The Avalanche Factor—the Modern Era of Avalanche Education

This is meant to be a book review of The Avalanche Factor by Joe Stock (2023). But the real value of Joe’s book is that it captures changes in avalanche education over the last decade, and to make that point, I’m going to start with my own avalanche context.

My history with avalanches

I grew up in a flat landscape and my only exposure to avalanches was seeing them in Saturday morning cartoons—typically caused by loud noises. I didn’t start to pay attention until high school, in Anchorage, when Jill Fredston, a venerable avalanche educator, came to our physics class as a guest lecturer. I went wide-eyed when Jill described indicators of unstable slopes, and turned to find Brian Baus in the classroom—we had just seen those indicators while sledding on the flanks of Flattop Mountain. Brian was working up to his high-school-legend accomplishment of sledding from the summit (a ~1500 ft. run … in jeans and a bomber jacket).

I didn’t learn to ski until my mid-20s, and when I did, I went all in. Backcountry skiing helped me crawl out from a dark place in my life, and I will always be indebted to its role in my mental health. It was a golden era—one of those magical phases where everything and everyone lined up just right. I found partners with similar risk tolerances, fitness, great communication, and consistency. I knew we would be skiing together every weekend, the only question was where.

The ease of our social dynamic was a little surprising given that I was the only one who didn’t know how to ski. My partners lent me gear, patiently waited as I fell my way down the ski lines, fed me Advil, and dusted the snow off of my back. I almost always fell asleep on the drive back to Anchorage; these were tough learning conditions.

I gleaned avalanche education from my partners and read all the classic avalanche books. I’m a good self-learner, and my academic background was a great fit for the more scientific chapters: stress, strain, strength, recrystallization, and data collection.

With my science background, the avalanche problem felt solvable. But in practice, I had a heck of a time finding the weak layers and persistent crystals that were so obvious in my books. Given that we weren’t triggering avalanches, I concluded that my inability to find facets in pit tests wasn’t a big deal.

Like many new skiers, my ambitions outpaced my skillset until things started to go wrong. After a few small slides, I remotely triggered a large avalanche that buried two friends who survived without injury, though one retired from backcountry skiing. The next year I was buried on the flank of Mt. Logan, about as far from help as possible. And the following year an avalanche crept over our skin track on Mt. Fairweather a few hours after setting it.

These incidents made it apparent that I was not doing a good job of solving the avalanche problem. So I invested in formal training, a Level 2 course with the Alaska Avalanche School. I felt like I won the lottery with the instructor team of Eeva Latosuo, Leighan Falley, Joe Stock, and John Sykes. If this crew couldn’t teach me what I needed to know, I was hopeless.

I spent the next winters based out of Valdez and alternated my time between ambitious objectives in greenlight conditions and long low-angle runs the rest of the time. I found a crew of like-minded partners and thrived in my second golden era of skiing.

My newfound confidence in ‘solving the avalanche problem’ took a hit in 2017 when a former girlfriend died in an avalanche in British Colombia. What really pissed me off was that Amy wasn’t a risk seeker—didn’t get a thrill from poking the edge of her risk envelope—which is exactly what I was doing. That felt unfair. This is, of course, how avalanches work—they are unfair. You can do everything wrong and get away with it, or do everything right and get buried.

It wasn’t until writing The Packraft Handbook that I got a new perspective on the avalanche problem. This was the first time that I sat down and dedicated time to learn about wilderness risk management explicitly. My literature review helped explain some of what I’d figured out on my own and identified gaps that I didn’t know were there.

The loudest message, screamingly loud, was that the easiest way for me to reduce my risk in the outdoors was to stop skiing in avalanche terrain. It’s that simple: we choose to go into avalanche terrain (for fun!) but if you play the game long enough, you are going to experience physical or mental hurt or loss. After burying, being buried, and losing a friend, the only box left to check was my own death. So, I spent the next three years on the flats and low-angle slopes.

Stepping back in

I kept thinking: maybe this will be the year when I rediscover the spark of backcountry skiing in avalanche terrain. I’m slower, more patient, a better communicator, know what loss feels like, and am less attached to objectives. Is the new me able to solve the avalanche problem? Can I cultivate a third golden era?

Feeling out of touch with modern avalanche avoidance strategies, I applied to teach Level 1 courses for the Alaska Avalanche School (AAS) this winter. Teaching is the best way for me to learn, and I love the process of lesson development. I’m excited to learn from the other instructors and get caught up on today’s avalanche education curriculum.

While reviewing the AAS Level 1 curriculum, I was surprised by how much has changed in the past ten years. And the changes feel like real progress. I’ll describe these changes below because they are also reflected in Joe’s book, The Avalanche Factor. This isn’t a surprise—Joe worked with AAS for many years before splitting off to create the Alaska Guide Collective and his own course offerings. So, here starts the book review.

The Avalanche Factor

Simply put:

The Avalanche Factor is the most accessible avalanche resource on the market.

Joe has done an incredible job of synthesizing his decades of formal training, teaching, and skiing experience into a digestible narrative. The Avalanche Factor provides a strategy to stay safe in avalanche terrain with an emphasis on “get better at turning around” rather than getting bogged down in snow science.

Here are some of the big changes I see in Joe’s book and avalanche education at the recreation level. Disclaimer: I am not an avalanche professional and I’m in the early stages of re-learning my avalanche avoidance strategy. These are my opinions and you should consult professionals for more information.

