We get this sort of non-event feedback all the time when we're out there.
You know, we ski a line, it doesn't have a latch, and so we think,
hey, I just made a great decision.
That slope was totally stable.
But as we well know, sometimes it's the tenth skier down the slope.
Somebody finds a sweet spot, and so it's really hard.
You can spend all these years out there doing it, thinking you're making great decisions.
And then the one time you don't make a great decision.
It becomes incredibly obvious.
I was just having this conversation with a colleague of mine who has not had a lot of formal avalanche education,
but has a huge amount of backcountry experience, and suddenly had an avalanche involvement recently,
and it just completely rattled her, you know, because they were completely surprised by it.
And I think, unfortunately, that's the problem.
You and I spoke about this in the past, but, you know, it's the definition of a wicked learning environment.
It's somewhere where you don't get feedback on your decisions on a regular basis.
So it's really hard to know whether or not you're making good decisions.
Welcome to All Aspects, a podcast where we explore, discuss, and celebrate adventure culture and outdoor lifestyle.
It is our mission to educate, inform, and entertain our fellow adventurers about the inherent risks that surround us
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All right, let's get to the show.
All right, welcome to the All Aspects podcast, where we talk about how to do dangerous things in the back country
the safest way possible.
And I'm really excited for today's guest, longtime colleague, and we don't see each other very often,
but I really resonate with this guy quite a bit.
He's got a big brain on him, and great personality as well as Larry Goldie.
Larry lives up in the North Cascades.
He's an AMGA, an IFMGA guide, and we went through the guide exams together at about the same time,
got to know each other there.
He's an avalanche expert.
He's been teaching rec courses for two decades now and pro courses for over a decade.
And then he's also the snow safety director at North Cascade Heliskeen.
And he also wears a lot of different hats.
He's a dad as well.
And he's also a coach for mountain athletes at EVOC for the last couple of years.
And let's dive right in.
Larry, welcome.
Thanks for joining us.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Jeff.
Good to be here.
Yeah.
Hey, softball question to start.
Okay.
You've lived a life of adventure for many decades now.
What was it that attracted you to this lifestyle and then this career?
You know, it's a funny question.
I had somewhat of an improbable path, but in high school, I grew up in New Jersey, so
kind of kid of the suburbs, race BMX bikes.
In high school, I fell in with this crew of deadheads, people that were traveling around
to see the Grateful Dead.
And so we would go on tour.
We would like print stickers and graphic design class in high school and like literally selling
stickers, selling fireworks, like subsidize our ways to go follow the dead around.
And right when I graduated high school, I had this Volkswagen bus and we drove all the
way across country to go see the Grateful Dead in Ventura, California.
And I had just blown the engine on the bus like days before and I had this guy call me
put in a new engine in my driveway.
And so we're like a day behind schedule to leave on the trip.
So we start driving.
There's three of us.
One person driving, one person navigating, one person sleeping.
And we drove 24 seven and brand new Volkswagen air cooled engine.
We would pull over on the side of the road, change the oil every thousand miles.
And we roll in like 15 minutes before the show is supposed to start.
And and somebody's like, Hey, we go into the canceled show and we're like, what?
You know, like this is 1986.
So there's no cell phones, no internet.
Like we hadn't heard anything about the show being canceled.
So we wind up turns out Jerry Garcia went into a diabetic coma and they canceled a bunch
of shows.
So we're suddenly out of luck.
We met up with a friend who lived in Southern California and he's like, Hey, you guys, let's
go up to Sequoia National Park.
And so we drove up to Sequoia National Park and camp there and we're hiking around every
day hanging out amongst the Sequoia trees.
And I was just like, Oh my God, I would have driven across country just to come here.
And it was on that trip.
I was like, I want to spend my life in places that are as beautiful as this.
Like here, I'm, you know, kid from the suburbs back East.
And like, I'm laying on the ground at night looking up at like the most incredible sky
I've ever seen.
And you know, just the mountains.
I was just so blown away that I, you know, that put me on my path where I was like, I
want to make a living hanging out in places like this.
So I'll have to accident.
Say, yeah, right?
If Jerry, Jerry managed his blood sugar better, you might not be a mountain.
There might have been some drugs involved.
I don't know.
For Jerry, not for me.
I gotta say.
Yeah, yeah, of course not.
Of course not.
Yeah.
No experience psychonauts have ever been on the podcast here.
I gotta say.
So you know, that sounds like a really interesting adventure.
And it kind of reminds me of like my like kind of early trips out West when I was in college.
And I think we like flew into San Francisco, stayed with a friend in Berkeley and then
we hitchhiked out to Yosemite, which took like three days to tap and then just like
camping the dirt all summer and climbed our faces off.
And literally someone would read the John Long How to Rock Climb book and yell up at
the leader.
Oh yeah, I had some early adventures like that.
My first time, I remember my very first lead was in Yosemite and I didn't know anything
about runners.
You know, I bought a used rack of like mostly stoppers and some hexes.
And I didn't know you're supposed to put slings on these things.
And like I'm pulling over onto the ledge at the top of the pitch and I looked down and
like all but one of my pieces had pulled out just from rope drag.
Oh my gosh, you know, it's better you didn't know until the end, right?
Oh my gosh, you know, I'm a little bit envious of folks who are learning to get into climbing
and skiing now because there's so many more resources available and opportunities like
I didn't even know like mountain guiding was a job and it would have been a lot better
to hire a guide or do a course with a mountain club or something like that instead of like,
oh, the trial and error method when you're dealing with life and death consequences.
It's kind of a small miracle still here.
Yeah, yeah, I know.
Thank goodness for guardian angels.
And I think you and I are raising young kids were like, man, I hope that guardian angels
still in place.
I'm kind of relieved my daughter is very casual about skiing and climbing.
She's just like, I gotta take it or leave it.
I'm just like, hey, that's great.
No big deal.
And then as a follow up here, so it's pretty interesting that adventure you described like
there's so many unknown parts of it.
And it sounds like it was a bit touch and go whether the van would even make it out there
and then no idea that the shows had been canceled and then just like pivot into a new itinerary
and just like all these happy accidents.
What, what is what does adventure mean to you?
What is it that attracts you to it and what are some things you associate with it or how
would you define it?
Yeah, you know, it's funny.
It kind of it brings me right back to those years.
I had no idea this was like my informal training as a mountain guide, but all those years of
traveling with the Grateful Dead, like we were constantly having adventures.
There was the show, but it was the travel in between.
You know, the thing I used to say about driving a Volkswagen bus is you just never ever knew
if you were going to get somewhere or not.
