Skip to content

Cookies 🍪

This site uses cookies that need consent.

Learn more

Zur Powderguide-Startseite Zur Powderguide-Startseite
events

Event report | 8th Snow & Safety Conference in Lech am Arlberg

Difficult snow conditions & successful lectures

by Patrick Wehowsky 01/08/2020
You could say that the weather gods didn't mean well with the new, old Snow&Safety Conference in Lech am Arlberg this year. Rain in Lech was not necessarily what freeriders and off-piste skiers had hoped for. On the other hand, it wasn't really about powder skiing but about risk management in the winter mountains. The conditions were indeed challenging for this and therefore anything but unsuitable.

Predominantly poor visibility conditions, mixed and varying snow quality in the smallest of spaces challenged guides and participants.

In addition to the traditional guiding offers and various avalanche transceiver courses and scenarios, there were some innovations in the overall structure of the conference this year. For the first time, the conference took place in Lech and no longer in the Alpenrose in Zürs. The date was also moved from the start of the season to mid-December due to greater snow reliability.

The presentations on Saturday evening took place in what is probably the best-designed ski rental shop in the Alps at Sport Strolz. The building, which has a minimalist exterior reminiscent of natural house shapes, is accessed on the inside by a large spiral staircase that leads down several floors. Between rental skis and rental boats, the lectures in the high rooms (room height 4-5 m) had a special character. This year, instead of the two evenings of lectures, there were only lectures on Saturday evening. While in recent years, mountain sports personalities with sometimes dubious messages have occasionally made it into the specialist lectures, this year there were two specialist lectures by proven experts.

JT (Jan-Thomas) Fischer, avalanche dynamics expert and Head of the Snow and Avalanches Department at the Federal Research Center for Forests (BFW) as well as President of the newly founded " Austrian Society for Snow and Avalanches", ÖGSL for short, kicked things off.

In his vivid presentation, he cheerfully mixed new findings from basic research with fundamental knowledge about how airbags work in snow.

From basic research, he pointed out an apparently new dichotomy of avalanche classifications. No longer dry/wet but warm/cold is now used as the basic distinction. To illustrate the influence of temperature on avalanche dynamics, he showed laboratory experiments that illustrated how granule sizes in avalanches change depending on the temperature. In some cases, these even change within the avalanche. According to Fischer, the temperature of the avalanche has a significant effect on the flow width of large avalanches in particular. For off-piste skiers and ski tourers, these findings are not so important for the time being, but they do have an influence on the calculation of safety zones in the valleys. All people in the mountains should have a great interest in this infrastructure safety.

With a skillful presentation and clear, experimental proof - popcorn! - he subsequently demonstrated that airbags can contribute to survival due to inverse segregation and not due to a reduced density due to the airbag --> Airbags are not life jackets! Anyone who thinks that such scientific differentiation is unnecessary should realize the consequences that incorrect mental models can lead to. The mental model of an airbag as a buoyancy aid fatally has no major problem with terrain traps; after all, a cork always comes back to the surface.

The burden of the second and final lecture fell to Alexander Prokop, who is well known both at Snow&Safety and on the Arlberg. Prokop is a lecturer in snow and avalanche research. He leads numerous international research projects in the field of avalanche safety at the universities of Graz and Vienna and has also been conducting research on the Arlberg for a long time.

His lecture was entitled "Snowy versus snow-poor winters - when & where does the avalanche danger lurk?". As an introduction, and thus as a clever link to the last two snowy winters with the special precipitation events, he pointed out that the jet stream has changed structurally due to the strong warming of the Arctic (+5°C in the last 100 years in Spitsbergen). Due to the lower temperature, the stream is meandering more strongly, which means that weather conditions - north jams or sunshine - generally last longer. He demonstrated the very different winter patterns - little snow vs. lots of snow - using the very different seasonal graphs from a snow measurement station in the Lech ski area. Didactically reduced to the essentials, Prokop conveyed the characteristics of the respective winters:

rich in snow = mainly drifting/fresh snow problem, as well as sliding snow

>>> short periods with high avalanche risk

poor in snow = old snow problem

>>> longer lasting avalanche problems

>>> rather large avalanches resulting from the shallow weak layers

>>> rather little sliding snow, rather long periods with unfavorable conditions.

He referred to experiments from his scientific practice, which showed that only round, decomposed snow can absorb a lot of moisture. Large, angular crystals, such as those found in low-snow floating snow winters, absorb almost no moisture, which also explains the lower incidence of sliding snow avalanches

Looking back at the last snowy winter in the northern Alps, he also discussed the avalanche accident in Lech and referred to the FACETs to sharpen your own perception before and during the tour/freeriding. All in all, the two lectures were perfectly balanced this time in terms of length, content and the mixture of new insights and the transfer of fundamental knowledge. The lack of a discussion round was not really missed.

Conclusion

Despite the rather difficult weather situation with wind and poor visibility, these were once again instructive days on the Arlberg. For next year, we can only hope that the free guiding sessions for young people will be included in the program again. PS: There was even a fine snowboard team with Chris Schnabel as guide. So snowboarders as a dying species are also catered for!

Photo gallery

This article has been automatically translated by DeepL with subsequent editing. If you notice any spelling or grammatical errors or if the translation has lost its meaning, please write an e-mail to the editors.

Show original (German)

Related articles

Comments