Dec. 21, 2011 - Issue #844: The Artist

Reaching the summit

Snow geeks get all the peaks

Every expedition reaches its own crux; the critical decision to forge ahead or turn back.
It's an uncharacteristically warm winter day and as we climb higher into the alpine, my skins slop with the weight of wet snow. Every 30 metres or so, I stomp off the accumulation and start again. When it comes to touring on warm days, there is an unwritten rule that all wise skiers follow: get up early and get out fast, before the heat gets too intense and loosens the snowpack.

We're treading the margin as we reach the top of Destiny Ridge, so when our instructor and guide, Peter Amann, suggests we better keep our stay at the peak brief, my fellow students and I listen, tarrying just long enough to glory in the summit.

Standing on barren, wind-blasted scree, the seven of us soak in a pristine moment. Below us lies our skin track and the Icefields Parkway, above Mt Hilda and to the southwest the Athabasca Glacier. The sky is so crisp and clear against the mass of the Rockies it seems a new shade of blue needs to be added to the spectrum, to define the colour of skies reserved for those who gaze on them from winter summits.

The preceding journey had made the sight all the more rare, coming as we had through a thick, shadowy forest of spruce and pine, emerging into the subalpine under overcast skies threatening to envelop us.

We'd noted these and many other conditions on our way up—part of our training for the Avalanche Skills Training 2 course. Under Amann's guidance we assessed the snowpack and selected safe travel routes. We had dug pits, peered through loupes at snow crystals and discussed the variables of weather, terrain and time. All invaluable in understanding snow stability, but it's still only part of the equation.

Human agency is the wild card. The thirst for adventure, the ambition to claim summits and stomp virgin snow inspires risky behaviour. If your eyes are set on the peak, it's hard to accept anything less, but often that's what the backcountry forces us to do.
 

According to Bruce Tremper's Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain, when it comes to making decisions about snow safety, you should be right 99.99 percent of the time. Intuitively most of us get Tremper's point, but consider the practical application. How many of us get things 99.99 percent right, all the time? Wouldn't 99 percent be enough?

Not when you start doing the math on backcountry travel. Tremper gives a simple example: say you want to ski 100 days in the backcountry per year (and who wouldn't?). Assume that you cross 10 avalanche slopes per day, 95 percent of the slopes you cross are stable and for every ten avalanches you trigger, one will be fatal. Theoretically, then, at 99.9 percent, you'll enjoy approximately 100 years of safe backcountry travel. At 99 percent, you're dead within one year. Big difference, and that's assuming that your 0.01 percent moment is at the end of your career, and not the start.
Choosing to summit or not can be one of those marginal decisions, the 0.99 percent difference—which makes those moments among the peaks all the more rare and valuable.

One of the things that doesn't get mentioned enough in the avalanche safety training literature is the opportunity to bag a summit safely. Even with an expert guide, there's no guarantee. During my level one course at Red Mountain, we'd set our sights on two peaks but prevailing weather forced us to bail on both.

Nonetheless, the prospect of peak-bagging beats standing below an untracked alpine pitch, idly wondering—or, worse still, trying and failing. All the more rare is summiting under clear, still skies on warm days, with the crumbling, jagged grey spires and slabs of the eastern Rockies before you. Once you have, with the proper training to accompany the miles of experience under your skis, it engenders a primal craving.

This is where all the snow geek stuff comes in. I want 99.99 percent assurance every time out. And I want summits—to take that perfect powder ride through the steep couloir.

For that, I need to know what the snowpack is doing, so I am learning to be a snow scientist. Yet at the same time I am also learning to be skeptical of empirical data. There are few absolutes. Snow is the ultimate, unknowable medium.

Making our descent, I stop below the first open slope to film my companions skiing down. It's a perfect moment: one after another, they carve deep turns into soft corn. Only afterward, I realize I've mistakenly hit the record button a second time, stopping it before capturing even five seconds of footage. Just like that, the moment is gone. Erased. Like it never really happened.

An hour-and-a-half later, after wide giddy carving on alpine faces, adrenalin-fuelled glade grinding and a slog back up through a babbling creek, we reach the parking lot. The flatness of it is surreal, like coming off the ocean with sea legs,but I can look back up and see with perfect assurance that yes, we were there. Up on that spiny scree shoulder, overshadowed by Mt Hilda, the faintest hint of ski tracks are still visible.

More stories in Snow Zone »

vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus