Photo: © Chris Souillac
Once you have decided where to go, your conduct on the slope will determine your safety. If you follow the rules and keep thinking, you have a much lower risk of triggering an avalanche. If you do not, you could turn a slope that professionals would regard as offering a safe passage into a very unsafe place to be.
Go one at a time on exposed parts of the mountain, do this wherever slopes above and/or below are steep enough to avalanche. This is one of the golden rules of off-piste/avalanche risk management. The weight of one person is much less likely to trigger a slide than that of two or more people. And if the worst happens, only one of you will get caught and the rest of the group are able to organise a rescue.
When we go on a low angle slope and there are no steep slopes above us, we don’t go one at a time. There is no reason to. However, once we get into areas where there are 25° slopes, we know that there will be steeper and shallower slopes around us. Then we make sure that we only ever expose one skier at a time to any risk.
Only ever stop at islands of safety. These are places where you are protected from potential risks, such as under a rock, on a ridge and not below a loaded slope (nothing dangerous above).
Ridges are good places to go to whenever you have the slightest doubt. Riding along a ridge is generally a pretty safe bet as long as you don’t ride out onto a cornice above a big drop-off.
A ridge doesn’t have to be a classic knife-edge. It can be a rounded area, often referred to as a shoulder. The key point for avalanche safety is that it shouldn’t have a significant slope above you that could release and sweep you away.
Avoid convexities. This is where the slope goes from flat to steep abruptly. A lot of slabs fracture here due to a higher amount of traction stress in these areas.
To observe this, try bending a Mars bar, the chocolate layer cracks at the convexity (where it bends) because that’s where most of the stress is concentrated. That is a lot like the snowpack on a slope where there are convexities.
Keep your tracks together. The merits of this may not be proven scientifically, but if you follow next to the track of the person who went in front of you and they didn’t set off an avalanche then the chances of you triggering an avalanche are much reduced.
Keeping your tracks close together is also good manners. It preserves fresh lines for other people. It is also a courtesy to other skiers mixed in with respect for the mountain.
Terrain traps may exist below you. Remember this is where you could end up if something is let loose above you. Will it take you into a hole, a ravine or a lake? Will it take you over a cliff?
Terrain traps are anything below you that could make the consequences of being swept away even worse. Terrain traps can transform a small avalanche into a fatal one.
Don’t trigger avalanches on other people, this is really bad form and you’ll go to jail if you kill them.
Always have escape routes in mind. If you are a really good skier, you can sometimes ski out in front of the avalanche and then get out to the side. But recognise it’s very, very difficult to get out of a moving avalanche. Have a plan, but remember most of us will not succeed.