And I wound up sleeping in so many crazy places.
Remember one time going to these shows with a buddy and a friend of his who had I had never
met before and he had a Volkswagen van and it blows up on the side of the road.
He gets out looks in the engine compartment.
He's like, well, what are you guys waiting for, grab your stuff, get your thumbs out there.
And like in less than five minutes, he just makes the decision to abandon his van on the
side of the road and go for this like four day trip.
Like he didn't even hardly think about it.
And you know, we grab put sleeping bags under our arms, backpacks on and and sure enough,
we just like slept on the ground in the parking lot and we ran into people that got us a ride
home and just that I think from a lot of those early adventures, I just developed this appreciation
for not knowing exactly what was going to happen.
You know, you kind of have a loose plan, but you know, it's that to me, it's like the joy
of travel, whether it's mountain travel or foreign travel.
It's just that the element of uncertainty of it all that that keeps you on your toes.
And I feel like it sort of it brings out the best in people because you just you don't know
what's going to happen and you have to be ready to pivot and adjust to whatever circumstances
you're in.
And yeah, nowadays, you know, I feel like as a guide, I like to take people on adventures,
but I want a lot more confidence in the outcome.
So there's a little there's always, you know, we always deal with a certain amount of uncertainty,
but you know, we build in margins.
So we're sure we can have some uncertainty and still bring everyone home safely at the
end of the day.
But I think a friend of mine once wrote a book about the elements of adventure, which
I think he really kind of nailed, which was, you know, it's it starts with high endeavor,
but I think it's, you know, it's a goal that is challenging for people.
And then there is that element of uncertainty, the outcome of the trip is uncertain.
And there's good companionship.
And then a tall diversity.
And I feel like, yeah, those are all like truly the elements of adventure.
And you know, you got to have all those in there.
And you take anyone away.
We've all been out there with people that have low tolerance for adversity.
And it's like, man, I'm killing this trip for everybody.
It reminds me of like JFK's moonshot speech, where he's like, we choose to do these things
not because they're easy, but because they are hard.
And it will be the test of our ingenuity, our commitment, our perseverance.
And I'm like, yeah, that's what I'm signing up for.
Yeah, agreed.
Yeah.
I do want to back up a little bit and just say, hey, none of this is scripted.
So I had no idea you were going to go there and that the Grateful Dead were instrumental
in your life of adventure.
And I don't want to leave the audience with the idea that you're like this trippy, dippy
deadhead just winging from hip.
I think one of the things that I love about talking with you and bouncing ideas with colleagues
is that you're a real critical thinker.
You're constantly asking why.
And this notion of best practices, a lot of people feel like it's a destination.
Oh, we're doing best practices.
We arrived.
And it's like, no, no, no, those are constantly evolving.
And I always see you kind of pushing for better, pushing for better.
And be like, hey, that's great what we're doing now, but how can we optimize this?
How can we make it safer, simpler, more enjoyable, higher rewards, that kind of stuff.
And I think that your approach to risk really resonates with me.
And that's one of the reasons why I want to have you on the podcast.
So I just want to clear up any misconceptions that listeners might have.
If you hire Larry as a mountain guide, he's going to pick you up in his Volkswagen bus
and you may or may not make it to the trailhead.
That is not the case at all.
Yeah, the formative years, but it feels like another lifetime ago.
And that's honestly what makes it a funny story is that it was an unlikely entrance to this
industry.
But yeah, some great adventures.
Now I drive highly reliable vehicles and a little more of a plan when I take off.
On a trip.
Even if I do break down, I don't have to just abandon my car.
Do they have triple A for helicopters?
And that might be a good segue.
Maybe you could contrast.
What's a day in your life like at North Cascade, Helly skiing, where as the snow saved dirt,
you know, there's a quote from the big Lebowski where they tell the dude, hey, her life is
in your hands, dude.
And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, don't say that because he doesn't want the responsibility.
But it is a huge amount of responsibility on you because you're charged with keeping
your guide team safe, but also keeping the public safe.
And I'm guessing you probably have like families with kids out there.
Occasionally we do.
Yeah.
So we typically, we start every day just by explaining to the guests, okay, we've got
two big goals for the day.
The first goal is to bring everybody home safely at the end of the day.
The second goal is to have a great day of powder skiing, you know, go out into this
wild back country and find the best snow that's out there.
And but we let them know that the first goal always trumps a second goal.
Doesn't matter how good the skiing is, like everyone wants to come home at the end of
the day.
And I think just front loading that for people is really important to say, like, you know,
you're not hiring me to serve up the best run of your life.
I'll try to do that, but you're hiring me to ensure that you can go out and do this
and come back at the end of the day.
And there is a lot of uncertainty.
You know, we don't do any control work out there.
So it's a fully wild snow.
Nope.
Okay.
It's not in our permit.
And so, you know, ultimately we have to choose carefully what terrain that we're going to
ski.
So our day starts pretty early.
The guides will typically arrive an hour or more before the guests show up and we go through
a morning workflow on the InfoX platform and we'll go through a whole run list where we'll
talk about whether or not a run is going to be open or closed for a guest skiing for the
day.
And ultimately, if a run is open, it just means we feel like it can be safely guided.
It doesn't mean that any particular line on that slope is fair game.
It might be like really tight controls to get people through a certain section.
But you know, if we feel like it's manageable.
And then after we go through that whole meeting, we'll kind of come up with a game plan for
the day.
That's often dependent on the groups we have, whether we have for the day, other logistical
considerations if we have touring groups or if there's a year exchange or anything else
that's happening within the operation.
Then the guests show up.
Hold on.
If I could just do a couple of terms in there that people might not be familiar with.
So the InfoX is kind of the industry platform for how you log information throughout the
season and track week layers and their distribution of where they are for the aspect, northeast,
elevation bands, and then it's also how we share information as professionals in a standardized
platform.
So it's a very formalized setup so that you can keep track of the snow throughout the
whole season.
And then what was the other thing that I was going to, oh yeah, I can't remember.
All right, keep going.
Well, you know, I'll just throw in one thing about the InfoX.
It's both, it's a tool for internal sharing of information as well as external so we can
share it with all our nearest neighbors.
Then everybody's making better decisions because we're seeing what everyone else is
seeing and they're seeing what we're seeing.
But then it's a way for us to keep our whole guide team apprised of what's going on on
every day.
The workflow gets sent out to everyone, even the guides that aren't working.
So those people can keep abreast of what's happened each day.
