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It was an interview, a retrospective, 20 years of using the stop or go Austrian Alpine Club method that he designed.

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And they said, hey, you know, what about with the old snow problem?

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And he's like, there is zero close to zero predictive value for me as a mountain guide to stop and dig and pound on snow columns with my group of clients.

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The bulletin is tells me, hey, there's an old snow problem dial it back. That's all I need to know. And he's like, it is a fool's errand.

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If I'm trying to outsmart the old snow problem, because you may get away with that Russian roulette or crossing through the minefield, you might be able to walk through the minefield a couple times.

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But you don't want to build a career out of walking through minefields because eventually you're going to hit the trigger and it's going to blow up.

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Welcome to all aspects, a podcast where we explore, discuss and celebrate adventure culture and outdoor lifestyle.

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It is our mission to educate, inform and entertain our fellow adventurers about the inherent risks that surround us every time we go outside to play.

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And to provide you with the knowledge and tools to help you do the things you love the most and the safest way possible.

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All aspects is brought to you by AspectAvy. AspectAvy is on a mission to save lives by making avalanche safety simple.

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It is the only app that tells you where the high and low risk zones are for today's avalanche danger.

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With a suite of built in tools like forecast verification, slope meter and gear checklist, AspectAvy is the new safety standard for avalanche risk management.

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Remember, there are dozens of apps that get you into the back country, but there is only one that's designed to bring you home.

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And that's AspectAvy. Go to aspectavy.com to learn more or download the app to start your 30 day free trial.

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Thank you, AspectAvy, for making this show possible and thank you for listening.

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All right, let's get to the show.

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We're back. Howdy, Dave.

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You're upright. You're feeling better.

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I'm feeling better. I wouldn't say I'm healthy yet, but I'm out of the flu cave, I think. We'll see.

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Well, I'm happy to hear that. We're obviously doing this podcast from our own houses today because Jeff is recovering and I got a wedding to go to this weekend.

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So I can't keep you getting sick.

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Nobody needs to share this.

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Jeff, I wanted to start off by telling you a shocking fun fact that has no relation to what we're going to talk about today.

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Oh, now I'm really curious.

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Do you know how many slices of pizza are consumed every minute in the US?

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Whoa.

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Every minute?

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Every minute.

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Every minute. I'm going to say a million.

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Okay, well, it's way less than that.

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Okay.

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It's 21,000 every minute.

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Wow.

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And that's because this is a secondary fun fact that I just learned.

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That's because in America, the average American consumes 650 pounds of dairy a year.

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What?

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Dude, like, what does that even look like?

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A lot of cows.

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Dang.

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Anyway, so we're talking about how snow pits might kill you or why they may be plotting to kill you.

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And Jeff, I am actually very excited to hear this one because I have told you this.

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I've always been kind of confused about how snow pits are actually that helpful, at least like for a solo person digging it.

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And so I'm actually very excited to get into this and hear kind of your take on like when they work or like kind of why snow pits are good, how they work.

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And then on the other side of it, why seems like we're fascinated by snow pits.

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Seems like everybody's out there like my whole social media feed is people digging pits and everyone's freaking out and being like a million likes.

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Yeah, let's go.

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So like let's so let's jump into this like right off the bat.

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Hot take.

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How are they useful?

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And how are they kind of overrated?

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Yeah.

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So when they're useful is unfortunately so far removed from most 99% of the users.

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They're they're useful in a professional setting when you're in an organization, when you work at an avalanche center or a guide operation and you have like 100 pits or more that you've been tracking since October, November, December, January now.

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And you can put all the data into context.

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But as a solo recreational user, the predictive value for staying alive is almost zero.

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Because your sample size is going to be one, maybe two pits per tour.

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And basically what you're looking at is about a meter chunk of snow.

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You know, like extended column test is 90 by 30 centimeters.

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And that's about one one millionth of the slope you're going to ski.

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So I don't want to bet my life or my friends lives or my clients lives on one tiny data point.

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So this is where it gets really tough for people to accept is like, Hey, the snow pit is basically a one way street.

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It can take you to safe town or conservative town.

