Luck and Avoiding Avalanches

The Avalanche Review printed this article in spring 2024. Minor revisions here.

The next skier triggers the entire face. Conditions and partners align to make skiing in extreme terrain feel easy. The local avalanche guru dies in an avalanche. As Gallatin Avalanche Center director Doug Chabot says, “Luck is real, both good luck and bad luck.”

Luck can be defined as a chance occurrence that affects us. Luck is out of our control and unpredictable. What we can do is improve skill, which minimizes luck. Understanding this need to improve skill and reduce luck is important because avoiding avalanches does involve luck.

How Much Luck is Involved with Avoiding Avalanches?

In Michael Mauboussin’s book The Success Equation (Mauboussin 2012), he writes, “When a measure of luck is involved, a good process will have a good outcome but only over time.” Cause and effect are loosely linked in the short run. By that description, avoiding avalanches includes luck. Over a few tours or a season, an amateur may trigger as many unintentional avalanches as a professional, but over the long haul a professional will trigger less unintentional avalanches for the number of days out.

Mauboussin also describes how to test whether an activity includes luck. “Ask whether you can lose on purpose. In games of skill it’s clear you can lose intentionally, but when playing roulette or the lottery you can’t lose on purpose.” By that test, avoiding avalanches includes some luck because you can’t always lose (get avalanched) on purpose. 

“The lion tamer has the book on lion taming. She goes into the cage and she does everything by the book, but she still gets eaten by the lion.”
— Drew Hardesty, UAC 2023

Using myself as an example, I have spent decades working at improving my avalanche-avoidance skills, but luck is still involved. Although I have never been avalanched, I have unintentionally started many avalanches, a client of mine was avalanched and not hurt, and my climbing partner was killed by an avalanche. All of these can be viewed as combinations of good skill, poor skill, good luck, and bad luck. 

The Stories We Tell Ourselves 

Our experiences with avalanches can be difficult to understand and seem random. For example, an avalanche accident involving friends, or deep slab avalanches can appear as random outliers. The human mind creates cause and effect stories to simplify and better understand these complex experiences, just like everything we don’t truly understand. This pattern seeking is called the narrative fallacy. I didn’t trigger the deep slab because…. 

In addition to not understanding seemingly random events, the human mind also does poorly at understanding probabilities. The gambler’s fallacy is another narrative we tell ourselves in which we equate a random string of good luck to skill. Say we nail five days of skiing with stable snow, stable weather, and stable partners. Was that skill like we tend to think, or did we get lucky? 

An important way of thinking about probabilities is that above average outcomes tend to be followed by events that are more average. “Any activity that combines skill and luck will eventually revert to the mean,” says Maubuossin. For example, you may have good luck and ski many days in avalanche terrain during considerable avalanche danger. Reversion to the mean explains that your good luck will probably run out since the average likelihood for considerable danger is “human-triggered avalanches likely.”

“Skill and experience are how you change probabilities. Luck determines what side of the probability you fall on. ”
— Aaron Money, avid backcountry skier

Luck-Skill-Continuum

Gaining knowledge and experience don’t improve our luck. They improve our skill. Our ability to avoid avalanches lies on a luck-skill continuum. At one end of the spectrum are avalanche amateurs who rely more on luck. At the other end are professionals who rely more on skill, although they take on more lifetime risk. The important thing to consider is where your actions lie on this luck-skill spectrum. Then you can shift your actions and training to reduce luck, and move toward skill. It’s still a combination, though. One can be skilled and get lucky, or skilled and unlucky. 

Despite its sordid origins, The Rumsfeld Matrix helps explain how luck plays into avoiding avalanches. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said there are four quadrants of risk (Krogerus and Tschäppeler 2018). Luck would fall into the quadrant of unknown unknowns, the stuff we don’t know that we don’t know.

The Rumsfeld Matrix for backcountry skiers helps explain where luck lies within our decisions.

The Rumsfeld Matrix can be viewed on a bar graph with ranges for amateurs and professionals in avalanche terrain. The amateur relies more on luck. The professional relies more on knowledge, experience, and intuition. Neuroscience professor and backcountry skier Russ Costa says, “I think about it as uncertainty reduction, and the uncertainty that remains (there's always some) is luck.”

Amateurs rely more on luck than professionals. Professionals rely more on knowledge, experience, and intuition.

