BUILDING THE DAY: PLAN, DECISION POINTS AND DEBRIEF

The Technique

1. Start the plan the night before, not in the car. Read the forecast properly: the danger rating for each elevation band, the listed problems with their aspects and elevations, the size and likelihood of what is expected, the weather that is coming, and the trend, meaning whether things are improving or getting worse. Read the forecaster's discussion, not just the icons, because that is where the uncertainty lives and uncertainty is the part you plan around. Write down the two or three sentences that summarise the day in your own words. If you cannot write those sentences, you have not understood the forecast yet.
2. Turn the forecast into a terrain filter before you choose an objective. Take the listed problems and cross off the terrain each one punishes: the aspects, the elevation bands, the slope angles, the features. Do it for the worst problem first and then for the others. What is left is the ground available to you today. Only now do you pick where to go, choosing from what remains rather than starting with the objective you wanted and looking for reasons it fits. This order matters more than anything else in the planning process, because the reversed order, objective first and justification second, is how competent people end up on the wrong slope.
3. Build the plan with alternatives, and make the alternatives real. A plan A that requires everything to be good, a plan B in simpler terrain, and a plan C with no avalanche terrain at all. Map all three at home so that downgrading on the hill costs nothing but a decision. Groups persist with bad plans mostly because the alternative is vague, and a vague alternative always loses to a specific, exciting objective. Give plan B a name, a route and a reason to be fun. Include timings: when you need to be at each point, when you turn around regardless, and when the light or the warming makes certain terrain unacceptable.
4. Define your decision points geographically, in advance, and mark them on the map. A decision point is a named place where the group stops, gathers, and consciously decides whether to continue: the top of the approach, the bench below the headwall, the last point where retreat is easy, the col where you commit to the far side. Attaching decisions to places rather than to feelings is the whole trick, because places arrive whether or not anyone is willing to speak up, and a scheduled stop makes a doubt easy to voice. Groups that do not do this tend to make one continuous unexamined decision from the car park to the summit.
5. Write your go and no-go criteria before the emotion arrives. At each decision point, list what you need to see to continue and what will stop you: no recent avalanches on similar aspects and elevations, no whumpfing or shooting cracks, no more than a given amount of new snow, wind below a certain strength, no rapid warming, everyone in the party feeling good, on time against your schedule. Write them as tests, not as vibes, and write them at home. Once you are standing at the col in beautiful weather with the objective right there, your brain will generate excellent reasons to continue, and the only reliable counterweight is a decision made earlier by a calmer version of you.
6. Track observations through the day, deliberately and out loud. Nominate someone to keep the running picture: new snow depth, wind and where it is moving snow, temperature changes, sun on aspects, any avalanche activity seen and its aspect, elevation and size, any whumpfing or cracking, how the surface feels underfoot, whether the snow is getting heavier. Say these things to the group as they happen rather than storing them privately. The value is not the individual observation, it is the trend: things getting worse through the day is the strongest signal you will get, and it is easy to miss when everyone notices a piece of it and nobody assembles the whole.
7. Practise the turnaround as a skill, because it is one. The hard part of turning around is social, not technical. Make it easier structurally: agree at the start that anyone can call it, agree that the caller never has to justify it, treat a turnaround as a successful outcome rather than a failure, and never let the group tease the person who made the call. Set hard turnaround times and honour them even when you are close, because being close is when people get hurt. If you notice the group generating reasons why the criteria you wrote do not really apply today, that is the moment to stop, because rationalising your own written rules is the clearest warning sign in the whole process.
8. Debrief every day, briefly, while it is still fresh. Five to ten minutes at the car or over a beer, covering four things: what we planned, what we actually did, what we saw, and what we would change. Look hard at the gap between the plan and the day, because that gap is where your habits live. Ask whether any decision was made on emotion, whether anyone had a doubt they did not voice, and whether the terrain matched the conditions. Judge the decisions on the information you had at the time, not on the fact that nothing happened, because a day where nothing happened can still contain a decision that was badly wrong.
9. Keep a simple record, because a season of tracked days is worth more than a decade of impressions. A short entry per trip: date, area, forecast summary, problems listed, what you actually observed, what terrain you rode, what you turned down and why. Over a season this becomes a personal snowpack history and a mirror on your own judgement, and it is the closest a recreational rider gets to the tracking that professionals do. It also makes you honest, because a written record of the days you pushed on is much harder to argue with than memory, which quietly edits itself in your favour.

Common Mistakes

Choosing the objective first and then reading the forecast to see if it fits. Fix: filter the terrain from the forecast first, then choose from what is left, every time, and notice when you are tempted to reverse it.

• Making decisions wherever the group happens to stop. Fix: mark named decision points on the map at home and stop at every one, even when the answer looks obvious.
• Carrying a plan B that exists only as the phrase "or we could do something mellow". Fix: map plan B fully, with a route, a schedule and something worth riding, so downgrading feels like a choice rather than a defeat.
• Skipping the debrief because the day went fine. Fix: debrief the uneventful days especially, since those are the ones that quietly teach bad habits.

The Drill

Build a written plan for your next day out with four required elements: a forecast summary in your own words, terrain crossed off by problem type, at least three named geographic decision points with written go and no-go criteria for each, and a hard turnaround time. Standard: after the trip, mark each decision point with what you actually did and why. Any point where you continued against your own written criteria is the single most important thing to discuss in the debrief.

← Full survival & remote first aid curriculum