Tobias Kurzeder

From March 13-15, 2009, the BigLePowSki Freeride Happening took place in Davos for the second time. 200 participants experienced a special kind of backcountry weekend. The weather on Saturday kept its promise for a dream day. Advanced freeriders had the opportunity to get to know Pischa off-piste in workshops and guided tours and to learn from experienced mountain guides.

Sunday, 15.03.2009

Disentis, located in the Vorderrheintal valley, is no longer just whispered about as an insider tip among freeriders. But that doesn't matter, because Disentis has still lost none of its charm and versatility. The only disadvantage of Disentis is also a great advantage: the hidden location in the rear Surselva makes the approach a little time-consuming, but in Disentis you can usually still enjoy the great freeride terrain in untracked snow for several days after the last snowfall.

Freeriding is a high-risk sport and one that is booming. This also applies to ski touring. The number of freeriders and ski tourers in avalanche-prone terrain has risen immensely in recent years, even if there are no reliable figures on the number of winter sports enthusiasts in open terrain. If there are more and more winter sports enthusiasts in avalanche terrain, there should actually be more and more avalanche accidents.

When snow falls with wind, the fresh snow is deposited very unevenly. This creates areas on a slope where the snow cover cannot support its own weight. The weight of the snow masses causes tensions that are much greater than the static friction between the layers of snow. In these places, a snow slab spontaneously breaks loose and slides off as an avalanche. Very often, however, the slab still hangs on the sides or on top or is supported from below and does not slide off. The slab "hangs" as a taut trap on the slope ?

Avalanches occur because the weather provides the avalanche material snow through precipitation. Weather and avalanches are therefore inextricably linked. The weather patterns in the Alps are complicated, which is why we will limit ourselves here to the weather and avalanche basics.

Swiss avalanche rescue expert Manuel Genswein and Norwegian Ragnhild Eide tested the top models of avalanche shovels for their usability under real avalanche snow conditions during a field test for more efficient excavation and rescue of buried avalanche victims. Buried victims were dug out from a depth of two meters, which is an extreme endurance test for the shovelers as well as for the shovel material. First of all: the result is questionable or catastrophic for many models.

The new educational touring trail on the Lampsenspitze (Praxmar, Sellrain, near Innsbruck) aims to teach winter sports enthusiasts the theory and practice of ski touring and how to deal with avalanche danger. The project is based on an online platform www.tourenlehrpfad.at and the educational trail along the tour to the Lampsenspitze near Praxmar in Sellrain.

When Werner Munter's life's work "3x3 Lawinen – entscheiden in kritischen Situationen" was published in 1997, nothing in avalanche science was as it had been before. And that was necessary and therefore a good thing. In a short time, 3x3 Avalanches became the standard textbook in avalanche science. The author Werner Munter can look back on more than 40 years of experience as a professional mountain guide and worked for many years as an employee at the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research.

This ski touring guide is only available in English, but is nevertheless an inexhaustible source of powder dreams and alpine feasts – or nightmares for anyone who wants to undertake serious alpine adventures in and around Chamonix.

Phew, not yet another ski touring guide for the much-vaunted Eastern Alps around Salzburg. Stop, because this ski touring guide really has it all: ski tourers and freeriders will not only find standard tours here, but also "a few crazy things" and when extreme alpinists à la Albert Precht say that, then you can expect these tours to be really crazy.

This book is a real hit in terms of trends! But that's not all: finally a tour guide with a stylish layout, with lush, appealing action shots in large format. And instead of the usual ridge scrambling and pigtail waving, the tours and descents presented here are all based on the it's-all-about-the-down motto.