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Jump-and-run: Avalanches are not a video game

About the important difference between avalanche risk management and the management of an avalanche descent

by Patrick Wehowsky 04/04/2018
PowderGuide was born out of the desire to combine the fun of off-piste skiing with informed and professional risk management in order to ideally be able to spend a lifetime "off-piste". A few years ago, Jeremy Jones summed up this principle in the catchy phrase "live to ride another day".

The core of this idea and the aim of all relevant training courses on the subject of risk management in winter terrain is the fact that avalanches are a damn dangerous thing and that you should focus all your actions on avoiding them.

Just as a reminder: the risk of dying in an avalanche, the so-called mortality risk, is approximately 1:5 without an avalanche airbag and 1:10 with an airbag. A third of all avalanche deaths have already been caused by mechanical circumstances after the avalanche has stopped.

Unfortunately, this didactic endeavor is repeatedly neglected by the visual trivialization of avalanches in videos of major ski productions. The professional athletes always seem to manage to escape the snow slab. One should be aware that this scenario is the exception and not the rule.

The current occasion for this repetition of the familiar - stating the obvious - is an episode of a web video series starring Xavier de le Rue. In his series, which is marketed under the names "Shred Hacks" (for Red Bull) and "How to XV" (for Deeluxe), de le Rue shares his experience and knowledge of mountains and splitboarding in several videos. Topics such as "how to ride with ice axes", "how to splitboard" or "how to choose your line" are covered.

In his video, which Red Bull has given the awkward title "How to avoid avalanche danger", Xavier de le Rue shows how he deals with the risk of avalanches in his lines. The following subtitle is "How to manage avalanche risks". It is, one might think, about classic risk management, as has been standard for 20 years.

From the correct statement that there is no such thing as zero percent risk (i.e. 100 percent safety), a cut leads directly to the recommendation to always ski as if a potential avalanche were about to occur. The intention to look for safe spots in a descent makes perfect sense. In principle, this takes up the standard measures of common strategies such as "stop or go".

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However, "Stop or Go" is about ensuring that only one person (usually the person who triggered the avalanche) is affected in the event of an avalanche and that the other people are in a safe place. In de le Rue's video, on the other hand, the focus shifts from avoiding the worst-case scenario of multiple burials to taking an avalanche into account as standard. The video suggests: An avalanche can happen, but you can manage it quite well if you know how.

This thematic shift in focus and the relativization of slab avalanches portrayed - you just have to be on your guard and you'll be fine - is highly problematic.

Another tip from de le Rue from the video: "carry speed going through below pockets that are loaded!" If you are traversing under blown-in areas, you should drive fast.

This gives the impression that he can accurately assess which zones may or may not go off. Sometimes deep snow packs are easy to see, but this is not always reliably the case, nor are drift snow packs the only possible type of avalanche problem.

De le Rue's approach is like a "jump and run" video game. Just keep jumping from one "island of safety" to the next and you'll get through the level. In fact, this is a halfway adequate comparison: if you don't make it, you die. Except that in real life, there are no countless attempts to make the level.

This portrayal of risk management is extremely inappropriate given de le Rue's fame and the Red Bull target audience, which largely consists of people interested in action sports in general rather than people who have a lot of experience with avalanche risk management and routinely move around in exposed terrain.

In addition, some things are claimed that do not correspond to reality in the sweeping way formulated in the video. De le Rue demonstrates his best-practice approach on a couloir ascent. At the beginning of his run, he tries to provoke an avalanche by means of a ski/slope cut. This is rather unfavorable in the exposed terrain of a couloir system. Due to the many possible rock contacts in the event of an avalanche, couloirs are considered to be terrain with high consequences, which is why even greater caution should be exercised here. The idea of making some form of slope cut or ski cut at the start of a "high-consequence" terrain in order to avalanche is the opposite of what the more controversial slope cuts are intended for.

On Avalanche.org you can find the following definition and application notes on slope cuts:

"A stability test where a skier or rider rapidly crosses an avalanche starting to see if an avalanche initiates. Slope cuts can be dangerous and should only be performed by experienced people on small avalanche paths or test slopes with relatively shallow and soft slabs. Do not use slope cus on big slopes, slopes with serious consequences, deep slabs, or hard slabs."

So: Ski-cuts can provide interesting clues, but they should not be carried out in exposed terrain, but preferably only as a "slope test" on sufficiently harmless terrain formations. In addition, this test method is not useful in an insidious old snow situation and hard snow slabs, as hard snow slabs do not break at the skier, but rather above, which significantly reduces the chances of successfully skiing out.

If a demonstrably very experienced professional like de le Rue decides to carry out a kind of slope cut on a challenging run, that is his right. However, this procedure should not be presented as a standard measure for everyone.

The flashback in the video - a snow slab was kicked off by him and de le Rue got away with his safe spot technique - once again distorts the danger of snow slab avalanches and stabilizes what I consider to be the wrong focus of a video whose audience probably has no idea what they are being presented with, as is also clear from the YouTube comments.

The concluding summary of ritualizing his suggested technique (safe spots) in order to always use it unconsciously also seems too one-sided to me. I understand the positive idea behind it, but in a video which, at least according to the title, is about avoiding avalanche danger, the correct behaviour to avoid avalanches should be habitualized first and foremost and not a behaviour that already includes the triggering of avalanches. The price of an avalanche accident is definitely too high for that.

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.

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