Bayesian updating is a useful way to describe a shift from luck to skill. Say the avalanche forecast danger is moderate for a storm slab problem, so you plan to ski in challenging terrain. Once in the field you notice numerous recent avalanches. Rather than staying on challenging terrain and relying on luck, or giving up and going home, you update your prior knowledge with this new information and change the slope-scale danger from moderate to considerable, and shift from challenging to simple terrain.

Improve Your Skill, Reduce Your Luck

When people say, “It all comes down to luck,” it prevents them from learning. As National Avalanche Center specialist Chris Lundy says (UAC 2023), “Luck in the backcountry is what makes it hard to develop expertise.” The wicked learning environment is due to the effect of luck on avalanche decisions. Luck in the complex avalanche environment creates unjustified confidence in those who are less skilled and experiencing good luck, and unjustified doubt in those who are skilled and experiencing bad luck. This makes avalanche expertise only attainable through a combination of experience and deliberate practice to learn the right lessons. Experience alone doesn’t develop avalanche expertise. Chabot says, “What we can control is being trained, fit and skilled so we can minimize the bad luck (he's buried and I have to dig him out fast), and maximize good luck (the slopes are more stable than I thought).”

Focus on the Process, Not the Outcome

With help from the Narrative Fallacy, we often confuse skill and luck. Our initial reaction to hearing about an accident is, I wouldn’t have done that, and use the explanation of Their poor skill, as a way to simplify and understand those mistakes. This self-serving bias also leads us to believe that I made all the right decisions, but then got unlucky. These ways of thinking about luck and skill fit into a process-outcome matrix (Parrish 2023).

Our confusion with skill and luck can be seen in a Process-Outcome Matrix (Parrish 2023). 

“Amateurs focus on the outcome. Professionals focus on the process.”
— Shane Parrish, Farnam Street

In environments that involve luck, a good outcome (eg. not getting avalanched) does not mean the process (eg. making observations) was good. “In activities where luck plays a strong role, the focus must be on process….where luck is a strong force, the link between process and outcome is broken.” says Mauboussin. In Clear Thinking (Parrish 2023) Shane Parrish calls it “The Process Principle: When you evaluate a decision, focus on the process you used to make the decision and not the outcome.” Improve process by gaining knowledge, experience, practice, and debriefing to learn the right lessons. Below are some ways to focus on the process to improve your skill and reduce your luck. 

How to Improve Your Skill and Reduce your Luck

1. Debrief. By acknowledging when you were lucky, you can better perceive those situations in the future and adjust course. Debrief at the end of the day to examine your sense- and decision-making process separate from the outcome. Beers and high fives alone don’t count. Asking “Did we get lucky today?” is a good debrief question. 

2. Don’t push your luck. Lucky streaks will end as the outcomes revert to the mean. Say you’ve started ski cutting large avalanches in the backcountry without being caught. Pushing your luck with a wild snowpack will eventually revert to the mean, which means getting avalanched.

3. Be prepared for good luck. If you get the ball, do you know which way to run? Arm yourself with a quiver of trips for when weather, snowpack, and partners align. Get advanced avalanche training and practice those skills so you’re in position when a potentially great new backcountry partner comes along. 

4. Be prepared for bad luck. Consider the consequences of bad luck. If the slope avalanches will I be okay or will I be dead? Make yourself lucky by choosing terrain that has an escape zone and a good runout, so if it avalanches the outcome isn’t “he was unlucky to die,” and is instead “he got lucky to not get buried.” Likewise, train for bad luck by practicing wilderness first aid, avalanche rescue, shelter building, fire building, sled evacuation, etc.

5. Learn from other’s bad luck. Fight your instinctive temptation to think, I wouldn’t have done that. Rather than attributing someone else’s accident to their poor skill, see what you can learn from their experience. Put yourself in their shoes, without the hindsight benefit of knowing about the avalanche. 

References

  • Chris Lundy on the Four-Letter Word of Decision Making. Utah Avalanche Center Podcast. January 23, 2023. 

  • Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler. The Decision Book. 2018.

  • Michael Mauboussin. The Success Equation. 2012.

  • Shane Parrish. Turning Pro: The Difference Between Amateurs and Professionals. Farnam Street blog, accessed February 25, 2024.

  • Shane Parrish. Clear Thinking. 2023.  

  • The Avalanche Review. Are We Good or Just Lucky? 36.3. 2018. 