You know, that's what we skied, what conditions were like, any avalanches we've observed,
all those things.
So it goes both ways, both internal and external with that platform.
Yeah.
Oh, now I pop back into my head the run list.
I think this is a foreign concept for a lot of recreationalists because a lot of folks
say, hey, let's go to this zone.
I'd really like to ski this line.
It's kind of putting things backwards and we'll see, I think it's in condition.
Professionals do it totally backwards.
We say, hey, here's the conditions and here's our group.
What is appropriate for both?
What's the appropriate terrain given the snow conditions and group we have today?
Could you talk a little bit about how we've got the green and the red on the run list
and how those two don't get fuzzy?
How do you keep them straight in your head so you don't get pulled into, oh my God, that
red run looks really good.
Let's rationalize how we're going to ski it.
Yeah.
Well, and honestly, Jeff, that's the whole point of doing a run list is to take emotion
out of the decision-making process.
So we sit around in the morning looking at computers or projected images of the terrain.
We're all drinking coffee and we talk about the weather and the snowpack and then the
weather forecast.
And then we talk about what terrain, given all that data, would be a safe choice for
the day.
And we try to have enough terrain open that we can make a day out of it.
But it's a very non-emotionally charged environment, bunch of guys sitting around a table, drinking
coffee, just crunching numbers, looking at telemetry data.
How much did the wind blow last night and what are the weak layers that we're dealing
with and then talking about terrain as opposed to going out in the field, skiing a really
mellow run in great snow and being like, wow, that was so fun.
What about that?
Let's go over there.
That's an emotionally charged environment and you're not going to be making your best
decisions at that point.
So the run list is a tool to take the emotion out of it.
And it is, I would say there's also, there's one more factor where we have this ability
to close terrain in the field.
If we get out there and suddenly, well, the wind slabs are way touchier than we thought
or they're deeper than we expected, we can say, okay, well, we're not going to go here,
we're not going to go there, but we can't go the other way.
We can't open terrain in the field.
If we got it wrong, the penalty we pay is that we can't ski that terrain for the day,
but we can go there tomorrow.
So yeah, there are some ability to change our perspectives in the field, but only to
a more conservative outcome.
Yeah, it's a one way street towards conservative decision making.
We can never say, oh, that was read on the list because we were worried about wind slabs,
but I'm not seeing it.
So let's go ahead and green light it.
That does not happen in a professional setting.
It does not happen.
No.
Yeah.
I find it's really interesting when I'm, my list of back country ski partners is really
short and it's often with professionals because it's so much easier to work with that same
framework.
And when we introduce a member of the public, they're just, this is like a different language.
And when they're like, hey, that's really well, why don't we go over and ski that?
And all the guys are like, nope, it wasn't on the table at meeting this morning when
we had coffee and they're like, what are you talking about?
It's a totally different way of looking at risk.
Yeah.
And no, absolutely.
And I feel like, you know, it's one thing when I do teach recreational courses, I encourage
people to have a process like this.
However informal it is of just, you know, if they're talking about a zone, either look
at photos or talk about some of the main ski lines in there and what's open and what's
closed for the day and then choosing your partner super carefully.
So if there are people that you go out with that always want to push and, you know, ski
a little bit more aggressively over time, you might decide, you know, it's not worth it
to call those people.
And I'm like you where I have a very short list of people I'm willing to ski with.
And a lot of times if I can't find a partner, it's like, I'll just go skin up our ski hill,
make a couple laps, get a good workout in, but I'm just, it's important enough to me
to have like good decision making out in the field that I won't just go with anybody that's
willing to go.
Yeah.
Whereas in my younger age, you know, you meet someone at a dinner party or at the bar and
be like, oh, you want to ski tomorrow?
Sure.
Let's go.
And I have no idea what people's skills or risk tolerance and yeah, yeah, very, very
slim guardrails to buffer from calamity.
Yeah.
Hey, what are you seeing?
You've been teaching avalanche courses for about two decades now and pro courses for
over 10 years.
Where do you see the pros struggle with on their courses?
Yeah.
That's a good question.
You know, I think like everyone, you know, we all struggle to deal with uncertainty.
And I think, you know, at the professional level, we feel like we should have higher
confidence in our decision making.
One of the easy ways to have high confidence in your decision making is keep your decision
making really conservative.
But you know, we try to have the foundation of our decision making based on strength
and weight of data.
And one thing I see professionals doing is we go out in the field, we have targeted
observations that we're trying to take.
And then we bring that data back to the operation.
And I think we can all be guilty of just the bias of when it takes us an hour in a snow
profile to gather some information about, for example, a targeted layer that we're looking
at in the snowpack, even though it's just one piece of information, and we know that
the snowpack is really variable over the terrain, it's hard not to be biased toward that piece
of information that we got.
And you know, when we have a guide meeting, we're discussing these things, people tend
to be biased toward the information that they've collected themselves.
So the results of the snowpack tests that they've done, even though it might not agree
with, you know, some of the larger number of observations that have been taken out there.
When we take it ourselves and we have invested a lot of our own time in there, it's hard
not to be biased toward thinking that what you see is all there is out there.
So that's one thing I see a lot of professionals struggle with.
You know, and I find myself in meetings pointing out all the time, like you guys, we really
don't have that many data points here.
We've dug a couple of profiles over this vast tenure, you know, how confident are you that
this problem really doesn't exist anywhere else just because we're not seeing it in these
handful of holes?
Well, if I was the person banging on this 30 by 90 centimeter column, I'm going to have
a lot of confidence in it because it, you know, this is classic social psychology, neuroscience
stuff of the recency bias.
And if it's my data, I believe it wholeheartedly.
And I think that's one of the great examples of working in a team where you can check me
and be like, Hey, Jeff, I know you just dug two pits and that's very fresh in your brain.
But we were just out skiing around with clients today while you were on snow safety team.
And this is what we saw and they don't actually mesh.
And it's, I think that's really important to remind yourself if you're in the public
of, Hey, listen, you know, you just don't have that much information to go off of and
contrast that with how a professional operation will do it, where you're pooling information
and tracking it the whole season.
And then still making usually more conservative decisions than the public is doing is often
what I see out there.
I would totally agree.
And that's why I think, you know, the forecast center, they tend to have the most information
of anybody.
They've got professional observers out there.
The forecasters are out digging.
They're in touch with ski areas and guiding operations.
And so they tend to have more data points than anyone.
So I feel like if you're a recreational skier and you're thinking that the avalanche center
has it all wrong and things are way better than they're saying, you got to realize they've,
they're the ones that have all the information.
