READING CONDITIONS: FORECASTS, OBSERVATIONS AND THE DAILY PLAN

The Technique

1. Read the forecast in the right order and the danger rating comes last, not first. Start with the avalanche problems, because the problem type is the thing that tells you what to avoid. Storm slab, wind slab, persistent slab, deep persistent slab, wet loose, wet slab, glide, cornice: each one behaves differently, hides in different terrain and gives different warning. Then read where each problem lives, meaning aspect and elevation band. Then the expected size and likelihood. Then the discussion, which is where the forecaster tells you what they are unsure about, and the confidence statement, which tells you how much of this is observation and how much is inference. The rating is a summary of all of that, and summaries lose information.
2. Problem type drives terrain choice more than any other single input. Wind slab sends you to think about lee aspects, cross loaded gully walls and convex rolls near ridgelines, and it usually gives feedback you can see and feel. Storm slab is broad, obvious and short lived. Persistent slab is the one that catches good parties, because it is low frequency, high consequence, poorly behaved under normal tactics, and it does not give you the reassuring feedback that keeps you honest. When a persistent problem is listed, the correct response is to reduce your terrain rather than to go and test it. Wet problems are governed by time of day and by warming, which means your plan needs a clock in it.
3. Translate the forecast into terrain before you leave the car, on paper. Write today's problem in one sentence. Write the aspects and elevations it lives on. Then write three lists: terrain you will ride, terrain you will not, and terrain you will only ride if you see specific evidence, with that evidence named. Doing this in the car park takes ten minutes and it is the difference between a plan and a direction of travel. Riders heading offshore should read the local product for the destination and note the local rating scale, and Australians should note that much of the terrain we ride at home has thin or no forecast coverage. No forecast does not mean no hazard. It means you are the forecaster, with less information.
4. The field observations that matter most are the cheap ones you gather constantly on the way in. Recent avalanche activity is the strongest signal there is, and it outranks anything you will get from a snow pit, so look at every slope you can see and note what has run, what size, on what aspect and how recently. Then the collapses and the shooting cracks, which are the snowpack telling you plainly that there is a weak layer under a slab. Then loading: new snow, snow moving on the wind, rain on snow, and rapid warming. These are red flags, they are qualitative, and they do not need a number attached to be believed.
5. Small tests are useful because they are cheap and repeatable. Pole probing as you skin or ride to feel hard over soft. Hand shears on a safe bank. Boot or track penetration. Ski cuts on small, low consequence features with a clean runout. Watching the snow behave at the edge of your track, on the cutbank, under the sled. Formal pit tests have their place, but they are one point in a variable snowpack and they are easy to over trust, especially with persistent weak layers where a clean result tells you very little about the slope next door.
6. Treat your evidence asymmetrically, because the cost of being wrong is not symmetrical. Observations that say conditions are worse than forecast should change your plan immediately and without debate. Observations that say conditions are better than forecast should barely move you at all, and never on the strength of one test or one uneventful slope. Every party that has ever been caught rode something that held first. Absence of evidence in a persistent slab problem is not evidence of stability, it is the normal state of that problem right up until it is not.
7. Build the day as a route with decision points, not as a destination. Name the specific places where the party stops, looks, and chooses: the point where you commit to an aspect, the point where you drop into the drainage, the crossing of a runout, the turnaround time. At each one, decide in advance what evidence sends you to plan B, and know what plan B actually is, including how you get home from it. A plan with no named alternative is a plan you will not leave, because at the moment of truth nobody wants to be the person with no suggestion.
8. Professionals adjust all day and they adjust in one direction easily and in the other direction slowly. They keep a running sense of whether hazard is rising or falling, they expose one person at a time in consequential terrain, they use safe zones and keep spacing, and they watch the party as closely as the snow. The discipline that is hardest to copy is this: once you have moved your plan down, you do not quietly move it back up later in the day when everyone is tired, the light is flattening and the good line is right there. Then debrief at the end, write down what you saw, and send observations to your local forecast centre where a public observation platform exists, because your notes make tomorrow's forecast better for everyone.

Common Mistakes

Digging a pit, getting a reassuring result, and upgrading the plan on the strength of it. Fix: a pit can talk you out of terrain but it should almost never talk you into it. Let good results confirm caution, not replace it.

• Reading the danger rating and skipping the problem description. Fix: if you cannot state today's avalanche problem, its aspect and its elevation band out loud without looking, you are not ready to choose terrain yet.

The Drill

The one page morning translation. Every riding day for a full season, before you leave the car, write on one page: today's problem in a sentence, the aspects and elevations it lives on, your yes list, your no list, your conditional list with the evidence named, and your turnaround time. That night, write what you actually saw and whether it matched. Standard: the morning page done in under ten minutes, the evening note done every single day, and the whole season kept in one notebook you can read back.

← Full survival & remote first aid curriculum