Dirtbags less likely to get caught in avalanches

Thanks for the responses.

Lowell, in this thread you've accused people of ignorance and cowardice. But that's just your reality. If you really want to have a helpful discussion, then you have to align "your reality" with "actual reality" as closely as possible.

Using language such as "skiers regard completing an avalanche course as a license to cut their safety margin narrower" isn't really useful in any discussion of avalanche education because as you say, this is both a generalization and your opinion. Your opinion covers all skiers and therefore it really doesn't apply to reality ( and avalanche education is supposed to teach recreationists to align their perception of instability with the reality of instability as closely as possibly ). This remark may represent the reality of how some skiers behave on some days for a given set of conditions but even that isn't really known.

The same applies to your comments on the imaginary correlation between receiving avalanche education and going skiing in avalanche terrain. This doesn't apply to all skiers. Here's why: In your reality, "all skiers regard completing an avalanche course as a license to cut their safety margin narrow". However this isn't the same as "actual reality" where some skiers may behave in the manner you describe and some may not. In the context of having the useful discussion that is your stated goal, your opinion might need to align with reality a little bit more.

Appropriate for this thread or not, your presentation provides a nice opportunity to give you some relevant criticism in the context of avalanche education so that you can see why the soft conclusions you reached in this thread are not helpful for the discussion. ( However I won't accuse you of ignorance or cowardice. ) The problem with your tips and tactics is as follows: the prevailing state of the instability in the seasonal snowpack is a spectrum. On one side is "absolute instability" ( widespread naturals )and on the other side is "low instability" ( go ski the steeps with normal caution ). However the region in between these two poles represents the prevailing state of the seasonal snowpack: "conditional instability". This means that under certain conditions, in certain places, relative to a specific triggering force, a recreationist could release an avalanche while traveling over a specific region of the snowpack if their actions apply energy that exceeds the threshold required to trigger propogating shear fractures. In simple terms, high uncertainty exists during the prevailing state of instability in the seasonal snowpack.

In one part of your presentation, you state that "sloughing", not slab avalanches, constitutes the bulk of the avalanche hazard for a generic time and place. You can't possibly make this assertion without knowing actual prior and current conditions. By prior conditions, I mean the actual history of terrain, weather, and snowpack. Do you know why sloughing occurs in dry snow? Do you know why sloughing occurs in wet snow? Do you know what sloughing indicates relative to slab avalanche formation? Is there a relationship or not? Is the relationship direct or highly correlated? Data sampling forms much of the basis for perception of instability. Your helpful tips, in which you substitute your personal experiences for "actual data sampling" and reach conclusions about instability, could shape someone's perception of instability and lead to disaster. Especially if that person hasn't taken a recreational avalanche course. You undoubtedly possess far more mountain experience than I do, but, that said, the actual prior and current conditions ( i.e. past and present reality ) are the only safe means for evaluating instability and minimizing uncertainty.

Regarding CAC and opening an interesting discussion. That avalanche education and avalanche safety equipment modify human behaviour is already well-understood. It's also not fair to call someone a coward and accuse them of "bending over backwards to ignore the results of the study" when their apparent "cowardice" and "ignorant" behavior are, once again, "your reality". Which is not the same as actual reality. Talk about human factors!

Hmmm I think we need some snow to fall....

Boy, do we all ever need some snow to fall. If you read this whole piece, you're as bad off as me. Lots of understandable conjecture being put forth. However, anybody who lives or works in any sphere that requires critical analysis (such as medicine, engineering, marketing, politics, forecasting or any science or mathematics field) knows that an observation out of context does not equal an accurate conclusion. To be more likely, mathematically, to die in an avalanche, you have to influence one or more of the factors:
1. How often you travel in avalanche terrain/conditions and to what level of risk - the frequency of being in the right place/right time;
2. How prepared you and your party are, and your degree of analysis - your knowledge base;
and 3, the least discussed element: what probability of potentially fatal slope failure you are willing to accept.

If you ski a lot, are well learned and prepared, suss out the conditions well, yet ski with an attitude of "it probably won't go," your probability of being smoked is most determined by what the likelihood of slope failure you're willing to accept is. This is a concept that is foreign or uncomfortable to most. Is your threshold 1%? That means if you ski that line in that condition 100 times, it will fail dangerously on you once. Is your threshold 10%? Only requires ten times to die. 20%? That's five times. Hardly anyone ever thinks about it that way. I don't pretend to be able to know anywhere close to enough to put numbers to every situation, and I'll humbly admit (not proudly) that I've skied plenty of runs well above what I'd put down on paper as my threshold, but therein lies the unspoken message in the article: our personality determines our probability after our knowledge has covered what it can. If you have a jones that prevents incorporating data from your knowledge into your decisions, then the more you ski in dodgy places on big days, the more likely you are to die. Lots of fairly well-off and fairly well-educated people ski the BC and die of old age. But if you're missing the "I can walk away" chip, all the avy courses and high-tech schwag in the world may as well just be a ticket to ride. Let's try not to respond with the "that's the adventure of the mountains" old tired line. I get my recharge in the same place. I'm just making a point.