And you know, I think we get this sort of non-event feedback all the time when we're
out there, you know, we, we ski a line, it does an avalanche.
And so we think, Hey, I just made a great decision.
That slope was totally stable.
But as we well know, sometimes it's the 10th skier down the slope.
Somebody finds a sweet spot.
And so it's really hard.
You can spend all these years out there doing it, thinking you're making great decisions.
And then the one time you're, you don't make a great decision.
It becomes incredibly obvious.
And I was just having this conversation with a colleague of mine who has not had a lot
of formal avalanche education, but has a huge amount of back country experience and suddenly
had an avalanche involvement recently.
And it just like completely rattled her, you know, because they were completely surprised
by it.
And I think unfortunately that's the problem.
You and I spoke about this in the past, but you know, it's the definition of a wicked learning
environment is somewhere where you don't get feedback on your decisions on a regular basis.
So it's really hard to know whether or not you're making good decisions.
Yeah.
And I think that's in the past, that's been a big problem with avalanche education is
there's no way for us to know what we don't know.
So when we do a debrief at the end of the day, we're just like, well, I think we got
it right.
We didn't get avalanche.
We didn't see any signs instability.
But in the past, we didn't know how close to the edge we were, or if we were pushing
into the red high risk zone.
And that is a really tough way to learn where you don't have a mentor.
Because like think about if you ever played any kind of kids sports or did drama or music,
you had a mentor, a coach who was on you and they're like, Hey, you got the right result,
but your process was all fucked up.
We need to correct that to set you up for success in the future.
And I don't know if you've had a chance to play around with debriefing your tours with
aspect avi, but that's something I like is like, Oh, shit, I actually went into the red
here for this short 20 meter section.
Why did I do that?
Let's not do that again.
Yeah.
Well, you know, a ramp a good point that I think we're also all subject to sort of outcome
bias.
So for years, it's been standard operating procedure for almost anyone.
When you have something happen in the field, you know, an avalanche, you brief it at the
end of the day.
It's like, wow, you know, we got to talk about that.
That was a really close call or that was like terrible accident, whatever.
But when we don't, Hey, we just pat ourselves on the back and think, Yeah, we nailed it
today, when in fact, if we get into that pattern of debriefing our day and not necessarily
just looking at the outcome, but like, Hey, how is our decision making process?
How are our comms out there today?
Even if nothing really went wrong, that's when we start doing better every day.
And just cause we, you know, got away with it.
It's exactly what you're saying about like, Hey, we didn't have an avalanche tray, but
we did wind up in the red.
You know, why did we do that?
And how could we have avoided that?
You know, one of my favorite questions in these kind of daily debriefs and honestly,
I do these with my friends all the time is just say, Hey, if we went and repeated that
tour tomorrow, what would we do differently?
And I think for so many people, you know, we all want to get better at this.
That's the million dollar question is like, what am I going to do differently tomorrow?
So I'm making better decisions than I did today.
Yeah.
And since we're just coming off the Super Bowl, I always listen into an interview with,
it was an in depth dive on the Freakonomics podcast about San Francisco 49ers.
And they were talking with the coach and like the day after a game, the whole day is spent
analyzing video with every member of the team.
Yeah.
And I was like a whole day and he's like, Yeah, the day after game day, I'm in at the
office at five in the morning and it's reviewing every single second with each player to review
their performance and see what are we going to do differently next time to be better.
And I was just like, Whoa.
And you know, it may feel like football's life or death, but skiing really is life or
death.
And quite often people are like, Hey, we didn't see an avalanche high five beer 30.
Let's go.
Hey, so I asked you what you see with professionals.
What kind of mistakes do you see them do?
What about for recreationalists when you're teaching a rec course or like doing an avalanche
refresher for folks?
Are you seeing anything different that they mistakes they tend to make that you'd be like,
Hey, I need to step in here and do some coaching so that we change this habit and set them
up for success.
Yeah.
There's a few things.
But I see with a lot of recreational skiers, I would say one of them right out of the gate
is they often head out into the field without any sort of plan.
Let's just go out there and see what looks good.
So there's no formalized decision making in that non emotionally charged environment.
So they're leaving themselves open to all these human factors that we know tend to be
the underlying cause of almost every accident for one reason or another.
It's like, Oh, there's tracks on that slope.
So we thought it would be fine.
We saw another group go there.
All these things that can sway our decision making where in that non emotionally charged
environment, there's no way I would ski that today.
But if we didn't have that conversation, we'd get out there and we see a couple of people
we know going to ski that suddenly we can talk ourselves into it.
So that's one of the biggest ones.
You know, I would say by and large for so long, the focus has been on beacons shovel
probe have all these rescue skills.
And it's like, while I would agree, those are requisite skills for anyone going out in
the back country.
The reality is it's like CPR.
Like you're if hopefully you're never ever going to use those things.
And so we have to carry the gear and we have to have those skills.
But in reality, we want to have a decision making process that's going to keep us from
ever utilizing those things in our pack.
And so I think that an avalanche courses, of course, is where you have to learn those
skills.
But I feel like there's been such an emphasis on that over the years that people think because
they know how to do rescue and because they're carrying the gear that they are being safe.
When in fact, you know, that is nothing to do with being safe.
It's that's essentially having a first aid class before you go out backpacking, you
know, you're probably not going to use any of those first aid skills.
But you know, you're obviously a safer person in the back country for having those skills.
But you want to make good decisions to begin with.
So it's interesting if I can get off you for a second, it's kind of interesting that the
focus on the reactive gear and knowing how to use it well.
And you're like, OK, but the stats are if we're buried, it's a coin toss whether we're
going to live or die for buried.
And that is like, whoa, what if we put the emphasis on our proactive systems to keep us
out of avalanches altogether?
And it sounds like correct me if I'm wrong, I'm hearing you say, hey, there needs to be
more of an emphasis on our proactive systems.
Yes, you got to have the rescue skills and gear, but it's so much better if we never
have to touch them.
Absolutely.
And I feel like, you know, avalanche education has moved heavily in that direction.
You know, I know at airy level one class is called decision making and avalanche terrain.
And it's to help people come up with a process.
So and it's kind of mimicked after what we do very formally as guides, but it's have
a process that's repeatable that ultimately gets better the more we use it so that we
are making good decisions to begin with.
So we hopefully never have to reach into our packs to pull out any of that rescue gear.
You know, one thing I'll sometimes do in my recreational avalanche classes is ask people
like, Hey, give me your transceiver right now before you ski this slope.
