When skiing off-piste, you can do the difficult bit properly and then completely ruin it when you stop. Everyone drops one at a time. Lovely. Then you ski over to your mates, who are standing in a nice obvious group directly underneath the slope you just skied.
I’ve definitely been guilty of paying more attention to the line I’m about to ski than where I’m actually going to stop. The problem is that your stopping point is part of the line. If an avalanche can reach you there, you’re not in a safe spot.
Look up before you stop
The obvious thing to look at when you’re choosing somewhere to stop is the ground you’re actually going to stand on. That’s not really the important bit. Have a look uphill and work out what feeds into it.
A nice flat patch can be right in the runout of a much steeper slope. Gullies are particularly easy to get wrong because the bottom often looks like a very convenient place to regroup, when it’s exactly where snow from a much bigger area above is going to end up.
I’ve certainly caught myself looking for somewhere comfortable to stand rather than properly looking at the terrain above it. It’s an easy habit to slip into, particularly when the skiing is good and you’re thinking more about the next line than where you’ve just stopped.
You don’t need to be standing on steep ground to be exposed to an avalanche. That’s really the point. Before I settle somewhere, I want to know what’s above me and where snow from it would actually go.
The flat ground to the side looks like an obvious place to regroup. Unfortunately, there’s quite a lot of mountain above it still, including side gullies.
Get out of the runout
If I’m stopping below a slope, I want to be properly out of it. Not six feet to the side of everybody’s tracks. Avalanches can spread out remarkably wide.
A ridge or decent piece of high ground can give you separation from the path. Sometimes dense trees or a substantial terrain feature will do the same. The important bit isn’t finding something that looks sheltered from where you’re standing. It’s whether an avalanche from the terrain above could actually get there.
Tracks don’t tell you much either. This is one of those things that’s surprisingly hard to ignore in real life. You arrive somewhere and there are twenty tracks through it, or somebody else is already standing there, and your brain quietly files that as evidence that everything is probably fine. It isn’t.
What worked as a stopping point in yesterday’s conditions may also be a crap choice today. Consider the conditions, including wind loading and untouched powder stashes that may release.
Gullies deserve a bit more suspicion
I’ve stopped in gullies plenty of times over the years because they’re convenient. They’re often where the terrain naturally brings everyone back together.
They’re also exactly where you don’t want to be if they’re collecting avalanche debris.
Snow gets funnelled into a gully and can bury you much more deeply than the same amount of moving snow on an open slope. Creek beds, depressions and abrupt transitions can do the same sort of thing, while cliffs, rocks and trees give you something unpleasant to hit on the way through.
This is why I don’t use flat and safe interchangeably. They aren’t the same thing.
Think about who’s skiing next
Where you stop also needs to work once the next person starts skiing.
If we’ve decided to expose one person at a time, I don’t then want the rest of the group sitting somewhere that person could send an avalanche onto them. Apart from being a fairly obvious flaw in the plan, you’ve now potentially got several people involved instead of one.
Ideally the person who’s just come down is somewhere genuinely out of the firing line and can still see the next skier. Then you bring the next person through.
This sounds incredibly obvious written down. On the mountain it gets murkier. Someone stops somewhere slightly different from the plan, the next person skis over to them, somebody else joins them and suddenly that’s the meeting point because… well, everyone is there.
I’ve done that. Most people who spend enough time off-piste probably have.
It’s worth deciding where you’re going before the first person drops, but I’m not religious about the original plan either. If I get there and it looks worse from below than it did from above, I’ll move.
There isn’t a magic type of safe spot
I’d be wary of turning any of this into universal rules like stop on a ridge or stand behind trees.
A ridge can be useful high ground and still have something nasty connected above or behind it. Widely spaced trees can be slap bang in avalanche terrain. A flat-top snowdrift can look wonderfully safe until you look at the size of the slope sitting above it. Cornices introduce another problem altogether.
You’re choosing somewhere that makes sense for that terrain, with that avalanche problem, on that day.
That does require knowing what you’re looking at. If you don’t have the avalanche training to make those decisions yourself, an article on the internet obviously isn’t going to provide it. Get trained and go out with people who know what they’re doing.
If you’re not sure, don’t go
Looking up the mountain before you stop is a good habit. It isn’t a way of deciding whether avalanche terrain is safe.
You need to understand the avalanche forecast, the terrain around you and the consequences if something does release. If you can’t confidently work out whether your stopping point is exposed, that’s a pretty good sign you shouldn’t be making the call yourself.
Get some avalanche training, go with someone who knows the terrain, hire a guide, or choose somewhere else to ski. There’s always another line.
And even when you do know what you’re doing, turn around when you stop and look uphill. It’s remarkably easy to concentrate on the bit you’ve just skied and forget about everything sitting above you.
Then, once you’re actually somewhere sensible, you can stand around talking shit with your mates.