Thank you for helping with this article

Aaron Money, Andrew Schauer, Bruce Tremper, Cathy Flanagan, Chris Lundy, Clint Schmidt, Doug Chabot, Lynne Wolfe, Mark Smiley, and Russ Costa. 

Skiing in Moderate and Considerable Danger

In many regions the avalanche danger hovers at moderate and considerable for most of the winter. This is where the most fatalities occur and where the most uncertainty lies. Plus, anytime we enter a remote region we start with a danger rating of considerable. So where can we ski during moderate and considerable danger and keep risk low?

In a nutshell, I avoid avalanche terrain during considerable danger. In moderate danger, it depends on the avalanche problem. If there is potential for large avalanches that could kill me I avoid avalanche terrain. Here is a more complicated answer:

First, for the simple answer. Use the Trip Planner from Avalanche Canada to relate avalanche danger to an ATES terrain rating. According to the Trip Planner, at moderate danger stay on simple and challenging terrain for normal caution. At considerable danger stay on simple terrain for normal caution. Accidents are infrequent at normal caution, green zone.

The Trip Planner portion of the Avaluator from Avalanche Canada.

Avalanche terrain includes slopes over 30 degrees, or challenging and higher on the Avalanche Terrain Exposure Scale.

Another answer for where to ski in moderate and considerable is to look at the size and distribution of avalanches within the forecast danger rating. Not all moderates are the same, nor are all considerables the same.

Moderate danger is defined as “small avalanches in specific areas; or large avalanches in isolated areas.” Considerable danger is defined as “small avalanches in many areas; or large avalanches in specific areas; or very large avalanches in isolated areas.” It’s wise to avoid avalanche terrain if there is potential for large avalanches. Large avalanches can be deadly even without terrain traps.

The North American Public Avalanche Danger Scale.

An example from the Chugach Avalanche Center forecast for Turnagain Pass for December 30, 2023. The size of these glide avalanches is large to very large. Stay away from avalanche terrain where there is potential for these large avalanches.

The more advanced, and more common, answer is to choose where to ski during moderate and considerable danger based on the current avalanche problems. Each avalanche problem requires a unique way to travel around. For example, moderate danger for a small dry loose avalanche problem may mean it’s okay to ski in avalanche terrain with normal caution. Moderate danger may also be for large and dangerous avalanche problems—deep slab, wet slab or glide—which means stay away from avalanche terrain because they could kill you.

For another example, it may be easy to ski in avalanche terrain with low risk during considerable danger for a wind slab problem if you can see the wind slabs. But blanket those wind slabs with four inches of powder and they become invisible, and then it’s wise to avoid avalanche terrain.

It takes a lot of time in the backcountry and/or advanced avalanche education to effectively use avalanche problems to decide where to ski in moderate and considerable danger.

Dry loose tend to be smaller and more predictable...avalanche terrain can be considered with normal caution. On the other hand, deep slab, wet slab and glide are destructive and unpredictable...avalanche terrain is not recommended.

Chugach Avalanche Center highest danger rating for March for winters 2022/23 on left to 2018/19 on right. There were periods of low danger, but it’s mostly moderate and considerable danger.

In spring and summer the danger goes to low more often. Save your stoke for spring! Unfortunately, the safest option is to avoid avalanche terrain altogether during moderate and considerable danger. If you do go into avalanche terrain, you acknowledge that injury or death is possible.

Guidelines

  1. In your early years of avalanche study, use the Avaluator Trip Planner to select an ATES recommendation for where to ski in moderate and considerable danger.

  2. Pay attention to the size and distribution of the possible avalanches on the Avalanche Danger Scale that are within the current forecast danger rating.

  3. As you gain more knowledge and experience, use avalanche problems to decide when and where to ski in moderate and considerable danger.

  4. Avoid avalanche terrain where there is potential for large avalanches.

  5. Save your stoke for spring, when danger is more often low.

More Reading

Writing The Avalanche Factor

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 to 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 editing in June 2023.

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. 

1898 Palm Sunday avalanche.

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.

Dave Stock at Rogers Pass.

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.

Joe's Avalanche Obsession

A couple years ago, a trip with five Québécois finally came together. On the first day we did a thorough trip plan and a trailhead check, we practiced avalanche rescue, and we started touring up from Turnagain Pass. The avalanche danger was at moderate for a persistent slab that was buried ten days earlier. The weak layer had shown no propagation or avalanches in over a week. But like the forecasters, I still did not trust the snowpack. As we toured, we dug a quick pit at 2,000 feet and another at 3,500 feet, but found no propagation. I couldn’t even find a weak layer. We continued climbing to the ridge, spreading out and spotting each other up the last steeper section.