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And that's it, meaning if I dig a snow pit and it looks really crappy and I'm like, whoa, today was supposed to be a low danger day.

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That may prompt me to make more conservative choices and really dial back my terrain choices.

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Okay.

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So basically what you're saying is.

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So snow pits, when they're used to like aggregate tons of information over a season, like by a forecast center or a guide operation or whatever, like that's when they're useful.

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Super useful.

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They're consistently going and checking like rechecking and putting that data in and they can kind of see it like plot out.

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And they're tracking the trends. Is it getting lower risk or higher risk of an avalanche over time and they can correlate that with other signs of instability, recent avalanches, cracking one thing, things like that.

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But I lost you buddy.

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What do you mean?

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You just got really frozen.

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We're back after our brief technical difficulty.

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But we were just talking about basically that snow pits are like a one way street, essentially, if you're going to use them, not as a guide operation or something like that.

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Where you have, you're seeing it consistently and kind of seeing the trend out goes, it can only be used if I'm out in the back country on a slope that I maybe want to ski. It can only be used for me to like dig down, you know, do all the taps and be like, Oh, this is unstable.

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I should not ski it today.

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It can't be used the other way to be like this is stable because well, just because where the snow is where I'm digging is not going to be the same as the whole face of a ski.

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Yeah. And it's the classic kind of Dunning Krueger trap where we get a little bit of knowledge.

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And we think that translates to judgment. And it's like, Oh, I can run right through this yellow light. It's going to be just fine because I just did my level two. I've got my cert bro.

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Let's dig a pit and decide whether to ski it. You're like, Whoa, no, no, no, no, no, no, it doesn't work that way. Because I mean it's just not practical to dig more than one to maybe three pits on a tour.

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And that's not enough data to make a decision to override, you know, what the forecast and what aspect of he's telling you, it's not nearly enough.

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And the trick the real bummer is, because avalanches don't always respond to our bad decisions, we may get away with it many times in a row and think that we're doing it right.

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And we're like, Hey, I did this last week, I dug a pit, it looked good, we skied the bowl, we outsmarted the system, we went more aggressive than what the avalanche forecasters were telling us to do that day.

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And we went against their advice and we went, went right through the red zone and that aspect avid it all turned out fine. So we must be doing it right.

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And that is a huge mistake. But you may get away with it many times until it catches up with you.

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Okay, so, so if this is, so if this is like the case, it seems like, well, first off, why is there such an emphasis on this like when you go look around the web or even like, even the avalanche centers like they have to know what you're telling me.

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Why do they encourage people like, what, why is this such a thing if it's so inaccurate on like a per person basis.

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Yeah, yeah.

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Yeah, let's set the background just a little bit here. Well, I'll answer the question then I'll give it some little background information.

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So in, you know, condom and Danny condom and Nobel Prize winner and social psychologist says this, in the absence of a simple efficient system to make decisions.

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We're going to grab anything we can.

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And so that's what I think is going on. You're like, there's a scene in the big Lebowski where the movie opens up, and the two heavies ram his head into the toilet. And they're like, where's the money Lebowski we want the money Lebowski where is it.

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And they finally let him up for air and he's like, let me go take another look. I'm sure it's down there somewhere.

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And that's how the snow pit feels. It feels truthy, because if you're doing extended contest, which is the best predictor that we have the best correlation between avalanches and propagation through the through the

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small section that you've isolated on your pit.

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When you see that it's very convincing. It either falls in your lap as a mini avalanche and you're like whoa.

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Or it doesn't.

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And it gives us the illusion of being yes or no, go or no go.

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And that's very appealing. And it looks great in photos when you get that that failure as you tap on the shovel.

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It collapses and then travels through the column. And you're like, oh, that's a mini avalanche and it falls in your lap and it's heavy and a little bit scary and you're like, wow, that was cool.

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So it comes off as being really sexy and is the answer.

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But it's really a tiny, tiny amount and I'll give a couple examples to illustrate that point. So it was a high danger day and I was teaching avalanche course level two for a bunch of locals.

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Super experienced folks went to a new zone that hadn't been in and I purposely went there in the forest to illustrate this point.

