 Poster: A snowHead
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Layne asked
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| I find it surprising that such experienced skiers are getting caught after all the discussions about this years snowpack. Am I being harsh? I know anyone can get caught out. There but for the grace of god and all that... |
I can suggest some reasons and maybe snowheads have their own, perhaps better, ideas
i. experts probably spend more time in the mountains so even with reduced risk they will feature higher in the stats
ii. when the risk is 3 or 4 for most of the season people are tempted out anyway, hoping their expertise will let them find safe routes
iii. we shouldn't confuse expertise with experience or being a good skier, avalanches are rare and experience is not the best teacher in this area
Why this year with the talk of a complicated snowpack? After a flurry of incidents around Christmas with the first big winter snows there have just been a trickle of incidents, perhaps people feel the whole avalanche thing has been overdone.
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Overdone, or in your (obviously informed) opinion has the snow pack stabilised?
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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The guide who gave the avalanche talk a group of us attended in Les Deux Alpes last month emphasized that knowledge about avalanches is incomplete and the factors are very complex. The pisteur present told us about quite a major and unexpected avalanche the previous week where they had been unable to pinpoint the cause. Nobody had been caught in it, thankfully.
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Many years ago, I watched a documentary on the work done by the people at the avalanche centre in Davos. They stressed time and time again that theirs was a very inexact science.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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davidof, I am afraid I don't have any additional ideas, (other than noting that avalanche safety is more of an art than a science), but your point 3 resonates with the idea that perceived risk can diminish with increased "familiarity". I am sure that this is not the case with experienced professionals in last weeks sad cases.
But one can imagine as you look out at (say) last weeks bluebird days with lots of fresh, that the turn of year warnings and accident rates are suddenly a whole world away. Thinking about it, that was perhaps partially a factor in the lucky escape discussed in Utah in December (?) where a very experienced party got it a bit wrong.
Might one also suggest that in some cases, some guides feel "pressured" by some clients to take that little extra risk?
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Familiarity: "I've skiied this face in much worse conditions dozens of times before and it's been fine, and look you can see the lodge from here"
Social Proof: "Pierre is going up today, says its fine and he's been skiing here since he was three"
Commitment : "Well, we've hiked this far, we may as well go for it"
Scarcity: "Everywhere else is so tracked out and we're not predicted anything fresh for weeks"
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The mountains don't know that you are an expert.
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Just because one is an expert doesn't mean he can't get caught out. Sometimes risks has to be taken and accidents will happen despite precautions taken and check lists. I doubt that this season the risk level will ever go below 3, but people will be still skiing off-piste.
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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| never summer wrote: |
| I doubt that this season the risk level will ever go below 3 |
Errr, we've had quite a few days with risk level 2 on the BERA here in the Vanoise in the last few weeks...
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davidof,
Agree with your points above, and we had quite a bit of talk about the snow pack on our course in Chamonix the other week, our guides and instructors were more worried about crevasses than avalanches as the snow had been blown around some what, exposing rocks, crevasses and the like which were not there a week before.
I always think that in some resorts the pressure from the clients to ski fresh tracks off piste is one of the contributing factors that is overlooked to much these days. I say some resorts for reasons as well! 
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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Expert skiiers tend to ski steeper runs which by their nature are more likely to avalanche, they are also more likely to be found off piste which again makes them more vulnerable.
Professional skiiers are perhaps even more at risk, instructors and guides earn their living by taking others skiing there will always be an element of "the client has requested this" going on, a good guide will of course always tell their client that the risk is too high, but there will occasionally be avalanches in unpredictable locations for reasons unknown
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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For me, that experts get caught out, is probably the reason why I am a scaredy cat and always stay on the piste.
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Isn't this the same question as 'why do professional racing car drivers die in car crashes?'
The exposure to risk is an order of magnitude higher than the average Joe, and 'expert' does not equate to 'infallible/immortal/omnipotent'. Perhaps it helps if you refer to them as 'so-called experts' instead.
