Here’s some thoughts I frequently find myself giving to people asking how to get into the backcountry.
The first thing is to understand it can be a long, complicated journey depending on your goals. It’s important to be realistic about your ability to commit the time, energy, and money to it. You need to understand the journey and set realistic goals. Here are a couple of basic milestones you can use as a reference for understanding what kind of goals to set and what kind of timeframe you might expect in achieving them:
- Being an effective, self-sufficient participant in a tour in simple (non-avalanche) terrain
- Being an effective leader in simple terrain
- Being a participant in tours in avalanche terrain
- Being a leader in tours in avalanche terrain
Now, there are a lot of subtle distinctions within these categories, but it’s a good generalized starting point. Let’s look a little more closely at the first two.
Participant in Simple Terrain
Timeframe: 1 season
Minimum Recommended Education: Self study, read a good overview text like Trempers Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain and practice some of the below skillsets. Overall: spend some time learning about and practicing with the key skillsets listed below or take a course catered to learning them. You want to show up to a AIARE course with a baseline of experience to get the most out of it.
Key Skillsets to Develop:
Self-Care
You will need the ability to take care of yourself in the winter mountain environment with appropriate gear selection and use. Getting a feel for the kinds of food and hydration strategies that your body enjoys as well as the physical output you enjoy while touring is important too.
Fundamental to self care gear: having the correct layering and equipment strategies for the three modes of travel: uphill, downhill, and stationary, is key.
Movement Skill
We want to be able to travel reliably and efficiently without holding up the group—this is valuable for both enjoyment and safety. Be proficient in the skin track with basic uphill movement skill and efficiency techniques as well as things like kick turns. Having your boots dialed in takes some experimentation and is essential. A common issue is boots that are too small–touring boots need to be fit differently than downhill boots. Make sure your getting them fit so they are comfortable on the uphill, not just performance oriented on the down hill.
Downhill movement skills are also important. You need to be able to travel safely and reliably in variable backcountry snow, not just on the packed snow you typically find in resorts. Being able to use survival skiing skills like downhill kick-turns and the wedge-cristie turn are invaluable.
Transition Skills
Being able to quickly and efficiently transition your gear from uphill to downhill is important. It should feel like you can transition your skis and clothing in 5 minutes or less without feeling rushed. Of course, a snack break in there is fine too.
Sense for the Mountain Snow Environment
This is the cornerstone of everything we do in the mountains. You must have a feel for how the snow will be and how that will affect what you do. This informs everything from avalanche danger to powder skiing. At a higher level, this becomes everything!
As a newer operator, you should begin tracking how conditions affect your movement skills and self-care. Anticipate the weather and the equipment you’ll need. Are your jackets warm enough? Anticipate the snow conditions—can you ski them safely and reliably? Will the up-track be icy and challenging for your skins or easy grippy powder? Take ownership of how these conditions will affect you and try to anticipate them ahead of time.
Leader in Simple Terrain
Timeframe: 2–3 seasons
Minimum Recommended Education: AIARE 1 Course, Basic First Aid and Emergency Response Training
Additional Skillsets to Develop:
Planning, Navigation, Track Setting
This is all about getting to the good snow while avoiding the hazards. In a leadership role, you become responsible for keeping the group away from hazards like avalanche terrain and finding snow conditions that suit your group and goals. Learning to use digital planning tools to create a route plan, as well effectively following that plan in the field, is the name of the game. Learn to use caltopo, its better than onX. Get it downloaded on you computer and make an account, download it on the phone and link the accounts. Plan you route, bring it into the field, track your real route and compare the two after you get home. You have to be able to connect to the map, before, during and after the field.
At this level, don’t expect to be perfect. Your main goal is to avoid hazards like avalanche terrain effectively while building your sense of the mountain snow environment and improving your fluency with the self care and movement skillsets.
You will also need to develop a feel components of winter navigation like how to create a skin track that allows the group to travel efficiently in the snow as well as more general elements of planning like travel time planing.
The Mountain Snow Environment and Interpreting the Avalanche Hazard
At this level, we are still focused on avoiding avalanche terrain, and an extremely nuanced understanding of the avalanche hazard is not essential. However, an entry-level understanding becomes very important, as we need to understand exactly what constitutes ‘avalanche terrain’ and how far we need to be from that terrain given the avalanche forecast.