A de-emphasis on crystal morphology

The avalanche education industry has recognized that snow science can be paralyzing, hard to do right, and when done right, isn’t the most important piece of the puzzle. I welcome this change—it affirms my frustration as a fresh MIT graduate who studied crystal morphology but was still unable to find the damn weak layers in snow pits.

The Avalanche Factor dedicates ten pages to snow metamorphism, a quick-and-dirty what and how, but then moves on. Joe writes, “The trick for backcountry skiers is to understand enough about metamorphism to improve decisions, yet avoid losing sight of the big picture, which is to avoid avalanches.” In other words, less zooming in, more zooming out.

At the introductory level of AAS, students are encouraged to distinguish rounds from facets by feel and sound but are not expected to have or use a more detailed understanding of snow recrystallization.

Identifying and testing specific “avalanche problems”

Avalanche science is overwhelming, and the industry is making an effort to simplify decision-making by identifying discrete ‘avalanche problems.’ There are nine (in the US) such as wind slab, persistent slab, dry loose, etc. Here’s how the CNF avalanche center presents the primary and secondary avalanche problems in their forecast:

The beauty of this approach is that each avalanche problem can be evaluated with specific tests. This feels much more attainable to me, as a recreational skier, than trying to create detailed pit profiles and make multiple pit tests to address the overwhelming number of factors that might contribute to an avalanche.

For example, given the avalanche problems above, wind slab tests include pole tests, hasty pits, and an extended column test; wet loose tests include boot penetration, visual cues, and ski pushes. I can do that. And when possible, the avalanche forecast includes the suspected depths of the worrisome layers, which makes it more likely that I can find them on my own.

Joe’s book describes how to make extended column and propagation saw tests, but here too, the emphasis is to efficiently collect a data point and then go back to the big-picture avalanche avoidance system.

Some avalanche education organizations don’t even include snowpits in their introductory courses. AAS still does, but the learning objectives are to identify ‘upside down’ snowpacks, understand what they read in the avalanche forecast, and make decisions in unforecast terrain.

Avoiding avalanche terrain

The shift away from snow science and pit tests is a shift toward identifying and avoiding avalanche terrain. Joe dedicates an early 20-page chapter to avalanche terrain, but the real discussion occurs in later chapters: Problems and Danger, Margins For Safety, and The Avalanche Avoidance System. In each of these chapters, Joe’s experience in the mountains comes through with specific examples (photos) and strategies for choosing when and how to travel through avalanche terrain. This is a real strength of The Avalanche Factor, and the message is clear: slow down, collect data, have a plan, and if in doubt, turn around. AAS’s curriculum has a similar emphasis: designating decision points and using them to re-evaluate conditions.

Human factors

You can’t throw a stick at today’s outdoor industry without hitting someone applying insights from sociology and psychology. I’m doing this too, in part thanks to being married to a mental health counselor.

The Avalanche Factor has a short and sweet chapter about risk, people, and decision-making. If these are new topics to you, this chapter will be a great introduction. If you enjoy this thinking space, you will be left wanting more.

Ten pages, half of the chapter, are dedicated to “how to make good decisions” and this is a valuable part of the book. I’m actively learning more about what goes wrong and what goes right in outdoor recreation, and Joe has done a great job matching his guiding experience with insights across the industry to provide useful action items. The human factor piece of the puzzle is rapidly evolving, and Joe’s book is a nice snapshot of where we are at today.

A quick sidetrack about heuristic traps … The avalanche industry got very excited (in the late 1990s?) when analysis revealed that most incidents were due to decision-making errors rather than the avalanche conditions (terrain, snowpack). Heuristic traps—mental shortcuts that lead to poor decisions—were soon incorporated into avalanche education.

But dedicating class time to heuristics fell out of favor when it became clear that knowing about these traps doesn’t actually make us better at avoiding them. The problem is that heuristics happen on autopilot (Kahneman’s “system 1” brain). The whole point is that we don’t think about them.

I found a useful insight at the end of Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. We are lousy at recognizing our own heuristic traps, but pretty good at seeing it in others (or less politely, we are good at judging others). So, one way to avoid these traps is to make decisions as a team. I love this. At some point, I’m going to explore the sweet spot where group thinking does harm (peer pressure, poor leadership, etc.) vs. where it does good (presenting different perspectives and catching missing data).

Backcountry skiing outside of avalanche terrain

There was one detail in The Avalanche Factor that bothered me, and it is a minor point. In both the intro and outro, Joe presents avalanche terrain as a binary stay-at-home vs. backcountry option: “It is safer to stay home and watch football than to go backcountry skiing.”

Yes, true, but I feel like this is a disservice to all of the amazing backcountry skiing that can be done outside of avalanche terrain. Avalanche terrain is optional, and The Avalanche Factor outlines when and how to avoid it, so these opening and closing comments feel out of place.

I want people to know that they can still have powder days, make turns, and enjoy the backcountry without needing to mess with avalanche terrain. I’ve loved re-discovering cross-country skiing and low-angle slopes these past three years, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the AAS students want the same thing. Or maybe I’m just representing the over-40 crowd. I’ll know more about that after my Level 1 courses in February!

My other disappointment is that Joe completely neglected to discuss how loud noises can cause avalanches. Or is this another change in our understanding since the mid-1980s 😉

[Or, if you would prefer, Tigger, or The Simpsons.]

In-person training

The Avalanche Factor is intended to supplement, not replace, in-person training. For folks in/near Anchorage, here are the options:

Joe’s avalanche courses through the Alaska Guide Collective
Alaska Avalanche School offerings