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The forest was beautiful old growth trees. And so the tree bombs are massive. So when we dug pits in the forest, we could not get them to fail.

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And this is at high danger, keep in mind. So it should be hair trigger it should be on isolating the column it should collapse and propagate, or from the wrist, just a couple taps, it should be and falling in people's laps.

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And they were like, what gives looks like we can ski everything. And I said, okay, great. So let's log our data here we got three pits with no result, meaning we could not get failure.

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And if you don't have failure, it's certainly not going to propagate throughout the column. So it was as good as it could get at high danger.

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And then we went out into a clearing where the tree bombs couldn't quite reach. And when we dug the pit, it failed before we could even tap on it while we were cutting it the whole thing failed.

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And they were like, whoa, this is super sketchy this looks like high danger. And you're like, yeah, that's because here, the snowpack is different than what it is 30 feet away from us.

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And the reason was, you know, it should have been the bull's eye for the persistence lab problem the old snow problem. We were North face shady below tree line.

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But the tree bombs break up the week layers. So they make it rumpy bumpy, and you no longer have a continuous week layer that can carry the propagation.

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And when I was illustrated to the students, oh my gosh, where I dig the pit is incredibly important. And even if I do everything well intentioned and correct, digging a pit representative of the slope I want to ride.

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It's just one tiny data point. And the buzzword is spatial variability. And that just means the snowpack is different from here, then it is over here, then it is over there, and closer to me.

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And it's just changing. And one of the papers that really drives that home and put this in the show notes is a paper from Europe, where there was a ridgeline with a big avalanche, and they went to the adjacent peak as close as you could get.

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And this second peak was slightly under 30 degrees so they knew they could travel there and be safe and out of avalanche terrain.

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But it was, but wait, just to be clear, like, it was like the same aspect, the same elevation, everything like same storms hitting it. It was like,

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literally the peak over.

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It was their doppelganger. It was the total twinsies as close as you can get.

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As close as you can have to like the like a controllable.

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So peak one avalanches and peak two is slightly under 30 degrees. So they go to dig there and say, Hey, let's see what we can see from a butt load.

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I'll forget, but it's in the paper how many pits they dug, we'll just call it like 50. They put those grad students through the ringer.

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And what they found was about a third of them. Yeah, about a third of them looked really scary. And you're like, Oh man, I've never seen this.

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And about a third of them looked like inconclusive, not bad, not good, just kind of.

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And then a third of them looked really good and you're like, Oh, I'd see that.

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And so you see this bell shaped curve, which often shows up in natural distributions in nature where things are bad, not so bad and pretty good.

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And that's just the natural distribution of things. So depending on where you dug on that slope.

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And I want to say the slope was like the size of a tennis court. You know, it's not that big of an area, but you could find the lucky spot and get the bad results.

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We're like, Ooh, that looks really scary. Let's not ski this. Or you could get the unlucky spot where you're like, Wow, this looks really bomber.

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I feel good about this. Let's go drop the bowl.

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It'd be interesting to see how like I haven't seen this paper. I would love to look through it, but it does it show kind of like where the results were like on a map of the face?

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Like, was it? I can't remember how to tell my head. No, it was like this third was sketch. This third was okay. And this third, like it'd be interesting to see kind of how like where.

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Yeah, I think it was pretty randomized to be honest. Where the results. Okay, so it was kind of like hot, holy. Okay, cool.

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And to be fair, you know, this is an extreme case or illustrative case to show spatial variability. The snowpack is constantly changing and different. And it's really hard for us to have 3d vision and be able to understand how or why the snowpack is different a few feet away from us.

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Okay.

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Because oftentimes you'll dig out there and it'll be a uniform week layer and it's really obvious. But you don't need to dig to find that out. They'll tell you in the avalanche report. They'll tell you straight up.

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Right.

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And say, hey, you know, these are the scary aspects and we recommend you stay under X slope angle today to manage your risk.

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Okay, but then what so this is sort of like circular but I want to touch on this again. Then why?

