BEYOND THE BASICS: WHAT AST 2 LEVEL ADDS

The Technique

1. Be clear about what an introductory course, at the AST 1 level, actually delivers. It teaches you to recognise avalanche terrain, to read and use a public forecast, to plan a simple trip that matches the conditions, to travel with basic group protocols, and to run a companion rescue with transceiver, probe and shovel. It is short, usually a classroom component and a field day or two, and it is deliberately focused on keeping you out of trouble rather than on getting you deep into complex terrain. It is the minimum for anyone going into avalanche terrain, including passengers who are following a more experienced friend, because a passenger who cannot run a search is not a partner.
2. Understand what an introductory course does not give you, and be honest with yourself about it. It does not make you a competent judge of snowpack. It does not qualify you to lead others. It does not teach you to operate in complex terrain when the forecast is uncertain. It gives you a framework and a vocabulary and enough understanding to be usefully cautious. The most common failure pattern in this sport is a person a season or two past an introductory course who has had a run of good days, has never been scared, and has quietly started to treat the framework as expertise. If that description is uncomfortably close, that is useful information.
3. Know what a second level course, at the AST 2 level, is designed to add. It is longer, much more field based, and it moves you from following a process to exercising judgement. Trip planning gets harder and more rigorous, with real terrain, real forecasts and real uncertainty rather than tidy examples. Snowpack observation becomes structured: identifying layers, running tests properly, recording what you see in a usable way, and above all interpreting results rather than collecting them. You work on terrain selection when the answer is not obvious, which is the actual job, because the easy days do not need a decision maker.
4. Expect the snowpack component to be less comforting than you hope. A second level course spends serious time on how limited snowpack information is, how variable it is across a slope, and how to weigh a test result against everything else you know. Done well, it should leave you more careful rather than more confident, because you will have dug in enough places to see for yourself how much the snow changes over short distances. The riders who come out of these courses badly are the ones who acquire the vocabulary and mistake it for certainty. The ones who come out well are noticeably slower to declare anything safe.
5. Expect the rescue component to get harder and more realistic. Introductory rescue practice is usually one buried transceiver in open, friendly terrain. A second level course pushes into multiple burials, deep burials, signal overlap, awkward terrain, and the organisational side: who leads, who probes, who digs, how to run a strategic shovelling pattern rather than a hole, how to manage a casualty once you reach them, and how to handle a scene that is still exposed to hazard. Complexity is where rescues fail, and complexity is exactly what the introductory course does not have time for.
6. Expect a real emphasis on leadership and group dynamics. Most avalanche incidents involve a group making a decision, not a person alone, and groups fail in patterns: deferring to the most confident voice, drifting past agreed limits, avoiding the awkwardness of raising a doubt, and pressing on because someone travelled a long way. A second level course puts you in the position of running a group in the field, making a call in front of your peers, and defending it. That is uncomfortable and it is the point, because the skill of saying "we are turning around" to four keen friends is at least as valuable as anything you will learn about grain types.
7. Know who should take it. Anyone who leads others into avalanche terrain, formally or informally, including the friend who always picks the objective. Anyone riding complex terrain regularly, on foot or on a machine. Anyone who has an introductory course and at least a season or two of real days behind them, since the second level assumes you have a base of field experience to build on and it is much less useful without one. Sledders should look specifically for courses run for motorised users, because the terrain use, load, speed and rescue logistics differ enough to matter and the generic version leaves gaps.
8. Understand why field days cannot be replaced by reading, including reading this. Everything difficult in this subject is a perception skill: seeing that the slope above the trees is steeper than it looks, feeling the hollow sound under your skis, noticing that the wind has changed and the lee side is loading, sensing that the group has stopped making decisions and started following. None of that transfers from text. It comes from being in terrain with someone experienced enough to say "look at that, and here is what it means", and then being wrong a few times where being wrong is safe. Books and courses like this one make you better prepared for that experience. They do not substitute for it.
9. Treat training as a cycle rather than a certificate. Practise companion rescue at the start of every season and again mid season, because transceiver skill decays fast. Take a rescue refresher separately from your main course. Go out with people better than you and pay attention to what they do rather than what they say. Read the forecast on days you are not going anywhere, and check your prediction against what the forecaster says. And book the next course. The point of all of this is not to accumulate qualifications. It is that you and the people you ride with keep coming home, season after season, which is the only measure of this that matters.

Common Mistakes

Treating an introductory course as a permanent qualification. Fix: refresh rescue skills every season and treat your training as perishable, because it is.

• Taking a second level course too early, before you have field days behind you. Fix: get a season or two of real trips with an introductory level base first, so the advanced material has something to attach to.
• Sledders taking a course aimed at skiers and assuming it covers their use case. Fix: seek out training designed for motorised users, where load, speed, terrain use and rescue logistics are addressed directly.
• Reading widely and concluding you no longer need the field days. Fix: notice that everything genuinely hard in this subject is a perception skill, and book the course with the most field time you can find.

The Drill

Before this season starts, write down three things: the date of your last avalanche course, the date you last did a full companion rescue practice with your regular partners, and the most complex terrain you rode last season. Standard: if your last course is more than a couple of seasons back, or your last rescue practice was more than a few months ago, or your terrain has outgrown your training, book something now and put the date in your calendar before you finish the week.

← Full survival & remote first aid curriculum