Booting the last 100 feet to the ridge.

From the ridge I skied the slope first, making several ski cuts across the top short section of avalanche terrain before skiing a long, low angle powder run to beyond the runout. The next four skied, all experiencing the Alaska run of their dreams. The last person dropped into the slope and it avalanched, releasing about two feet deep and 200 feet across. He rode it 600 feet down, staying on the surface, and came to a gentle stop near us.

The 25-degree slope where most of the slab released.

A client of mine was avalanched. That’s a rough dose for a backcountry ski guide. We talked and debriefed about the avalanche at length. To the clients it appeared I did everything right. We skied together another nine days. It was easy to enjoy monster days of mellow powder skiing after the avalanche.

Of course I kept thinking about the avalanche. I’ve been studying avalanches my whole life, and now this happens. I came up with seven reminders of what I could have done better. 

  1. Take time with clients to include a thorough briefing, trailhead checks, rescue practice, and pits.

  2. Be meticulous in pits. 

  3. Surface hoar may not be visible on pit walls.

  4. Surface hoar avalanches move fast and on low angle slopes.

  5. Ask if am I pushing it for me, or for the clients? Both should be low priority.

  6. Always ski cut toward an escape zone.

  7. Good runouts are the difference between a ride and death.

But the main thing I thought was, “Wow! This is why I love avalanches!” Nobody was hurt, and now I get to learn a bunch.

I first heard about avalanches as a little kid when my dad took me backcountry skiing in the Wallowa Mountains in Oregon. He had a bunch of graduate students that were into backcountry skiing. As we toured into the Wallowas, I asked Dad what I was carrying in my pack and he said, “Your moon boots.” We made tele turns, that were mostly face plants, with long wooden skis and three pins. It took me 18 years to fix the heel and fix that problem. We practiced with Ramer avalanche beacons and ear pieces. One of Dad’s students gave an evening lecture on avalanche safety. Later in the trip, up through the trees, I heard an avalanche rumble down the mountain. I was hooked. 

Joe and Dave Stock in the Wallowas, Oregon.

I did my first avalanche project in sixth grade. I made a poster copied from a second edition of The Freedom of the Hills that showed a wise route going up through thick forest, and “NEVER!” written across the nice open ski terrain. I did every project in college and graduate school on avalanches. I was so lucky to have mentors like Karl Birkeland and Denny Hogan. Last spring I caught up with Denny at his home in Colorado. Denny has worked every job possible with avalanches. Denny showed me humility. He said you can’t be an avalanche expert because they are too complex. He also told me his wife always had his gravestone planned out. It would’ve read, “Should have known better.”

Denny Hogan at Independence Pass near his home in Buena Vista, Colorado.

My relationship with avalanches has gone up and down over the years. I grew up with parents who were science professors, so naturally I gravitated toward snow and avalanche research. I spent years head down bum up in snowpits. Then I didn’t dig a pit for ten years.

Working as a mountain guide I’ve felt like the doors have been wide open. I was taught the mountain guiding techniques, and then the constant message was, “Go for it. Guide anything you want.”

In the avalanche world, like in mountain guiding, I’ve also had many opportunities. I’ve also been told No many times. No, you’re wrong. No, you can’t do that. No, you can’t say that. I’ve often wondered why this is. Maybe it’s because avalanches are not well understood and often not tangible. You often can’t put your hands on this unseeable danger that lingers under powder. The lack of tangible evidence brings about a different ethos. It’s like some people feel they truly understand snow, and how it should be treated, and therefore they know the rules, and that Joe should be following those rules. 

Mountain guiding is much different. The mountain guiding problems are well-understood and tangible. For example, consider the Grand Couloir on the easiest route up Mont Blanc. Some guides won’t guide this route because of the rockfall. Other guides are up there every three days. There’s differences in opinion, but that’s okay because it’s an obvious danger. Everyone is allowed to think about it how they like. 

Looking down the Grand Couloir from the old Gouter Refuge on Mont Blanc. 2,000 feet of loose and falling rocks.

But maybe the real reason I’ve been told no many times in the avalanche world is because I’m a rogue. I think differently. I’ve never had a television. My childhood past time was digging holes in the Eastern Washington dirt. I’m bewildered by social media. Some people wonder if I grew up in a cave. 