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Because you see it, if you go read the full avi report, like the long one, not just in the little slip. But a lot of times it will be like go dig a pit or something like that. It's like why are they telling people to do that if

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it sounds like the experts and the pros and the forecasters and the guides, like kind of know that it's much less reliable than it's made out to be like why are they telling like is it just sort of like to cover their ass like what

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like that's a great question, Dave and I can't speak for everyone, but I will say in the absence of a president of back country system.

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People are going to grasp the straws in a snow pit is very convincing and I remember distinctly in one of the fatal avalanche accidents are read, and I read every single one from the last 11 years.

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It stood out. So clearly to me the forecaster said, dig down on the suspect slopes and analyze for fracture initiation that's did this, the, the, the column collapse and propagation did the collapse travel throughout it.

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And I was just like, holy smokes, that is putting so much pressure on a recreational user that is just wildly inappropriate. And it's just way beyond the abilities of most people and do you just dig one pit and say well we didn't see the old snow layer, or we found the old snow layer, and it collapsed, but it

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was like, okay, so does that mean it's okay. You're just like, oh my god, this is the way to man.

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Yeah, because it feels like the instructions are sort of like half, half there. It's like dig a pit and then you're like okay but what, then what like, it does that mean I just stay in a small area like 50.

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And then I just dig it directly down like straight line down from my pit like what, what's the instruction after that I guess like. Yeah, that's funny. I've never really kind of put those things together.

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I just always figured I was super lazy.

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And that's why I wasn't digging snow pit. And I'm sure some people will be like, well you are lazy, but I know just can I liberate you for, can I liberate you from that.

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Sure, but hold on, just one thing. Okay, I just have to say this because then you can fully vindicate me. So just for some reason my brain, I've always just felt like there's no way they can be that accurate.

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Like, there's a whole sort of and you're doing this one little thing and so it's kind of, I'm feeling a little bit relieved and vindicated because it's sounding like I was sort of my, I was sort of on the right track at least.

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Maybe not exactly.

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I would say the analogy to that is, if I'm going to dig one pit and go ski a bowl based off of those results, it's like playing Russian roulette, except when I open the revolver, the chamber has about a million, or the, you know, million spots for bullets.

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Okay, huge magazine.

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It's a huge magazine. And the pit I'm digging is just one bullet.

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And there's a million out there and I'm just like, close the chamber and roll it and I'm not sure how many bullets are loaded up there because I only have one.

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If I'm lucky, maybe I dug two pits, two data points. And that's just not nearly enough to bet everyone's lives on.

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Yeah, I often think about, I've kind of been thinking about this analogy more and it feels like the forecast and a lot of the tools we have are really good at telling us that there is a minefield.

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But like using that analogy, going and digging, it's like, well, yeah, we know there's a minefield there.

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So, tell me where the landmines are. And if you go dig a pit, you might not hit a landmine. You might be between them or whatever.

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And then, so it's interesting to me, we spend so much time and effort, it feels like in this day and age, basically telling people that there is a minefield, that everyone already knows there's a minefield.

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What we need to know is where the landmines are.

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Yeah, and that's, to be fair, knowing where the landmines are are really hard to see. Sometimes you can see bushy areas, ledgy areas, and you're like, okay, that's where the old snow trigger points are most likely to be.

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But a lot of times they're buried. And unless you have 3D vision, you're not going to know. So you just have to treat the whole slope as a minefield and just say, oh, there's mines in there.

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I'm not going there because that's exactly where the bulletin told me the old snow problem lives. So let's avoid that and keep our slope angles mellow.

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There's a story that illustrates this pretty well. It's a great interview, put in the show notes with Larcher. He's the Austrian mountain guide, IFMGA, internationally certified mountain guide who developed the Austrian Alpine Clubs avalanche curriculum.

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And so this has been in place for over 20 years. And it was an interview, a retrospective, 20 years of using the stop or go Austrian Alpine Club method that he designed.

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And they said, hey, you know, what about with the old snow problem. And he's like, there is zero close to zero predictive value for me as a mountain guide to stop and dig and pound on snow columns with my group of clients.

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The bulletin is tells me, hey, there's an old snow problem, dial it back. That's all I need to know. And he's like, it is a fool's errand.