A basic understanding of the North American Avalanche Danger Scale and how to interpret local avalanche forecasting resources is essential. Particularly how it relates to the potential size and runout of avalanche terrain. In some conditions, a very significant margin of avoidance is required around avalanche terrain, while in other instances, less is appropriate.
Emergency Response
Having a foundational knowledge of emergency response planning ensures the group can manage typical accidents associated with ski touring. We need to make sure a non-ambulatory injury doesn’t result in someone getting seriously injured or killed by exposure.
At this level, I emphasize avoiding avalanche terrain and don’t necessarily expect people to have advanced avalanche rescue skills, but introductory knowledge is recommended if tour plans have any uncertainty around your expected exposure to avalanche terrain.
Awareness of Group Dynamics and Decision-Making
Even as a budding recreational ski tourer, it’s important to understand that if you fall into the role of ‘the most experienced person’ leading the group, you will have undue influence on that group’s decision-making.
Everything from selecting objectives, to the uphill pace, and the groups ability to manage variable snow on the downhill are things you should start to become aware of and anticipating.
Consider things like: If you set a really fast pace and tire people out, that will predispose them to injury on the downhill. If you bring them to the top of a ski run with breakable crust, they might not be skilled enough to manage it and could get injured.
Making the Transition to Operating in Avalanche Terrain
This is a far more challenging problem to address. There are no longer certainties or concrete answers. Operating in steeper terrain we begin to have to manage and accept risk not avoid it. The difference there is paramount. In order to manage risk we need to understand it with a high level of detail and the experience required is substantially more than if we are simply avoiding it. This is a complex topic and will be address in another post.
How to Begin Building the Necessary Experience and Skillsets to get out there
There are three ways to understand the phenomena of the mountains as well as the skills we use to manage them:
- Formal concepts and education
- Direct experience
- Indirect experience and mentorship
At the ‘non-avalanche terrain level’, I focus more on experiential skill building. A level of just figuring it out is pretty effective—just avoid the hazards and go out and practice. Of course, coaching from a mentor or pro is a much faster way to get ahead on the experience curve and become more proficient. But in a lower consequence environment experiential learning is very effective.
A combination of around 1 mentorship/coaching day to every 5-10 days in the field can be a really cost effective combination for anymore motivated to progress quickly.
As we begin to consider interacting with avalanche hazard—i.e., we want to ski steep powder and therefore have to accept the possibility of encountering avalanches—we need a much more extensive database of experience, which is challenging to acquire given the increasing consequence of this objective.
Ultimately, we need to understand the phenomena conceptually and also build personal relationship with it. It’s more than just reading about how a wind slab avalanche forms—we need to know how it feels under our skis and in our hands? You need direct experience of the phenomena to really be able to recognize it in the field and change your travel strategy accordingly.
A good instructor has the depth of experience to bring you to the phenomena and show you how it feels. This is why an experienced backcountry skier is key—not just and experienced instructor. You need someone with a personal feel of the avalanche phenomenas.
It’s worth investing in an instructor who can give you all three parts: showing you the most recent research, showing you how it feels and sharing their experience with managing it. They will also help you gauge whether your consequence assessment is good enough to start experimenting with certain problem types on your own.
A good mentor will also connect you with the indirect experience that’s essential for managing dangerous phenomena that you can’t safely learn about firsthand under any circumstances—we can’t trigger a bunch of size-3 avalanches just to get a feel for them—we need to tap into the collective experience of the backcountry community to understand how to manage these kinds of hazards.
So Where to Start?
Take an AIARE course, but consider seeking out an instructor who can be a long-term mentor. There are plenty of proficient instructors, but you will get more value from someone you can build a productive relationship with over the longterm.
Avoid hiring an unspecified instructor or a generic course through a avalanche safety company or guide service—find someone who will guide you through your first years of backcountry skiing and help you develop a deeper understanding of the mountain snow environment.
Look to hire a fully certified ski guide through the AMGA, or better yet, an IFMGA guide. This is the best option if you want to be sure your instructor is someone worth investing in for the long term.
Due to high demand we have added a new AIARE 1 hybrid course. For more information
https://www.exploreorigin.com/en/listings/877083-aiare-1-open-enrollment-online-hybrid: