SNOW SPORTS · Big Mountain
SLOUGH MANAGEMENT: SKIING AWAY FROM YOUR OWN SNOW
13 min · Full library · written lesson, video in production
The point
After this lesson you can predict where the snow you release will travel on a steep line, position each turn so it stays below and beside you, and act correctly in the seconds when it does not.
Half the answer, free
The Technique
- Understand what sluff actually is, because the mental model drives everything else. Sluff is loose dry snow moving as a point release: it starts small, entrains more surface snow as it goes, and accelerates on anything steeper than roughly the angle of repose for cold snow. It is not a slab. A slab fractures across a line above you and takes the whole slope; sluff starts at your tails and grows downhill in a widening fan. That distinction matters because the responses are opposite. With a slab you are trying not to be on it at all. With sluff you are managing a river you deliberately started, and the goal is not to avoid making it - on a steep cold face you cannot - the goal is to never be in it.
- Learn how it builds, because the build rate tells you how much time you have. Sluff volume scales with three things: how deep the loose surface layer is, how steep and how long the pitch is, and how much of the fall line your turns feed into. Fifteen centimetres of cold new snow on a sustained pitch will build a moving mass that outruns a skier within a few turns. Dense or settled snow produces less sluff but the sluff it produces is heavier and knocks harder. Sun affected snow late in the day produces almost none until the surface breaks down and then produces a slow wet mass that is worse to be caught in. On the first turn of a steep pitch, watch what leaves your tails. That first release is your calibration reading for the entire line, and elite skiers deliberately make one turn and pause to take it.
- Accept that sluff travels the terrain, not your line. This is the single most useful idea in the whole discipline. Once released, snow obeys the local fall line, which means it funnels into gullies, accelerates over convex rolls, pours off the sides of spines into the troughs, spreads and slows on benches and aprons, and stacks against anything that blocks it. If you ski the middle of a gully, everything you release stays with you and everything above you comes to you. If you ski the crest of a spine, everything you release leaves sideways within a turn. Two riders on the same face, one in the trough and one on the rib, are having completely different days, and the difference is not skill in the turn, it is where they chose to put the turn.
Still under the glass
- The three ways to shed sluff with terrain, and what to do in the seconds after it takes your feet
- 5 more technique steps
- The 4 mistakes that undo it, with fixes
- The drill that builds the reflex
- The safety non-negotiables
It opens when you book a trip that runs snow sports - these are the exact drills you run with your coach out there. Your booking unlocks this whole library.
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