You know, people lost your mind and it's like, really, you're not willing to see this slope
without a transceiver.
What do you think the likelihood this thing's going to avalanche?
And if it's high enough that, you know, the only way you would possibly ski it is with
your beacon, then in my mind, you might not have enough of a margin built in like I as
a guide, especially for an operation where we don't do any kind of active mitigation.
You know, we are avoiding avalanches.
We are trying to ski slopes that we feel like very, very low likelihood are going to avalanche.
And you know, again, I'm not going to take off my transceiver, but at the same time,
I don't feel like the only reason I'm willing to ski that slope is because I have a transceiver
on.
I feel like the main reason I'm willing to ski it at all is because I'm confident that
I'm not going to trigger an avalanche on it.
And when my confidence goes down, I start thinking about maybe I should choose a different
slope or a more conservative line on this slope.
Yeah.
Have you come across Annie Duke's book, Thinking in Bets?
Yes.
Oh, I love her.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, yeah, I feel like I want to hire her to come into our operation to talk to us about
decision making because, you know, so much of what she talks about has direct application
to the kind of decision making that we are making where, you know, in the world of poker,
that is not a wicked learning environment.
So, I got, just say, so she's a neuroscience psychology researcher at Penn, PhD, and she's
also World Series champion of poker.
And the lens she looks through is she says, hey, listen, life is not chess.
Chess is where all the moves are known, all the information is available, and the best
player is going to win.
Life is like poker, where you have limited information, a high degree of uncertainty,
and it's about the process because you may get the process right, but you may not get
the right outcome.
And as you said, it's a bit of a wicked learning environment, but you get feedback quicker
than you do from the avalanche game.
So you might have a full house, and it looks like a good hand, but holy cow, Larry's holding
four aces, and I just didn't know that.
Yeah, yeah.
And her phrase, encapsulated is, do you want to bet?
Hey, Larry, I'm really confident about this slope, and you're like, really, Jeff, do you
want to bet your life on that?
In the year transceiver, just how much margins do we have on this?
Yeah.
Yeah, well, and one of the things she thought-
Keep going, I want to hear your thoughts.
Sorry, I'll shut up.
No, no, no, it's great.
I'm so glad you brought up Annie Duke because, and I would actually throw out there, I just
listened to an incredible interview with her on a podcast called Capital Allocators, where
she talks all about decision making and dealing with uncertainty, and one of the things she
brings up is this idea of, we use these terms all the time, like likely and possible, and
they're kind of vague terms, but they mean very different things to many different people.
So they've done some studies where they've asked different people, when I say something
is a real possibility, I want you to put a percentage on that, a real possibility.
And the percentage range people gave was from 20 to 80%, right?
For likely?
When something, yeah, for a real possibility.
Wow.
Hey, so, Larry, I say, let's go into this bar tonight.
It's likely we're going to get our asses kicked because it's a pretty rough crowd.
Do you want to go in there?
I'm going to say hell no.
Yeah, which I think that's what we see at considerable avalanche danger.
The definition is human triggered avalanches are likely.
And yet we still see lots of people pushing hard in steep avalanche terrain, way over
30 degrees.
And it's incredibly rare to get an avalanche under 30 degrees.
It's kind of outlier terrain.
And that's the standard travel advice you'll see in the avalanche bulletin.
Hey, it's considerable danger out there.
The situation is critical.
Human triggered are likely.
Keep it under 30 degrees and out of the run out zones.
And yet we often see people really pushing it.
And tragically, we had two really serious accidents in Crested Butte this week where
one person critically injured, another person killed, and they were riding over 40 degrees
and a bull's eye right where the persistence slab problem was.
We've got a really bad surface war problem right now.
And so they were like, okay, considerable danger, riding well over 40 degrees, exactly
where the problem lives.
It's like saying, hey, the mountain lion lives on this north facing terrain.
And I'm like, sweet, let's go tangle with the mountain lion.
I think we need to get the word out there for the public and just say, hey, the professionals,
we really dial it back and we're not doing that stuff.
And we've got more training and mentorship and teamwork and data tracking than the public
does.
And we're still raining it way back in.
Yeah.
Well, and I think the concept of building margins into what we do.
So whether we're using a term like considerable or human triggered avalanches are likely,
we want to feel like we have a big enough buffer to account for the uncertainty we have.
So does that surface war exist in this particular location?
I don't know.
I mean, I could dig a profile and I'll be really confident about right where I dig,
but I don't know if it exists 20 yards away from here.
So there's, when we're dealing with that uncertainty, the way we have to manage it is by building
margins in and leaning toward the conservative side of things.
And one of the easiest places to put a margin in is just with slope angle.
Yeah.
And ultimately, that's, you know, I feel like that is what we teach people on recreational
avalanche courses is when avalanche danger goes up or when your uncertainty goes up,
we dial the terrain down.
And that usually just means turning down slope angles.
That's the simplest way to do it.
And yeah.
Yeah.
And slope angles are objective.
You can get some baseline data if you have LIDAR laser mapping, and then you can verify
it in the field with your slope angle measurements and start to really calibrate your eye.
And that's something I see when I'm teaching AMGA courses with new guides is, or working
with Special Forces Mountain Guide team, there isn't that refinement yet.
They're not there yet with the slope angles in the field.
And I'm like, okay, everybody, what's your, what's your number?
My price is right rules the closest without going over.
And you need to be plus or minus two degrees.
You've got this window, but as a professional, you need to be there.
So when the terrain changes are action changes as well.
And it's really interesting to see how people who don't have a, maybe like a peeps mounted
pole mounted slope angle meter or one on their phone, they're, they're wildly divergent.
And yet supremely confident.
And usually the less mentor that would always say, you know, you could spend 20 years looking
at slope angles and guessing what they are.
And after 20 years, if you don't ever measure them, you are still guessing, right?
The only way to hone that skill is by constantly taking your best guess and then pulling out
a tool and seeing how you did, and that's how we calibrate.
Yeah, I don't know if you've ever skied with my brother since our ski exam back in the
day, but he is uncannily accurate and it drives me nuts.
Cause his brother was super competitive and he has bang on every single time.
And I'm like plus or minus one to two degrees usually.
And, and it's funny at the early part of the season, October, November, not so accurate,
but then the more feedback I get checking with the inclinometer, I get calibrated tighter
and tighter and I still can't beat him.
And it drives me nuts.
You know, one of the things I feel like helped me more than anything when I used to ski patrol
was looking, you know, one of the head forecasters made a map of the skier photos of the whole
skier area with the slope angles of every run on the slope.