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You know it makes sense.
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| davidof wrote: |
i. experts probably spend more time in the mountains so even with reduced risk they will feature higher in the stats
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Purely being pedantic, but risk to an individual is a factor of exposure so the increased exposure is pushing their risk up.
What they are reducing (arguably) with their "expert" knowledge is the likelihood that they will trigger an avalance in the first place. So while their risk per hour may be lower than the comparable "non-expert" skiier their total individual risk will be higher due to the increased exposure time (as evidenced by higher fatality stats...).
A more effective way of comparing the stats might be to break it down to risk/hr or risk/day for various skiier groups - but of course there are issues calculating this because numbers of skiier days for backcountry skiiers is tough to estimate.
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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The two cases in the previous thread were interesting in that:
Cabou was ski touring alone. Nothing per se wrong with that, except of course, you stand very little chance of being rescued should you get avalanched. I get the impression that he was skiing in area he knew very well. But that kind of comes back to my original thoughts. It seems to have been made clear this season, that it is different, and unusually stable.
Of course, you can put any isolated case down as one off. But then there is the second case. 1km, another very experienced skier was also caught. A guide leading a large group she died of the injuries sustained in the avalanche. The fact that two ava's were triggered so close on the same day suggests perhaps a more general misreading of the conditions.
All deaths are saddening of course. And of course, predicting avalanches is not an exact science, I just have an uneasy feeling that people, even experts, are not heeding the warnings that seemed to me to have been widely made.
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Poster: A snowHead
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davidof, Because nature does not give flying monkeys what you know or don't, it changes so even when you plan carefully and do everything right there may be something you missed or nature has changed!
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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bobmcstuff, I think that's what davidof said. Reduced (one hopes) probability but increased exposure.
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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and another possibility - knowing the risks doesn't stop you taking them. Just look at all those people doing extreme things in half pipes - they are experts, it's hugely dangerous (the toll of riders who have been killed or have traumatic brain injuries attests to that) but they still do it and seek to master ever more impossible tricks.
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davidof, human cognition is full of shortcuts and biases, experts are no less immune to that than others and in fact expertise and familiarity can lead you to underestimate risks whereas a lack of expertise tends to make people more cautious (as long as they are aware of the potential risk). Couple that with spending lots of time exposed to the risk of avalanche and hey presto lots of experts get avalanched. Couple that with managing avalanche risk being an inexact discipline.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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Also no amount of education and experience will make a stupid person smart or constrain the ego of a total plonker. I know a local guide who is a good skiier and climber but he is a thick as a bucket full of concrete. The human factor is a hard thing to allow for.
Last edited by Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do. on Tue 25-02-14 20:10; edited 1 time in total
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Another point which is hard to pin down: these peoples living is based on entering a potentially very risky environment every single day. This is something they are committed to doing in good and bad conditions every day for another 10 or 40 years. When you are young you don't ponder much about risk, but when you get older, how to put this, you must be at least become more cogniscent of stresses of tthis work. Of course every individual is different, but I would imagine many people need in this situation to adapt a risk-acceptant attitude, whatever will be will be, as in he/she can only do their best and hope for the best. The same way as a surgeon has to accept they will have complications once on a while. Without this acceptance that there will be bad outcomes which oftentimes you couldn't have prevented unless you didn't go out on the mountain or do the operation, you will be ineffective at the other end. The only other choice would be to embrace conservatism, become afraid of the mountain, but this is not compatible with making a living when risk is 3 or more for most of season.
Not sure if I verbalised that correctly
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Sound knowledge and decision making will mean that you ski slopes that have a low/very low risk of sliding, but the more often you do this the higher the chances that one day you will just happen to be extremely unlucky.
Making the right decisions stacks the odds in your favour, but you can still fall foul of an extremely unlucky roll of the dice.
Making bad decisions makes accidents much more likely but there will always be the element of luck, good and bad.