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If I'm trying to outsmart the old snow problem, because you may get away with that Russian roulette or crossing through the minefield, you might be able to walk through the minefield a couple times.

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But you don't want to build a career out of walking through minefields because eventually you're going to hit the trigger and it's going to blow up.

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So to his point, yeah, this is a super experienced IFMGA guide in his 60s who designed the educational curriculum.

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There's over a million members of the Austrian Alpine Club and they're told to use this system. This is the expert's expert.

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And he's saying, I don't dig pits. I'm focusing on managing my team through the terrain safely.

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And he's like, I don't have the bandwidth to be like, oh, maybe the old snow problems not as reactive on this slope.

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He's like, that's a fool's errand. I'm not going there.

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That's pretty telling coming from someone of that sort of stature.

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Yeah. And to be fair, like for me as a mountain guide, if I had an accident in Austria, they would run it through the algorithm and be like, hey, Jeff, you were way in the red.

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What possible reasons could you have for overriding your training that you were given? In fact, everyone's given. This is just accepted standards and norm.

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And I better have some really good explanations for why I pushed into the red zones and broke the rules.

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And if I'm like, well, I dug one pit and decided to put the whole team on the bowl because I got a good result and the old snow layer, it fractured, but it didn't propagate.

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I mean, that is not going to hold up in court. It's not going to go well for me.

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Yeah. So I guess like, hmm, that's an interesting way to think about that.

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All right, we're going to take a quick break to let Aspect Avi, our business daddy, have a little ad time and then we will be right back.

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Rolling into the weekend. Where are you going to ride where it's safe to go?

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Because the state right here, it's stuck at considerable avalanche danger for almost all zones.

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And the ones that aren't there, it's scary moderate. That's not much better because we have a really pronounced old snow problem.

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That sugar rotten snow is buried by the big storm slabs from the last storm cycle.

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So we're seeing a lot of skier triggered avalanches, snowmobile triggered, even remote triggered from the flats.

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So it's really dangerous out there. We got to worry about the slopes that are over 30 degrees.

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And on Aspect Avi, those ones are highlighted in red for considerable danger.

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And we need to use the slope angle meter tool so we can shoot the run out to make sure that I'm not going to get hit if I remotely trigger the slide or someone drops it from above.

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If you want to stay safe and manage your risk this weekend, go to the app store and download Aspect Avi. We've got you covered.

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Alright, Jeff. So before we kind of wrap this up and give everyone actionable information or basically what to do about this, I just want to like ask, is there a standardized like, I don't know, distance or impact radius that can be applied to a snow pit?

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Sure. If you can make a pit and then you're like, okay, so I can assume that everything in 10 feet around me is this or does that exist or is that not a thing?

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Well, I grew up in Vermont and there's a bunch of classic Vermontrisms and one of my favorite one is hard telling not knowing by Jesus.

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That totally applies to this. Nobody knows. Alright, and if they do, you just keep asking them why and it's going to break down in a couple seconds because you just don't know.

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We don't have X-ray vision in the snowpack. However, you can make some generalizations.

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Let's say you're in an old growth forest and we talked about that before, the tree bombs interrupt the old snow week layers and so they make it discontinuous and even if you got failure in one tiny section, it's really hard for it to continue to propagate.

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So you could say, hey, as long as we stay in the dense forest and what we're talking about is a forest that's so dense, only experts can ride in there.

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It's not an open glade. This is like, you got to be on your game to ski in this terrain.

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And then as soon as it starts to open up so that normal people can ski through it, kind of breaks down. It might be okay or it might not.

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But when you're out in the open, it can be really tough to know because we reference that paper there where they found varying degrees of bonding tests on a uniform slope that's smooth and planar.

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Like think of a book tilted on its side on the table.

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And you're like, man, you couldn't have asked for a better situation than that. And the bonding tests were coming back dramatically different.

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So there's no way to know.

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Because when we go up, we have the general kind of ideas of spacing out to avoid, you know, like a bus length apart is kind of what we always go with.

