The Only Factor By Doug Krause Memories of the early days of my ski bumdom are hazy at best, but sometime in the mid to late 90s I shuffled into the sharp dry breeze of the car park at the Silverthorne Recreation Center in Silverthorne, Colorado. Crap, I thought, this is one of those things I’m going to have to immerse myself in for a decade. I’d just finished a Level 1 avalanche class, my first taste of avalanche education, and felt no better prepared to actually ski in avalanche terrain than when I started. We saw slides of frozen dead people, were introduced to a dizzying array of grain forms, and learned about Bullseye Information, but for what? In the absence of obvious clues, I felt little better prepared to stand at the top of a slope and answer the relevant question. Will it go? Hence my frustration. It seemed as if I would need years and years of experience to have any hope of developing a whiff of useful expertise – useful for actually skiing good terrain that is, because, yeah, I hate golf. A couple years later I perched high on a rib of Arapahoe Basin’s East Wall talking to my boss on the radio. "Can we open it? ", he asked. Christ, I thought, I don’t know. It would be more than another decade before I felt comfortable managing the balance of evidence and uncertainty, but I had an intuitive grasp of each. Yes, we had evidence of stability. Yes, I had uncertainty regarding the remaining potential for ski triggering an avalanche. So, I guessed, like most skiers do in the face of uncertainty. Open ‘er up. It will probably be fine. I spent some years at Arapahoe Basin learning how to manage terrain and squatting in various holes staring vacantly at 20-layer sandwiches of wind slab and faceted crap. I learned to “never trust a depth hoar snowpack” which is not even remotely helpful advice. Welcome to Colorado folks. Everything is open, but I wouldn’t trust it. I learned to build a measure of trust from a series of wellplaced ka-friggin’-booms supplemented by the ravening hordes pounding those edgy grains into a perceived submission. I think it was 2001 when I started a decade long seasonal pilgrimage to Las Leñas, Argentina. This required significant deprogramming regarding what could and could not be skied. In those days digging a hole in Leñas was more likely to present a wall of white concrete than a poop cake. It was here, in the absence of my little pentolite buddies, that I began religiously implementing terrain margins. They saved my ass more than once. Intuitively I began thinking in terms of avalanche problem types, sensitivity, distribution,
exposure, consequence, and treatment – though I lacked the vocabulary to articulate these issues or ruminate on them in a logical fashion. The form and content of avalanche education assumed urgency for me in 2007 when I took command of the snow safety program at Silverton Mountain Ski Area. The safety and welfare of my friends and the public lay largely on my shoulders now and the gulf between what a ski patroller learns in the first couple years and what they become after eight or ten seasons spread like a foggy chasm with no obvious bridge. We cross this bridge – yet, how? Dumb luck? Mentorship? Trial and error? Yes. All of the above. The survivors show us what is possible by this path, yet our physical and emotional scars bear testament to the peril. There has got to be a better way, a missing link, a map that points the way forward. My true search began. I settled on communication as the first stone – the solid footing that would support us as we attempted to cross the invisible sky bridge between experience and expertise. Here was something not a part of traditional avalanche education, something that was critical and endemic. A skill inextricably entwined with our work that could be taught and practiced and mastered. Surely the benefits of such a skill would percolate through every other critical competency. But, of course, it wasn’t enough. The barely contained whirlwind of Alaskan heli-skiing reinforced my belief in communication skills and highlighted another neglected critical competency: situational awareness. Nothing like Alaskan heli-skiing to highlight any deficiencies in situational awareness. Turns out that can be broken down into its constituent parts and practiced. No more telling people to be the sponge, now we talked about observation planning and integrating those obs into mental models and using them to project forward and consider all that may pass. Here was another foundation stone of decision making. Managing teams in Colorado, and Alaska, and Japan led to the (clearly not) inevitable conviction that teamwork is another critical competency we can define and train for. When I want to learn about something my first step is to usually look for a book on the subject. Well, twenty years ago that was my first step; now, I go to the internet, peruse the fluff for a bit, then drill into the academia on Google Scholar. Avalanchistas cling to their bubbles like a spider trapped by NZAD 23