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| peanuthead wrote: |
| The same way as a surgeon has to accept they will have complications once on a while. Without this acceptance that there will be bad outcomes which oftentimes you couldn't have prevented unless you didn't go out on the mountain or do the operation, you will be ineffective at the other end. |
I fully understand the difficulty of surgical complications. As a surgeon I have to accept that i cannot reduce risk of " events" to zero.
Here is what i do/ have done over the years to try and make myself better at managing complications
1) Do what you can to reduce exposure , in surgery that means reading the situation, learning what looks like high risk, being particularly cautious with high risk situations, working with experts ( usually my anaesthetist ) who also reads the situation well and is quick to pick up when things start to go bad. I also have super specialised, so I deal with a very small number of problems ( the knee) so I see the same diagnosis again and again. Understanding that the risk today is the same probability as yesterday ( eg 2%) Just because yesterday went well that has no ability to reduce today's risk, its still 2%. I the learn to read the " conditions" much better. If something looks like trouble it often is.
2) I have a system in place to make the situation more robust when i do suddenly have a complication that comes unexpectedly. What differentiates experienced surgeons, is not that they don't get complications, but, how they deal with them . I have a team who will act very quickly when it goes wrong. I will direct the team and decide what skills are required for the situation we are faced with.
Surgical complications ( and avalanches ) are at the long tail end of the curve of probability ( in other words they are are infrequent enough that you just cannot predict them in many cases)
A fascinating analogy peanuthead right on the money
Jonathan Bell
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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Davidof answers the question well in his own post.
I would also add
1) The most fun skiing you can find is fresh snow on a 25-40 degree slopes. These are also the most avalanche prone slopes. Therefore those actively seeking to ski "good snow" are always taking some kind of risk.
2) Statistically avalanches are rare events (compared to the % chance of being killed in a car crash etc). Often when people make "dubious" decisions nothing happens. Imagine you ski a slope on a cat 3 or 4 day. If you have a good run and the slope doesnt avalanche then you quickly build up a false sense of security that you are making "good decisions". When actually you are perhaps just increasing risk, depending on an element of luck, and *may* eventually be caught out.
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Haggis_Trap,
You are describing a Black Swan event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory.
A full expanation of most of the above posts can be found in " Antifragility"
I found Nassim Taleb' s book, Antifragility, one of the most powerful reads of the last decade.
Jonathan Bell
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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Thanks for everyone whose posted their good ideas to this thread.
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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Having fully established prior knowledge and familiarity to the area are insufficient to "prevent" being caught on avalanches, I also wonder how much does weather pattern change affects the "knowledge base" of these experts?
There's been more talk about "unstable snowpack this year" every year! Perhaps due to global weather change, what used to be pretty good area for off-piste skiing are getting less so with the passing of each year?
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Jonathan Bell, that looks like a pretty tough read....
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You know it makes sense.
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abc, This season it's due to dry and cold December and also high winds. There is weak layer and it can be found on all aspects this season.
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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| pam w wrote: |
| Jonathan Bell, that looks like a pretty tough read.... |
It is but worth it.
It's an extraordinary book
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Poster: A snowHead
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Jonathan Bell, maybe I'll get it, and pass it on to my son if it's too much like hard work; he loves stuff like that.
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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| Avalanche Poodle wrote: |
| The mountains don't know that you are an expert. |
Although somehow they seem to figure out that you are a poodle 
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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Actually the risk has been 3 or less for most of the season in many places…PDS being one.
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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Thanks for the prompt name change 
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| Quote: |
As my name seems to be ignored and everyone still calls me Scarpa
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Similar for me. Shall I revert?
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Actually, that might be difficult, as the previous persona, albeit dormant, still exists. Maybe a swap?
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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Nice !
Jonathan Bell
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FAQ
As my name seems to be ignored and everyone still calls me Scarpa, perhaps I should now be Scarpa the Avalanche Poodle.