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Yeah, to spread our weight out. And so I was wondering, you know, if that's what we, if that's how we measure spacing our weight.

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Is that also with that number radius? Does that have anything to do or is that just kind of a sounds like it's just a random number.

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Okay, so the reason why we space out when we're an avalanche train on the uphill track is to spread out our weight. That's the primary reason.

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Because if there's a land mine lurking underneath us, if there's five of us jumping up and down in one spot, we're likely to trigger it.

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But if we spread out, you're much less likely to trigger.

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Now, that is, that's trigger.

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That person is 20, 30 feet away. And ideally, the other people would be out of the way.

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Yeah. And so how this all works is, you can't justify going on a sketchy slope by saying, Oh, but we'll spread out or we'll go one at a time. That is a classic beginner's mistake.

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It's during our trigger planning process, we've already determined that this is a low risk slope to go on. And we're adding another layer of risk prevention risk treatment on top by spreading out even further.

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But it's never a justification for going into really sketchy terrain. Oh, don't worry, we'll do it one at a time or we'll stay spread out. No, that's a classic way to get smoked.

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And there's no, so there's no correlation between the distance that you stay apart when you're touring and how effective or predictable snow pit might be.

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No, no, no.

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Okay.

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And, you know, the best way, you know, another way to gather more information and this takes a really finely tuned hand is to have your avalanche probe out.

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And you can often click a carabiner onto the loop of the cable and drag it behind you like a foxtail. And then you can probe along the way and be like, Oh, we found this weak layer in the snow pit.

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Let's get a sense. This is like our 3d sonar probe going down in the snowpack ground penetrating radar.

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And you hold your probe like a pencil with your thumb and two fingers and you probe every stride and you see the distra or you can feel rather if there's a weak layer in there in that distribution.

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However, this is super advanced skill. And to be honest, it's one that I'll do frequently, particularly when I'm going to a new zone to get a sense of what the snowpack is like the structure.

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But I'm not betting my life to it because there could be a tiny thin layer that I may miss because I'm breaking trail and skinning.

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I'm not solely focused on it. But this is a great learning opportunity when you're doing an avalanche course to be with an instructor and be like, Hey, let's go down and see the weak layers in the pit.

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And let's probe right next to it. And now let's use our ski pole handle, which is less sensitive than the probe, but it's faster to use and see if we can pick it up.

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And I would say the students are about 50 50, you know, it's a new skill where they need a lot of coaching.

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But for advanced practitioners, it's a great way to gonna get a mental map and feel where those layers in the snow pit are or aren't over the train and see how that changes.

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You're like, Oh, this little subtle tilt to the east. I'm not feeling that crust anymore with the facets on either side. It's just cold snow. Okay, that's interesting. And you might dig down and to verify it.

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That'd be a cool topic for a different podcast of like, like the top five like elite pro tips or like techniques that people not for people like me to use but just to like learn about it.

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Yeah, five ways to get smoke while learning pro tips. I would, I would for sure just do it all wrong. I'd be like, Oh, something about like, but yeah, well, so that kind of transitions us actually smoother than I thought into so like how can people you know,

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like, let's leave people with a solution here. Right. How can how how should people be kind of using the snow pit? Because I mean, just just this morning, because I knew we were gonna talk about this, I just went on to YouTube and typed in snow pit.

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And there's hundreds of videos that are all like, don't die. This is the way to know if what you're seeing is safe, like everything. And you know, it's all pretty much that. And so now we're knowing that, well, that's just not the case. So, so how yeah, how people use them properly and then what are other tools that maybe

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can aid.

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Well, that could just help us more than say just digging a snow pit.

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Yep. So, first off the bat, most of the times, the snow pit is not helpful. And like in the big Lebowski, like, don't go looking back down in the toilet because the answer is not in there, man.

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The money's not in the toilet. Don't keep going back into the snow pit. Right.

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And so, you know, as a shameless product plug, that's what we helped do with aspect of like, if I'm going to contemplate breaking the red, because I saw one good snow pit.

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Oh, via condios and me goes, you're not going to last long. You might get lucky a few times but eventually that old snow layer is going to bite you, regardless of what you saw in your pit.