So this is for our control routes.
And so pretty soon you had this like, Oh, that's what a 38 degree slope feels like.
That's 42 degrees.
That's 45 degrees.
And pretty soon you're like, Oh yeah, that's just like double diamond.
Okay.
I got that one.
And that I found that so helpful.
And was that the average of the slope angle in the start zone or was it the max slope
angle?
It's typically the max slope angle in the start zone.
Yep.
And that is the most important number.
It's not so much the average because if you've got a steep roll over into flat, I want to
know what that steep roll over is.
That is the most important factor for determining the likelihood of it releasing in an outland.
Yep.
And I think, you know, we need to point out the fact that when you're dealing with persistent
week layers, you also need to be concerned with connected terrain.
So you might be skiing a 33 degree slope, but if it is 38 degrees adjacent to where you're
skiing but connected to, you could trigger the week layer that's going to pull out into
some lower angle terrain.
Yeah.
And what we're seeing here in the crest of bute zone is the surface horror layer is incredibly
touchy and unpredictable, meaning people are triggering from a half mile away.
I mean, that's just not fair.
No.
Yeah.
And then other slopes, non-reactive.
So if you happen to dig or ride one of the non-reactive slopes, it gives me this recency
bias of like, Hey, let's keep stepping it up.
It's looking good.
But the slope adjacent to us remotely triggered and we couldn't see around the back.
The corner.
Yeah.
No.
I, you know, one of my biggest close calls in my entire guiding career is very similar
story to that where there was a surface horror layer widespread throughout British Columbia.
Another guide and I were guiding a trip up at a back country hut in BC.
And we knew all about the surface horror.
And when we flew in, we asked the owner of the hut who was also a mountain guide about
the surface horror.
And he said, Oh yeah, well, it's not in our, our zone, our tenure here.
I said, that's crazy.
Like everybody's talking about this.
There's been like helicopters or totally triggering it.
People are triggering it from the flats.
Like, how could you not have it here?
He's like, I've been here the last few weeks.
We've been digging.
We're not finding it.
So we start poking around and we're digging and first day we find it.
But you know, it's small.
It's not super reactive.
And as the week goes on, we continue to dig and we're finding it some places, but not
everywhere.
And it's not this giant, big, scary layer.
And so gradually over the course of the week, we're starting to step up the terrain and
it's like day six of a seven day trip.
And we decided to ski a site pretty big run in the alpine.
And my partner's taking the group up and I'm like, Hey, I just going to dig one more time
and just, just confirm that we don't have the layer in this zone.
I dig a profile right at tree line where you'd expect to find surface horror.
It's not there at all.
I'm like hustling to catch back up with the group.
I come around this role and I see them on, they've got a bunch of switchbacks to gain
ridge crest and I watch the guide step onto ridge crest.
And as soon as he does this entire bowl, it's out like a meter deep.
And we've got 10 people in the track and you know, all in switchbacks and this whole thing
goes and I'm like, Oh my God, one, two, three, you know, I'm counting.
I'm like, get on the radio.
Hey, I see everybody who have got them all.
He's like, I know me too.
Nobody was involved.
His track was kind of miraculously intact.
The debris came to within an inch of the pole track next to his up track.
Wow.
But it didn't touch the up track at all.
But then we get up to ridge crest and you know, we look at the fracture line and there's
like 10 millimeter surface horror, plain as day, giant standing up, you know, right at
the base of this 36 inch hard slab, like size D3 avalanche, you know, deadly avalanche.
And we're like, Oh my God, that was way too close.
And that's, you know, anytime I'm dealing with a persistent weak layer, that's what
I feel.
I remember that of like, you just, you cannot outsmart the snowpack because of this, the
bugaboo is spatial variability.
You know, the snowpack is not uniform over the terrain.
And so trying to think, you know, what's going on everywhere is just a folly.
Yeah.
We don't have X-ray vision, even if you're a mountain guide.
Exactly.
Or even if you, like you said, the hot owner who's a mountain guy is like, Oh yeah, I
haven't seen it in a couple of weeks.
You know, it's looking good.
And you're like, you just can't see everything.
It's so much to cover.
Yeah.
The, the, the buzzword for that is spatial variability, but just means that the snow is
different here than it is over here.
Yeah.
And that's a perfect example of we rarely see surface or forming right at ridge crest.
There's usually enough air movement and wind at those exposed elevations that we don't get
a lot of surface or in the alpine.
We tend to find it the lower elevations at tree line where it's just a bit less windy,
but you still have a clear view of the sky.
And so for me not to find it down low and then to have it standing up giant right at
ridge crest, you know, none of us would have ever guessed that could be the case.
Yeah.
And you know, it was curious as you were telling that story, one of the things that stuck out,
it sounded like as your colleague crested and got on a chain in terrain.
Is that, do you think where he triggered it?
Sorry, Jeff, you just cut out there right when you started asking the question.
Sorry.
I must have slope.
Yeah.
The squirrel powered internet is bogging down.
Do you think it was your colleague who triggered it as he changed terrain?
He went from the kind of steep planar slope to it rolled over to flatter terrain?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it was right when he stepped onto ridge crest.
He said he heard the big womb felt the whole snowpack drop out from under him.
What was interesting, I have an incredible photo of that whole uptrack right after the
avalanche.
And, uh, you know, he is essentially there's two big bowls and there's a slightly lower
angle rib that went between them.
But it was subtle.
It wasn't like a really pronounced rib.
And as he was working up the slope, it kind of clouded over and the light got really flat.
And he was just kind of feeling the snow, how steep it was and trying to keep the track
on the lowest angle terrain he could feel.
And, uh, his last, well, as he was getting close to ridge crest, he starts poking out
and he's like, ah, this is feeling a little steep.
So he made a kick turn back away and then another kick turn.
So he knew like, if I can't get to ridge crest here, it's going to be two more kick
turns, which we always try to avoid, but he put two more in.
And then when he stepped onto the ridge, the whole slope triggered and had he put, had he
not put in those last two kick turns, he would have just walked right through the start zone
where it actually pulled out.
So the fact that he had that where with all to be like, this is just feeling a little
steep.
I'm just going to kick it back.
That's what kept the up track completely intact.
Whereas if he would have gone straight across him and or multiple people would have been
caught in that avalanche.
Yeah, and that pattern of what you're describing of a change in the terrain where it goes from
steep to flatter, that is often the place you'll be able to access the weak layer that you
weren't disturbing before.
And you know, Colorado has a highly variable snowpack because we don't get a lot of snow.
It's usually cold and light.
