Decision Making in Avalanche Terrain: Pt.III - Me
- Henry
- Apr 22
- 9 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
What does avalanche decision making actually look like in practice?
In this special three part series, I review three incidents that sparked conversations about avalanche safety, in my head and amongst my friends, when out on the slopes.
By breaking down these episodes, we can learn much about avalanche safety; but, perhaps more importantly, we can begin to understand what decision making in avalanche terrain actually looks like, something we're told to do in avi courses but may not have the tools to do straight away.
Reaping The Whirlwind
I felt the ski pop off first, more than anything else.
You don’t realise the tension a set of touring pins can apply on the toepiece of a ski boot until it’s no longer there, your foot suddenly free to adhere to the angles of gravity rather than the skin track it was glued to merely moments ago.
Looking up and ahead of me, I realised I still had a long way to go until the first island of safety. About 75yds ahead of me, part of the traverse track had broken off, and avalanched down the slope – a miniscule size D0 slide that resulted from the soft slab being baked in the rapidly approaching midday sun being pushed off and down the slope.
I still had a couple hundred yards of terrain to cross, a lot of it above the magic 30° slope angle, plenty more of it baked into soft slab, and almost all of it with plenty of materiel above to come down on top of me, if it so felt like it.
I sighed, disappointed in myself more than anything else. The fear came flooding back soon after. Once again I found myself minus a ski on a skin track traversing serious, difficult terrain. The first time round we were (comparatively) young and innocent, bounding unafraid into a patch of boilderplate ice and ending up with skis, poles and dignity strewn across the snow miles from anyone else.
This, like a fine whisky, was a fear matured and coloured by age and experience. I had been here before, I had seen this before, and, more than anything else, my avalanche paranoia came flooding back; so much for the good work we had done over the week preceding this.
Roughly two hours earlier, we had set off to conquer the Balme de l’Ours glacier, col, and, hiopefully the Ponte de Sanna, one of the most dramatic – yet accessible – peaks in the Val d’Isere region. It lies at the end of a long valley, in essence a continuation of the Manchet Valley that so many of Val d’Isere’s epic off piste routes feed down into.
It is a tour we had done before; two years ago we set off to complete our first ever ski tour by ourselves, choosing Balme de l’Ours because it is accessible yet feels like a “proper” ski tour, miles away from the nearest ski lift.
That time, we completed it via the southern edge of the route – the north facing aspect. This year, to give ourselves enough time to get the Col and summit, we aimed for the northern edge of the route – the south facing aspect.
This piece is about far more than a missing ski. If you’ve read the previous pieces in this series, you will know that conversations about decision making in avalanche risk terrain have dominated our skiing this week. We’ve dug snow pits, dryly observed the risk management – or lack thereof – of other skiers, and dissected our own follies that had led us into danger.
So let’s go back to the start of the day and work out what went wrong, despite – or because of – our best efforts.
Sowing the Wind
We met at at 0900 exactly. Well, we had aimed to, certainly. One of our small group of three experienced skiers had to run to the shop first to collect a ski repaired after some fairly major surgery, and, thanks to the incompetence of the shop in question leaving them in the back of their van, by the time we got moving it was around 0930.
It was warm heading up the gondola, too. Warmer than it had been throughout the week previously. Thankfully, the cloud had kept off, so there would be no further waiting around.
From the top of the gondola we set off down towards Borsat, used instead of Grand Pre because we wanted to access the upper traverse. See, there are two ways up to the Balme de l’Ours glacier. Previously we had done the southern route, but this involved dropping down into the valley to then skin up and out. Instead, we aimed for the northerly or upper route, which consisted of a much flatter traverse-like track. From the top of Borsat, it stays high pretty much the whole way along the valley, joining the lower track right before it kicks up at the end to the glacier. Without the drop and resultant climb, we could save enough time to hit the col at the very end of the valley and, ideally, Pointe de la Sana, too.
If you had read the previous pieces in this series, two things should have triggered some serious alarm bells based on the above description.
We had planned to take the south facing route of the two options, which was flying in the face of every bit of intel we had collected over the course of the week prior. We know that the snowpack is seriously stable on north facing slopes, and much of the damage was being done on everything but true north facing slopes.
Similarly, a high traverse line puts us in the danger of many slopes prone to avalanching, as we saw previously with our friends above Pays Desert. The avalanche forecast for today was calling for exclusively wet snow avalanche problems; as the snowpack warms up, the melting snow acts as lubricant, allowing slabs to slide over each other. This was of particular concern on south facing slopes, doubling up the concern we should have been feeling when planning this route.
