The mountains don’t shout. They don’t put up warning signs in big, bold print. They don’t pause in their tracks to give you a moment to think about what you’re doing. And they certainly don’t take a step back and say, “Hey, perhaps you should think about what you’re doing here?” The truth is, most of the time the mountains sit quietly in the background, inviting us in, familiar and forgiving. And that’s why safety in the mountains is so often misunderstood.
For many skiers, the idea of “mountain safety” still feels like a separate entity from the joy of the mountain. A box to be ticked, a lecture to be endured, a safety briefing to be listened to before heading off for a great day out. But the truth is, safety in the mountains isn’t about fear. Safety in the mountains isn’t about restrictions. Safety in the mountains is about understanding. And understanding means knowing where the rules are, and when they’re shifting.
The rules are easy to understand when you’re on the piste. The runs are clearly marked, the hazards are contained, and the mountain is, to a large extent, managed for you. But when you stray outside of that framework, however far outside, the rules start to change.
But most importantly, safety is not primarily about the equipment or the avalanche forecast. It is primarily about awareness – of the conditions, the terrain, and ourselves. Fatigue, the need to follow someone else, the desire to ski a particular line because “it looks good” – these are the human elements that lie quietly in the background of most incidents. There is seldom a single dramatic error. More commonly, there is a series of small decisions that have never really been challenged.
This section is intended to slow the process down a little.
What follows is a discussion of what safety means both on and off the marked runs, the different risks that each area poses, and the transition from one to the other that most people get caught out by. We will also discuss the equipment that is necessary for off-piste skiing – not that it will make us safer, but that it is part of a larger system that will aid our decisions, not replace them.
No equipment is capable of thinking for us. And no amount of experience will protect us from the vagaries of the snow, the weather, and the terrain. What will aid us is the ability to read the mountain correctly – and to know when to change the plan.
The mountains demand our interest, our time, and our respect. Safety is not about avoiding the mountains. It is about engaging with the mountains on their own terms.
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