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So, I would say that first and foremost, like, you know, follow the red shading and be like, hey, you know, these are the low risk zones and clear for today's problems and the avalanche danger.

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That's already been figured out for you. And it took a lot of technical engineering and a lot of research to make that happen.

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So it might feel like a shortcut and, you know, our Puritan guilt complex might feel like, oh, if I'm not digging, I'm not suffering and I'm not doing my homework.

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But, you know, referring back to larger, he's like, as a mountain guide, if there's an old snow problem, the predictive value of me digging a pit is near zero.

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Because it's avoidance of the minefields, it's not, oh, this minefield doesn't look particularly dangerous, meaning we only got failure, but we didn't get propagation.

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Let's go into that minefield. It's like, no, the forecast is really clear, you know, 95% of the deaths happen in the blacked out critical danger areas where the problem lives.

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And that's more than enough information. And, you know, the only way a snow pit can help me then is if I think I'm going to one of the areas in the white where the old snow problem doesn't exist.

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Right. And I dig to verify. And I'm like, oh, wow, we just found that surface war problem on Southwest. I thought it would have gotten cooked off.

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Okay. So, you know, that's why aspect of it takes the most conservative option at every juncture. So if there's an old snow problem, it flags all the slopes and says, hey, this is your low risk slope angle maximum today, and we're going to show it to you.

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And we're going to show you that line and clear and in red on the map. That way, if you go to a zone that isn't blacked out, but it does have the problem, you're still covered that, you know, we've based that baked that into the calculations and given you a slope angle to stay under so that your choices are low risk for that day.

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Obviously, like aspect has built this in. Like you can rely on it taking all that information to account if people aren't using aspect of you like, let's go.

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First off, when should they, when should they use a pit if they're if they're hell bent on digging a pit. What's the only actually what's the actionable information they get.

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Here's one time where it could be actually very helpful. And that's in the springtime when we got freeze thaw corn snow conditions.

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So ideally, we'd see a nice hard freeze at night and you have to chop through with your ice axe because your shovel isn't going to do it. And you're sitting on a six inch bridge of ice.

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And when I'm skinning in the morning, I'm constantly digging with my ice axe and oftentimes that'll do double duty. I'm improving the skin track at a tricky corner or something.

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But I'm also gathering data and I want to see probably five to 10 quick chop, chop, chop, chop.

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You might be able to do it with the heel of your boot, but you really kind of need an ice axe in the spring and be like, oh, okay, we're seeing a five to six inch freeze everywhere we're covering.

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Okay, that's interesting.

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And we're tracking that over time so that when we're riding down, hopefully we're on like one, maybe two inches of thawed corn snow, both for snow quality and for safety, that means we're still on four inches of ice.

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And if you're in a deep, well bonded snowpack, it's less of an issue. But oftentimes, like say in Colorado, people are waiting to the springtime because the weak garbage, old snow, the sugar, the facets, if you will.

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It's just garbage for about a meter. And then there's a frozen crust on top.

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And you think of a bridge of crust keeping you over imminent doom. And so you want to have a really good handle on how thick that bridge is of ice that you're riding on, and how much you're melting down into it.

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And at some point you're like, hey, we got to get out of here.

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The bridge is getting really thin over a whole bunch of wet facets.

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It's really hard for facets to round out and become really strong layers. So oftentimes in shallow snow packs like a meter or less than a meter and a half.

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You know, that's my that might be what you're dealing with that crust is keeping you from accessing that weak layer.

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Okay, so that that would be one instance of where a snow pit would be really good and helpful for you.

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And to be fair, I'm not really going through and pounding on anything. I'm just doing a quick chop chop chop. Oh, we're on four inches ice, we're on five inches, we're on six inches.

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And I'm getting a lot of data points along the way. And then I'm tracking how much how deep the thigh is and being like, okay, we got to change aspects or elevations and get out of here.

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Yeah, because it's not well with that one you can see what's going on pretty clearly at that point it's not quite the same. Yeah, yeah, needing to have a tower snowfall in your lap.