Molly gardening in the rocks in El Chalten, Patagonia. One winter, Cathy and I met my Mom and Dad in El Chalten. Mom realized it was her place. She loves the mountains, the volatile weather, the gauchos, and the climbers. She’s been spending winters down there now for 15 years.

I definitely got the rogue gene from my mom. She’s a hyper passionate and obsessive person and fed those traits to me. She taught me that being passionate and obsessed are essential for living a full life. To her my obsessions were normal. Another parent would have had me heavily medicated. 

Now I’m so grateful to be a rogue. I realize that great things get done by the rogues I look up to. J Harlen Bretz didn’t discover the great floods of the Inland Northwest where I grew up by committee. Darwin didn’t get consensus before publishing The Origin of Species. Alfred Wegener proposed plate tectonics because he didn’t follow the rules, and was a rogue. I now realize that being a rogue means the avalanche world is wide open. Just like the mountain guiding world. Anything is possible. I can still make conservative avalanche decisions, but my avalanche thinking is going further out there as I strive to get closer to the truth. 

J Harlen Brentz who realized the Scablands of Eastern Washington, near where I grew up, originated from ice age floods. He spent years studying this landscape and 40 years defending his theory until it was finally accepted. He wrote, "Ideas without precedent are generally looked upon with disfavor and men are shocked if their conceptions of an orderly world are challenged."

Now I love improving my avalanche knowledge through teaching and ski guiding. Teaching avalanche courses with Nick and Elliot and fine-turning our Alaska Guide Collective curriculum has been a blast. I love the challenge of teaching students how to deal with this intangible problem. How do I teach students to make smart, data-driven decisions, when mine are mostly made through intuition? 

By comparison, teaching rock, ice and mountain climbing are a no brainer. Thwack your tools like this and don’t fall off. Climb the crack like so. Backup your rappel these 10 ways.

I also love using avalanche knowledge when ski guiding in remote Alaska. I’m not out there managing risk. I’m managing avalanche uncertainty. That’s about the coolest thing in the world. I love the cerebral game of making avalanche decisions, with a bunch of clients waiting for me to voice my intuition. Sometimes I feel like yelling out “Wait! Don’t trust me! There is too much uncertainty to trust me!”

At the top of our first run of the trip in the Alaska Range last spring. We remote triggered this slope as we skinned up to our first run. That reduces uncertainty, but now where do we ski?

My latest avalanche obsession was writing a book about avoiding them. I wanted to know more. I wanted to take my avalanche knowledge to the next level. I’ve wanted to write an avalanche safety book for years, and I finally felt ready. 

I started writing The Avalanche Factor in 2019. It took a full year to get it all down. Then a year of revising. Then two more years of collecting edits from anyone that would read it. Turns out it’s the world’s most confusing topic. How do you make a logical progression without red flags being a non-sequitur? What do you say about snow temperature? And how about the human factor? I do know that my human factor is pegged at red most of the time, so who am I to say? I learned that the more you know about human factor the better you are at justifying your stupid decisions. I also learned that the trick to reducing the human factor, and making better decisions, comes down to the tools you use to reduce it. Tools like slowing down, cultivating good partners, and using a system.

To get The Avalanche Factor done in four years meant any day I wasn’t up to guide at 5am, I be up to write. It was so much fun. That’s the thing about being obsessed and passionate. It’s really fun. It makes for a great life and I feel so lucky. It’s nice to have the first edition of the Avalanche Factor finished, but I miss the process. It’s like pulling off a big mountain trip. It feels great to have it done, but the anticipation of the trip, and the trip itself, are what the obsessed live for.

After writing The Avalanche Factor I do feel like I’ve taken my knowledge to the next level. I’m not an avalanche expert, because, like Denny told me, that’s not possible. But I do know way more. And I’m dying to keep learning. So please, let me know what you think about the book. I love getting critical feedback. And it will all be fed into the next edition.

Also while writing The Avalanche Factor I realized that avalanche education is a vast and wild frontier. We know that avalanche education is working, because the annual death rate has flat-lined, but there’s a better way. It needs a macro-dose of Psilocybin. A new way of teaching avalanche avoidance is waiting for us. Seeking that better way to avoid avalanches will keep me obsessed for a couple more decades. That and my wife Cathy. 

My avalanche obsession is one reason why backcountry skiing doesn’t get boring.