I’d like to drop in a really quick aside here. As we skied this week, we witnessed the snowpack transition from winter to spring before our very ideas. That meant the type of avalanche problem changed daily, and often was one thing on some slopes, such as new snow and wind slab, but was others on other slopes – such as wet melt snow. Whilst this was complex to try and navigate, one thing was uniquely true: the avalanche forecast was always right. Always. No matter what the avalanche problem was forecast on the day, this was reflected in the results we witnessed in the field. I get that there are plenty of experience people paid to do this, but my hats off to them, they hit the nail on the head every time.
Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled programming …
Finally, this half hour delay first thing in the morning probably pushed us the wrong side of comfortable for many of these risks. The wet snow risk is elevated as the sun warms up and warms the snow, so the earlier you can cross it the better.
We have traditionally been quite good at recognising when slopes are transitioning into an avalanche risk in the sun, and getting out of there before things turn south, but for some reason today was the day we decided to play chicken with the avalanche risk.
Despite everything, every lesson we had witnessed, been a part of, or discussed, we waded right into the shark infested waters we had promised ourselves we were going to try so hard to avoid.
Harnessing the Wind
So how did we get out of this? How did we decide to play the hand we were dealt/dealt ourselves?
This is where your decision making comes into play. Yeah, fine, it had been a bit shit up until now, but there is nothing to sharpen the senses like a little bit of impeding death.
We came back to the one adage that never fails when juggling avalanche risk; terrain is the answer. No matter what the question regarding avalanche risk is, it can be avoided by your choice of terrain. Remember, avalanches only occur on terrain between 30 and 45° inclination; very very rarely, rarely enough to be considered utterly anomoulous, to slides occur on slopes inclined less than 30°, and there is a sweet spot around 38° where most human-triggered avalanches occur.
Therefore, avoid terrain in this window. It really is that simple. So that is what we set out to do. We very carefully picked our way around corners to see what was ahead; crossing right under old slide paths or areas with loads of material stacked up ready to pop? No sir, not today, we’re going to avoid it.
Occasionally we got things a bit wrong; see how I opened this piece. The fear in my head was mostly irrational, a combination of the poor experience I’d had in this position before and remembering a story I’d listened to on a podcast about a ski guide triggering an avalanche because he was the only one to bootpack a slopes, whereas everyone else skinned, and his ski boot driving the extra half inch into the snowpack impacted deeper into the snowpack than the others triggered a weak layer and a slide back on to his group.
I think it was called The Rest is Paranoia?
Fundamentally, however, we had ended up on this slope because it was mostly safe … there wasn’t a lot of snow above us to collapse down onto the track, and the bowl below was small and free of rocks. If anything happened, I’d slide for a bit and might be buried, but it would be small and manageable. My friends had passed through and were waiting on islands of safety for me, so were on hand to dig if the worst happens.
And whilst soft slabs are an avalanche risk, they were only just beginning to form. Soft slabs also have the benefit of, well, being soft; they break up easily and carry far less material than hard slabs, such as ice and wind slab. They also don’t propagate nearly as much as other avalanche types, meaning if you do collapse the snowpack, the collapse won’t spread creating small avalanches.
At one point, we went as far to transition back to ski mode and whizzed down into the bowl below us, before skinning back up the other side to avoid risky terrain, burning at least 20 minutes but ensure we all got home safe.
Finally, we came back to another adage; did everyone get home safe? I’ve mentioned this before, and indeed have an entire post lined up about it. This is more than shooting your mates a text or making sure no one slips over on the way home from après, it is a rule of thumb that influences decision making in the field.
Fundamentally, we gave up on Pointe de la Sana fairly early on, and soon gave up on going for the col, too. Yes, it was a shame not to make these objectives, but we knew we were skiing far too late in the day to risk these objectives. We would be tired, the snowpack would continue to deteriorate, and we still had to ski down and back to the flat afterwards.
And, we communicated all of this. Whether we were picking our way through a gnarly bit of terrain, or changing our plans entirely, we communicated these changes and revisions to our plan clearly and precisely, ensuring we were all familiar with what we were doing, where we were going, and how we were doing it. This was a long way from how things had gone in previous years, and was the cherry on top of our learning cake from this week.
In the end, we amended our objectives, but still had an awesome day out in the mountains. We put in the effort of touring all the way out into the middle of nowhere, we played around making snow angels at 3,000m, then we skied awesome powder through some stunning scenery on the way back. And most importantly, we were all there to share a whisky and a cigar on the balcony watching the sun go down; we all got home safe.
Final Thoughts
Whether you have read just one or all of this three part series, I hope it has helped you. Maybe it had helped you to overcome your paranoia having just completed an avalanche safety course, or maybe you want to get into avalanche safety but, simply, don’t know what it looks like. Maybe you have been looking for reinforcement for your own decisions, and I hope this has helped provide that. Planning, communication and awareness, in equal measure, are all important to achieve whatever it is you are hoping to achieve in the backcountry, and I hope these pieces have helped you do that.
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