Avalanche

You end up with these different things that we say, the things that we do, and we don't necessarily call out hazards.

And we have this Ian McCammon thing, is the guy who came up with this for Avalanche stuff, the facets.

It's like, yeah, familiarity, acceptance, social acceptance, consistency, the expert halo, track slash scarcity, social facilitation.

And, you know, you get this like, that's like kind of the big broad concept within facets.

So it must be fine.

the young woman who was watching was like, you know, she knew it was up and she was not able to sway him.

This goes back to what we say in Avalanche stuff, like everybody has a veto, you know? Like, hey, I don't feel comfortable.

We have to have a veto.

And how do you see the novices interacting with risk and making mistakes as opposed to the experts? Yeah, what's different?

Well, I feel like the Avalanche Center is fantastic, as you mentioned, but we need to take apart the forecast when we read it and not just look at the, you know, green or yellow type of color.

And, you know, if we see that green color, we don't want to just mean it.

Green means go, you know, on everywhere and every run and And the thing that I see the most commonly, and I'd say it's kind of both groups, is dropping the one-at-a-time thing.

Heads up.

Avalanche.

Watch out, watch out, watch out.

The film profiles world-class ski mountaineers Jim Morrison and his partner in life, Hilary Nelson.

Heads up.

Avalanche.

Watch out, watch out, watch out.

The film profiles world-class ski mountaineers Jim Morrison and his partner in life, Hilary Nelson.

It doesn't actually generate that much extra heat.

Avalanche is less about the cold and more about the, you know, several thousand tons of snow that just completely obliterates the ski lodge.

Everything is buried and crushed.

It's like boulders smashing into everything.

right, Bob.

Okay.

Avalanche is coming.

Bad stuff.

I think that the proximity of the good ski terrain to trailheads has been huge.

Proximity of those trailheads to an international airport has been good for a population of lots of people, affordable place to live, all of those things in the big picture and then we can talk about the snow the the type of snow we have here is um generally easier and more fun to ski than uh you know stay the typical powder day in seattle area um or you know more maritime snow packs um and then the uh Avalanche problems are maybe a little bit more manageable and tend to settle out more quickly than in the continental snow packs of Colorado or the Uintas.

Yeah, I think that's, you know, kind of what we hear.

It's definitely when I talk to people out backcountry skiing, that's why most people mention that they live in Salt Lake, you know, good proximity, good quality of snow, intermountain snow climate, all that good stuff.

And there was very, very little backcountry traffic there at that point.

There was backcountry traffic in what we now call the powder parks on the north side of Big Cottonwood.

And that predated the know the use of skins and people were traveling on um using wax and um and um scale skis and very early on powderbird said well there's no reason for us to go there um we've got helicopters we can go to this this bigger terrain and we can do some sort of avalanche control work from the top down and um and so initially i don't think there was that much conflict of interest between the two because backcountry skiers were using that relatively benign avalanche Resistant terrain, solar aspects, aspen trees, moderate steeps, and Powderbird was operating in the Avalanche Pass of, in those days, also included Mill B South and Broad's Fork.

And then, yeah, I mean, eventually at some point along the way, backcountry tours had the vision of accessing steeper and steeper runs and leaving the more avalanche resistant paths.

I don't know if the guy you know here, if they have that sort of thing here, but I haven't heard of that over here.

The Avalanche tracker.

Yeah, I don't think I've heard of that being used around here, but I don't know if it may be.

Yeah, I don't know.