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Yeah, but the rest of the time, it's more for educational purposes, because unless you're in an operational setting working with a team and tracking 50 to 100 pits throughout the season.

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You're on a variety of aspects and elevations and gathering that info and crunching it as a team and keeping it in your computer database, you know digging a snow pit one time every time you go out really isn't going to help you make safer decisions.

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Dang, well, I feel like my my lifetime of laziness is actually not as lazy as I thought.

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Do you got I mean, what, what do you want to leave people with on this topic.

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Well, if they didn't have aspect Davi what they could do is follow the bulletins advice, almost always, but frustratingly there's some days where they don't give you a slope angle recommendation.

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They'll usually say if you want to manage your risk, keep your keep your slope angles under 30 degrees or under 35 degrees and out of the run out zones.

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Because keep in mind, they are seeing the full compendium of data that you can't see.

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They are seeing the trends and be like, huh, we're not seeing any avalanches happening under 35 degrees.

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And we're not seeing any remote triggers. Okay, so our travel advice today will be manage your risk to stay on slopes under 35 degrees.

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It's pretty, pretty reasonable.

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The problem with that is one, nobody knows what 35 degrees is.

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And I see this all the time with the pros where I'm examining or instructing ski guides and I'm like right what's the slope angle here. And it's like playing a game on the prices right.

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And it's like, all right guys and gals, who's the closest without going over and you know they're often off by like five degrees.

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And so unless you have a highly tuned eye for slope angles and you have a slope meter that you constantly are calibrating your eye to, it's really hard to know what that angle is.

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It's so much easier just to show people on the map. Hey, everything 35 degrees up is red today. Don't go there and then get out your inclinometer and start training your eye.

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But now you've got kind of as the British would say the belt and braces approach, meaning you got your belt and you got your braces, your suspenders.

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So if one of them isn't working so hot, you've got the other one to back you up.

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Sweet. Well, I think that wraps it up for snowpets, man. The mystery has been unraveled.

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Yeah, you don't need to beat yourself up there really not that helpful.

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Unless you want to just for educational perspective and like learning about what they're talking about in the snow back in bulletin.

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And the big takeaway basically that I'm getting tell me if I'm right here is that the snow pits are effective because they're happening like hundreds of places, although you know forecasters are digging tons of pits and gathering huge amounts of data from

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tons of different locations. Yeah, and it's all being aggregated by the forecast.

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I have center a handful of super experts that like in our forecast zone, they're pulling from the ski area. They're pulling from the backcountry ski guides, the cat operation, the public and the forecasters.

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They might be getting shoot, I don't know, 1020 pits a day at the most, maybe on a quiet day, they may only get four or five.

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But that's a huge amount of information every day over the course of the winter that they're tracking. But my one or two snow pits a week. Don't mean squat.

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All right, well, shout out to the forecasters. Thank you for digging hundreds of maybe thousands of pets the air for us.

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They're doing a lot of good work on our behalf. So please support your local forecast with a become a member and support their good work because they save us a heck of a lot of time and make sure that we get to ride a lot more power.

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They shovel so we don't have to. Yeah, scene.

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Well, Jeff is great. Great getting to see you. I feel like I haven't seen you in like a week.

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Yeah, likewise.

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And we'll catch on the next one. You got anything? Any last words for the viewers?

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If anybody tries to convince you to ski a steep line because the pit looks good and they feel good about it. Wow. That is the biggest red flag you could ever get. And you're just like, I'm out by a condo some ego.

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All right, sounds good. Well, Jeff, I'll talk to you soon and thank you everybody for listening. Peace.

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All right.

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Cheers to it.

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Thank you so much for listening to all aspects. If you like what we're doing here, please leave a rating and review. It really is the best way to help others find the show.

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Thanks again to our business daddy, AspectAvy, for making this show possible. To learn more about how AspectAvy is making avalanche safety simple, go to aspectavvy.com.

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If you want to use this powerful new tool on your next backcountry adventure, simply download the app from the app store and enjoy 30 days free on them.

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Lastly, special thanks to IceLab for helping us produce this show. You guys rock and we couldn't do it without you.

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Thanks again for listening and we'll see you in the backcountry.