Lowell, in this thread you've accused people of ignorance and cowardice. But that's just your reality. If you really want to have a helpful discussion, then you have to align "your reality" with "actual reality" as closely as possible.

I think you're trying to put words in my mouth. I didn't accuse anybody of ignorance or cowardice. I said that the people quoted in the article avoided talking about what, to me, is the most interesting fact unearthed in the study--that avalanche training didn't statistically reduce the risk of being caught in an avalanche.

I don't believe this lapse was due to either ignorance or cowardice. I think that they probably realized that if they were to "go there" the newspaper reporter would get it all wrong and it would be more damaging than helpful.

But this doesn't alter the study's findings. You've hit hard on the idea that my statement, "skiers regard completing an avalanche course as a license to cut their safety margin narrower" is just my opinion. The results of the study suggest that it is more than an opinion.

Perhaps the problem is my poor choice of words. What I was trying to say is that people with avalanche training tend to venture farther into the gray area between clearly safe and clearly unsafe conditions because they believe their training enables them to detect the line that they must not cross. That's why their accident rate doesn't go down. This seems like a no-brainer to me, but what do I know? I'm not an avalanche professional. I'm just another backcountry skier who is interested in this subject.

Lowell, I haven't put words in your mouth. And you didn't say that people quoted in the article "avoided talking about the findings". You said the people in the article "bent over backwards to ignore" the findings. That's an entirely different characterization. Now who's backpedaling? I'm not sure how you managed to extract "bending over backwards" and "ignoring" from the article. When I read the article, I didn't notice any bending over backwards, nor did the subjects of the article appear to engage in any ignoring. You're ascribing behavior to the subjects in the article - except you lack any factual basis to do so.

In your original post you provided a "fact" that wasn't really a "fact" but just "Lowell's Version of Reality" ( your opinion ), i.e. when you said "the big message = skiers regard completing an avalanche course as a license to cut their safety margin narrower". I thought we've already established that this is your opinion and not a fact. Now you're back to saying that the study "suggests" that your opinion is indeed a fact. Really? I'd love to see you connect those dots with hard evidence - except you can't provide any. How could you possibly be satisfied with your own opinion as a scientific conclusion?

I fail to see how the results of the study, i.e. "avalanche training does not reduce the odds of being caught in an avalanche", have anything to do with your pseudo-science-opinion, i.e. "skiers regard completing an avalanche course as a license to cut their safety margin narrower". Is this your gut feeling? Regardless, you cannot possibly expect me to believe this is true without evidence. Where is the connection between these two items? Which skiers on which days? Is it all skiers, some skiers, most skiers, many skiers? How exactly do these skiers reduce their margin of safety? Is it intentional? Is is unintentional? Which avalanche accidents have resulted from the phenomenon you describe? Which deaths? Which injuries?

In my previous posts, I tried to point out that a lot of the snowpack and weather tips you provide in your presentation aren't helpful. Let me explain why, in simple terms: your tips aren't helpful because they're just pseudo-science, i.e. they're just your opinion ( but presented as facts ). Lowell, sorry but your opinion does not have the same validity as a scientific conclusion. Not in your presentation, and not in this conversation either.

CookieMonster, welcome to Turns-All-Year.com. Turns-All-Year.com is a backcountry skiing chat group. It's not a scientific journal. Opinions are what chat groups are about. If you disagree with my opinions, that's fine. I'm happy to hear your counter-arguments.

You keep returning to my NSAS presentation and trying to beat me over the head with it. If you were listening carefully, the first thing I said when I stepped up to the microphone was that my talk was not based on rigorous study but instead on 25 years of personal experience. It was a distillation of what has worked for me, nothing more.

When the organizers asked me to speak, I told them that I was not an avalanche pro, and they were okay with that. If you know of people who can bring the sort of scientific rigor you demand to speak at NSAS, I hope you will forward their names to the event organizers.

In the end, backcountry skiing is not science. It is humanism. In thinking about these things, I think intuition counts for a great deal. You may not agree. But I'll continue to discuss what my intuition tells me, to seek feedback and try and learn something. TAY is a great place for that.