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Avalanche at Burgstall: How we deal with mistakes

You're always smarter afterwards, aren't you?

by Lea Hartl 02/20/2017
She actually knew where the dangers lurked that day. Why didn't it stop her from climbing? A story about failure and the courage to talk about mistakes.

In the first half of January, it snowed heavily for the first time this winter in many parts of the northern Alps. Previously, there was only snow on high, shady northern slopes that was still left over from the fall. After the first snowfalls at the beginning of the month, the snow was replenished on January 13 and 14 with strong winds. Forest terrain became skiable for the first time of the season in many areas of Tyrol. Finally, January 15th was the first mostly sunny day. The general avalanche warning level 3 prevailed in Tyrol. In addition to fresh drift snow in all exposures above 1800 metres, the situation report warned of an old snow problem on shaded slopes above 2000 metres.

Making mistakes

On the afternoon of 14 January, Daniela Hochmuth is in the process of organizing tomorrow. She almost always goes freeriding with her two best friends. The three of them are a well-coordinated team and don't have to plan their ski days for long: they decide on an area and then go skiing there. Tomorrow, however, they will be joined by Antoine (name changed) - a Frenchman who Daniela has heard a lot about but has never met.

Dani is a snowboarder. She originally comes from a slalom and freestyle background and only switched to freeriding a few years ago. Friends took her to the powder. Right from the start, she took part in contests in the FWQ series, was quickly successful there and got sponsors, although she soon decided not to pursue her competition career any further. Antoine, on the other hand, has more of a ski mountaineering background and is known for his ski mountaineering achievements and challenging, steep descents. He also has well-known sponsors.

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In a few weeks, the two now want to start a trip together. That should go smoothly. To get to know each other, Antoine will visit Dani in Tyrol tomorrow and they will go skiing together. Dani wonders whether she will be able to keep up with the well-known skier on her board and hopes that she will get on well with him.

Dani read the avalanche report from 14 January in the afternoon and then mentally memorized: "We're going treerunning, it's dangerous above the tree line." Her two friends suggest Hochfügen as a destination. However, Dani doesn't know the area very well and wants to show Antoine around. That's why they decide on the Schlick. There is beautiful forest terrain at Dani's homespot.

The next morning she is not feeling well, she hasn't slept well, is late and feels stressed. She would have preferred to stay at home, but because Antoine has come all this way, she doesn't want to leave him hanging. She is late for the agreed meeting point in the parking lot. Antoine is already waiting and her two friends have already taken the gondola up. When Dani is out and about with the girls, they listen to the situation report together in the car in the morning. Today, she didn't get a chance to do so in the rush.

On the mountain, the morning stress fades into the background. Antoine and Dani get on well and are also a great match when it comes to riding. They won't see the girls again all day. The snow in the forest is dusty at every turn and even in the narrower forest aisles they rarely catch the ground. By lunchtime, both of them are actually pretty satisfied with the day - but they still don't want to stop.

They have touring equipment with them in case something does go wrong" and now the two decide to climb a little further to explore the area. They follow a busy traverse into the off-piste area, but instead of heading back to the ski area, they ski to the end of the traverse. Due to the cold temperatures, neither of their skins are sticking. Antoine solves the problem with some tape and naturally attaches Dani's skins to her splitboard. They ascend a few meters to the west into a flat basin at around 2200 metres. From here you can either continue in the same direction to Schlicker Schartl (2456m) or turn left (south) towards Hoher Burgstall (2611m). There are often well-trodden ascent tracks in all directions, but today Dani and Antoine are completely alone.

They briefly discuss how to proceed. Antoine expresses concern that the route to the saddle would take them into blown-in areas close to the ridge. This seems plausible to Dani and so they turn off in the direction of Hoher Burgstall. Antoine spurts and makes the first hairpin bends in the increasingly steep northern slope. Dani knows that she has less touring experience than Antoine. Without thinking specifically about avalanches, she asks him out of pure interest how steep he thinks the slope is. She thinks 37°, he thinks a little less. They measure with the poles and an app on Antoine's cell phone and come up with 35°.

They continue to climb at a distance. Suddenly, Dani's ski pole slips much deeper into the snow than before. She feels her pole poking through a softer, unbound layer that she hadn't noticed before under the fresh snow on the surface. "Isn't that a bad sign?" She is startled and briefly considers whether she should shout something to Antoine. As she doesn't want to appear anxious and trusts his assessment, she doesn't.

A little later, Antoine arrives at a small rocky island. Here, they both convert for the further ascent on foot and attach skis or splitboard to their backpacks. Dani needs a little longer. Antoine starts to make tracks again and trudges up the slope. He is about ten steps ahead when a crack forms on his track, which continues to the right. The entire slope to the right of the track breaks away in large slabs. Dani sees the avalanche coming towards her from above as if in slow motion and jumps to the left to the side.

After the first moment of shock, she realizes: she is safe, the avalanche has rushed past her side into the valley. She is already thinking about which number she will call to make an emergency call and imagines the rescue team, but luckily Antoine is not swept away either. She had been watching him out of the corner of her eye the whole time. He is still a few meters above her. Dani breathes a sigh of relief - the spook is over. They now look at the edge of the crack together and take a few photos. The crack is about 1.25 meters high. You can clearly see different layers in the snow. Dani asks if she should call someone to let them know that nothing has happened, but Antoine waves her off: "Where I come from, they don't do that!" On the way back to the ski area, they manage a few more beautiful powder turns.

A skier and a lift employee are already waiting at the bottom of the slope, having observed the descent: "Are you completely stupid? Didn't you see the drifting snow? You're lucky we're not in Italy, they'd handcuff you now!" Dani and Antoine drive off to the parking lot. On the way home, they stop at a pub to have a beer together. They talk about the day and the avalanche. Antoine summarizes the experience with a shrug of his shoulders: "Well, lucky you."

