Ski Hill. Not down Ski Hill, but sideways across Ski Hill. I felt nauseous and went back inside the tent. 

What the Ski Hill Avalanche Taught Me

I wondered why I skied so close to Dickey two days earlier. I had felt the weak layer. I knew the slope above had been loading. What was I thinking! The place where we stood had been obliterated by hundreds of tons of snow.

“Once you adopt a new view of the world (or any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.”

— Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow

This is called the Hindsight bias. The I-knew-it-all-along effect. We tend to distort the history of thinking in accordance to what we presently know. Hindsight is 20:20.

The Ski Hill avalanche was another reminder to look for outlier conditions. Ski Hill is probably safe 355 days a year. That means the outlier avalanche conditions occur 10 days a year. It’s those 10 days I need to watch out for. Like when it’s storming hard, I feel a weak layer and I’m feeling the pressure to satisfy clients. Then I need to adapt and listen to the mountains. 

Summary 

• Use the it-could-have-been-me approach to learn from avalanche incidents.

• Have an outlier mindset in avalanche terrain.

• Remember that hindsight is 20:20.

• To avoid complacency, ask “Is there something we missed?”

• Slow down when you have time to think.

“I hope for watercooler conversations that intelligently explore the lessons that can be learned from the past while resisting the lure of hindsight and the illusion of certainty. ”

— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“...if the consequences would have been severe or the event caused you to change your decision-making or practices, call it a near miss.
”

— American Avalanche Institute