So it's easily transported by the wind.
So oftentimes people will be skinning up the bowl and as it rolls over onto the ridge,
it gets windswept and you go from a two meter snowpack and it's hard to access that weak
layer because it's insulated by a thick, strong slab.
But then as it thins out closer to the ridge and you're getting down towards grass, that's
often where someone collapses the weak layer because the slab is gotten so thin and then
it triggers behind them.
So they might be on like 25 degrees and shallow and the rest of the team is back on steeper
terrain over 30 on a big slab and that's where it goes.
So I'm always really wary of changes in terrain with persistent weak layers and changes in
the depth of the slab.
And that's one thing I'll be like probing either with my ski pole handle or actually
have my probe out and clipped to my belt on my pack so that I can just keep doing that
X-ray probing and be like, what's changing?
What's changing?
Whoa, oh, this got weird in a hurry.
The slab is thinning out and now I feel that strong over weak.
Ooh, shoot, I really don't like this.
We're out of here.
Yeah.
Well, and yeah, I think an avalanche probe is the closest thing that we will ever get
to X-ray vision unless you are able to raise a bunch more money and create some sort of
goggles that will give us that X-ray vision for when we're traveling around over snow
covered terrain.
And if it does happen, I just want to be clear, it was my idea.
But yeah, the tool we have at the moment is pretty analog.
It's a probe and you can feel a lot of what's going on and you can tell the depth of the
snow and if you have benchmarks in the snow pack, one thing I encourage people to do all
the time, if you do take the time to dig and you have certain layers in the snow pack,
put a probe in next to those layers and see what it feels like when you're passing through
those layers, check the depth, see what it feels like when you're going through, you
know, a facet crust combo, how far down is it?
And then when you're walking around with your probe, it's much more meaningful because
you've calibrated it to the snow pack that you actually know is there.
I think that's the coolest experience when you're teaching an avalanche course and everyone's
like, oh, snow pits, I want to learn how to do it.
And you're like, hey, you're not going to ride this because the snow pit looks good.
Let's just be clear why we're doing the snow pit.
It's to learn about the snow and correlate that with the avalanche bulletin.
So we have a conceptual model.
It's not a decision making tool.
You don't have enough experience or enough pits.
There's just not possible to dig enough on one tour to say yes or no.
However, I love doing that with the ski pole handle, which is kind of gross.
But then when you hold your probe like a pencil with two fingers and a thumb, kind of like
I'm using chopsticks, and it's a skill that needs to be trained over time, it's pretty
cool and then people can start to correlate.
And as you change aspect, you're like, oh, I don't feel the crust anymore.
Oh, now it's just facets to the ground.
Yeah.
In Colorado, once you push through the slab, then you can just let go of the probe and
it just drops all the way down to your rock.
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
You know, while we're doing a little bit of myth busting, one thing that I've seen on
social media recently, I try to avoid it like the plague, but every once in a while when
I'm slumming the deaths out there, deaths, was people saying, hey, why are we skiing
this steep 38 degree pitch at considerable danger where we have the persistent slab problem?
And they're like, because we already got the slab to collapse and the slope cracked up,
but it didn't avalanche.
So now we're going to ski it.
And I'm like, whoa, I used to think that way until I've seen slopes collapse multiple
times and shoot geysers of snow up in the air.
It was that unstable.
And then finally on the 10th or 12th massive booming collapse, it finally avalanched and
released.
And I was like, yeah, don't think we want to trust our teams, you know, hang our teams
lives on that theory of it already collapsed once.
It's not going to collapse again.
You're like, nature doesn't like to be put in boxes.
And it is amazing if you're out there long enough, the crazy ass shit you're going to
see if you're skiing 100 days a year in the back country.
Yeah.
And speaking of a personal experience, I had a close call with that where we were right
on the edge of 30 degrees and we just kept getting booming collapses.
And then we finally triggered the slope parallel to us.
And it literally crossed a foot over our skin track where we had popped out of the glade.
And I was like, that was way too close.
It was cutting it way too close.
So that burned that into my brain of just because it collapsed once doesn't mean it's
not going to have a ledge.
Don't don't hang your life on that.
Well, I think we just, we don't really have the skill when we hear a big wonk like that
to assess like how much of the snowpack actually just collapsed right now.
You know, you can make a guess, but there's really no way to know whether that was the
10 yards around you, the 100 yards around you, what it was.
And it's often, you know, feels big and alarming when in fact it's quite localized still.
Yeah.
And my friend Dave asked a question that I think you touched on before he was like, hey,
snow pits, Jeff, like I understand we can't say, oh, I saw this in the pit here.
So that peak over there must be the same.
But he's like, if you had to draw a circle around you, how many feet out is that snowpack
representative of?
And I was like, fuck, if I know, like there's no way to know.
That's the million dollar question.
You know, we've all probably seen or many certainly most of us professionals have seen
the famous photo from Bruce Jamison who runs the Snow Science Department University of
Calgary of what looks like a very uniform planar slope that has like, oh gosh, 20 different
ruch block tests, large column snowpack tests on there and the scores range everywhere from
very stable to very unstable, all on the same slope with no noticeable difference whatsoever.
And as soon as you realize, okay, all bets are off, you know, and I mean, it's the definition
of spatial variability.
We just don't know nearly as much as we think we do.
But the bias is when you've invested a lot of time into collecting that data, you think
that it's much more representative than it really is.
Yeah.
Hey, shifting gears a little bit.
I know you teach courses for the examiner for the AMGA for the American Mount guys Association.
So you're training and examining new guides.
This often kind of like the classic line or two bullet points that you will give candidates
over and over and over that comes up all the time, like a pattern you're seeing of, hey,
this is where you need to focus on and improve your skills on.
It's probably track setting to be perfectly honest, you know, less in the avalanche realm
and more in just like the overall enjoyment of the day.
So you know, I'll typically ask people on a percentage basis how much of the day do you
spend going uphill versus going downhill?
You know, we all know it's 85 potentially 90% of the day is going uphill.
And so, you know, you really want to work hard to make that part of the day enjoyable.
And the way you do that is with your uptrack.
So it's both, you know, the uptrack you set and how you pace people on that terrain.
And then the other thing about the uptrack you set is I feel like so many people are
so concerned about preserving the skiing, like, oh, I'm just going to put a million little
kicker and put this slope over here.
So it's like, okay, you've made a terrible uptrack that I didn't find in any way enjoyable.
And you've gotten zero information about the snow because we didn't go over there and
then come back across over here.
Right.