Talking about mistakes

In hindsight, Dani says that she only really realized at home in the evening what had gone wrong that day and how lucky they had been: That they had been traveling in the exact area that the situation report had warned about. That even the planning had been chaotic. That she had underestimated the Schlick as the known home spot and hadn't listened to her gut feeling. That she wanted to prove herself to the more experienced Antoine. That she wanted to keep up. That she was too passive and let him take the lead without talking about it. That she had thrown her own resolutions ("only treeruns") overboard, had let herself get carried away by the beautiful lines in the morning. That she didn't actually talk to Antoine afterwards about what had gone wrong.

Dani has a certain level of fame within the freeride scene, she regularly posts on Instagram and Facebook about her days in the snow because of the sponsors, the followers and because she likes to share her experiences. She also has a good dose of idealism, which means she's always offended somewhere. The colorful illusory world of constant social media stoke, powder pictures and #epicday hashtags doesn't appeal to her. Although she takes part, she tries to be honest and thinks about what message she wants to convey. Dani would have found it dishonest to post a powder picture from the morning's treeruns with a comment about how great the day had been. After a friend gave her a good shout-out, she posted a picture of the edge:

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Patrick Nairz from the Tyrolean Avalanche Warning Service also happened to be out and about in the Schlick on January 15. He observed the two on their ascent towards Burgstall and photographed them from a distance before and after their descent. The pictures appeared in the evening in a blog entry from the LWD, with another reference to the old snow problem. For people who know the area and follow the Innsbruck freeride scene a bit - and there are many of them - it wasn't difficult to identify Dani and Antoine in the LWD post.

The public reactions to Dani's post on the internet were mostly positive: "Good that nothing happened", "Thanks for sharing". However, a few comments expressed what many were probably thinking - also in view of the impressive pictures on the LWD blog: "How stupid are you guys anyway"

Learning from mistakes

Admitting mistakes, to yourself as much as to others, is not easy. Drew Hardesty, longtime Utah avalanche warden and occasional, eloquent blogger, writes in Shame and the Social Contract that we want the recognition of our friends and ski touring partners just as much as the rest of the community - now often extended by hundreds of Facebook & quot;friends & quot; and Instagram followers. If we make mistakes, it can damage our reputation and we are deprived of the recognition we desire. We feel ashamed because we usually know how stupid and avoidable our mistake was. We rightly fear the ridicule of others, the reflexive "How stupid are you actually?". Perhaps mainly because we ourselves have reacted in the same way to the mistakes of others.

Studies from Canada suggest that winter sports enthusiasts there only report around 11 percent of non-fatal avalanches that they trigger or observe. (The Effect of Under-Reporting on Non-Fatal Involvements in Snow Avalanches on Vulnerability, Jamieson & Jones, 2015) This not only distorts various statistics on
accident and survival probabilities, but also means that the warning services miss out on valuable information. In addition, unnecessary search operations are repeatedly launched because it is unclear whether someone has been buried. What's more, if we don't talk about our mistakes, neither we nor anyone else can learn from them.

When we hear about an avalanche accident, the first thing we tend to do is look for reasons why it would never have happened to us. "I would never have skied the steep north-facing slope in a triple!" No na ned, as the Tyrolean says. We have identified the obvious problem and can now continue to be sure that we are not affected by it. Sure, there are the freeriders who always plunge straight into the steepest slopes, and there are tourers who are always out alone and without equipment, but then those are the others.

This neat division between us and the others, the mental demarcation of individual black sheep who are too stupid to read the situation report or have an avalanche transceiver with them, is convenient, practical and - as Drew Hardesty argues - wrong. There's not just the one big mistake (north-facing slope, steep, deadly three-pointer!), but chains of mistakes that get us there. The important question is not necessarily: "What was the big mistake?" - the answer is often, no na ned, obvious. The more important question is often: "How did the mistake happen?" And the answer to this almost always has to do with the much theorized, little practically considered human avalanche factor, which by definition affects us all and quite collectively as a society.

The aviation industry is often cited as an example of a system with effective, successful error management. Derailments, especially human ones, are systematically analyzed, discussed and then the system is adapted to prevent them from happening again. This is only possible if errors are made public. In airplanes, there is a black box that helps. Without a black box, a voluntary, open error culture, in which individuals make their errors public to the community, can only develop if the main work is done by the community. Hardesty names a few prerequisites for this:

  • Incidents must be seen as "free lessons" - opportunities to learn something without having to go through the same experience ourselves first.

  • What is an acceptable risk for one person may be completely unacceptable for another. This is okay and should not be judged in principle.

  • There must be a suitable framework in which mistakes can be discussed neutrally. This could be an accident report from the avalanche warning service, for example. At the very least, however, it should be a conversation with your freeride buddies or tour colleagues and honesty with yourself - what went well today, what didn't? This sometimes requires a willingness to put your own ego through the metaphorical meat grinder.

  • Opinion leaders of all kinds (freeride pros, mountain guides, film productions, ...) must set a good example and actively and transparently talk about mishaps.

You are only smarter afterwards if you actively do something about it. A "lucky guess" or a "How stupid are you?" is not enough.

Links, further information:

Avalanches where nothing has definitely happened can be reported to the control center, for example via the European emergency number 112 or the country-specific numbers of the rescue services. This is particularly important if it is unclear to outsiders whether someone has been buried. A quick call is enough to avoid costly search operations by organized rescue services.

Feedback LWD Tirol

Feedback SLF

Blogpost Drew Hardesty, Utah Avalanche Center

Also recommended: Podcast by avalanche warning expert Doug Krause on the topic

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)

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