So it's that long meandering, gentle uptrack that is both enjoyable.
People get to the top and go, oh, we're here already.
And it also gives you a sense of, oh, it's a little more wind protected on that other
side or it's kind of blown in, it's skiing a little deeper there.
Or I wonder what's over that little roll.
I'm going to put the uptrack over there and have a look.
The other thing I tell people all the time is, you know, when you do put in that gentle
meandering uptrack, it gives you the ability to try to route it by small little test slopes
that you can actually just jump on with your skis, put little ski cuts on and you can gain
a ton of information while you're moving uphill.
So you don't feel that need to stop and dig a profile and get a ton of information about
one spot in the terrain, but you've been collecting info the entire way up.
So when you get to the top, you have all these data points that you feel like you can see
a trend line through instead of one big data point that may be totally representative or
maybe a complete outlier, but the less data points you have, the harder it is to see the
trend line through those points.
So yeah, and then take an aerial view on that as a mountain guide, we have a hypothesis
of what the forecast is.
The hypothesis is that it's moderate and we're constantly trying to disprove it.
Like we're not just like, oh, forecast center said moderate, sweet, let's go.
It's like, okay, we are going to rigorously test this and gather as much data as we can
to try to be like, oh, actually we're seeing a reactive snowpack.
We put our skin track in on a mellow spot, but there's this small D1 rollover we can
stomp on from above with our whole team.
And if it pops off, we're like, okay, forecast disproved, snowpack super reactive, change
in plans.
And it's not just this blind acceptance.
And each forecast zone is going to be different.
And I don't know what the internal metrics are, but one of the best forecast centers
in Europe, certainly one of the best funded, their internal metrics say they're wrong about
20% of the time.
And so that's a really sobering thought.
And just like the weather forecast, nature is incredibly complex.
And the humans are incredibly highly trained and skilled at what they do, but nature does
not like to be put in boxes.
So I think it's really important for the recreationalists as well as the professionals to take that
mindset and being like, hey, the forecast is a mental model that was put out at 4 AM
by somebody in the hot seat.
And I've never had a day at one.
Yeah.
Like things could change and it's over a large zone and we are on a specific slope and we
need to verify, verify, verify that it pertains to what we're seeing and not just be like,
woohoo, turn my brain off.
Let's go.
Party time.
Yeah.
It's so true.
And anyhow, we have this disconnect of there's so many days that we're out there and the
weather is nothing like what the forecast said.
Yeah.
We look at Avalanche forecast, which is also has this high degree of variability based on
exactly where you are.
They're forecasting for this huge area and we expect that, oh, it should be exactly spot
on and I'm not going to see anything different than what they told me.
Yeah.
And, you know, I don't know if you've seen this in the different places you've skied.
You know, our variance over time is our bias.
And so if I'm constantly aggressive and a few days conservative, I have an aggressive
bias.
And I am by definition unable to see my own blind spots.
And if you go out with me and we're working with a group together, you can give me that
feedback.
I'll be like, oh, really, Larry?
I thought you wasn't aware of that.
Oh, shit.
But for you, it's totally obvious, right?
But that's the definition of a blind spot.
So if we're biased, it is unconscious and forecast centers around the world will have
a bias towards, we're going to call it considerable because the snowpack is fundamentally unfavorable.
And then other forecast centers will have a bias towards, we're dropping it to moderate
because, you know, natural triggered avalanches are unlikely today.
So we're going to moderate.
And that's an interpretation based upon this Uber, less than 1% of the professionals in
the world, and there's still differences in biases.
And I think that's something that the public's not aware of, but that we talk about as guides.
And I'll often hear it in Europe where they're like, I would rather ski in France at considerable
than Colorado at moderate because that holds no problem as a bastard.
And at least in Europe, if it's considerable, it's because they're talking about wind slab
and I can see it and I can feel it on the surface and I can, I can pivot as necessary.
Yeah.
Well, and I think honestly, that's one of the biggest improvements in the avalanche forecasting
world in recent years is just that we've started talking about avalanche problems.
And we're not just looking at the hazard rating, but we're talking about the problem because
you can have way higher confidence when we're dealing with storm slab or even wind slab
then when we're dealing with a persistence slab problem.
That old snow problem, just like it just baked in such higher uncertainty, how it's distributed
over the terrain and what it's going to take to trigger that layer.
And yeah, it just, you just can't outsmart it where it's easy to outsmart a storm slab.
You just stick to mellow terrain, whereas, you know, it's just not as easy to outsmart
the persistence slab.
And so I would tell people don't even try.
But in the end, the solution is the same.
You just stick to really conservative terrain.
Yeah.
And I think your, your story about the surface horror up in Canada on the hot trip illustrates
that really well where there's a, the mountain guide who designed the Austrian method called
stop or go is a great interview with the Austrian Alpine Club and they're doing a 20 year retrospective
on, Hey, this is the standard that the public's trained in as are the professionals.
And as a mountain guide, if I have an accident in Austria, it's going to be held up against
the standard.
And if I was in the red of the stop and go data driven algorithmic method, I better have
really strong reasons to justify why I took my team there.
It better not be.
Well, I felt good about two pits that I dug.
The surface horror wasn't present.
They're like, Hey, if you're in that blacked out critical danger sector, you need to expect
it to be reactive.
And his point is as a professional, he's like, my job is to shepherd my group through the
terrain.
It is not to be digging pits on the fly and making a reactionary decision of whether we
ski the slope based on one or two pits at a tea break.
And he's like the predictive value of that pit for me keeping my team alive is almost
zero.
It feels truthy in the moment that bias of, Oh, I just got this data.
It's really fresh.
And he's like, don't get pulled into that.
You know, the you can't outsmart the weak layer and the bulletin tells you all you need
to know.
And the only reason I might be digging is like to see, Oh, we're trying to avoid the
critical blacked out areas by going south or southwest where the surface horror got
cooked.
But I'm going to dig just to make sure that the bulletin is accurate.
And oh, shit, we found it here.
Okay, dial it back.
You know, that's what he's talking about is like, don't try to be a wizard out there.
Be a risk manager.
And the bulletin tells you stay out of these critical danger zones that 95% of the victims
die in.
It's exactly where it was blacked out.
Yep.
Yeah, it makes me think of a recreational avalanche course where I think it was a considerable
day with Storm slab.
And as we're putting in our uptrack, we're jumping on all these like steep little rolls
on boulders and on tiny little slopes, everything's popping off super easily.
You know, you can grab a shovel full of snow and tap on it and you watch the layer sliding
on there.
It's like all of our observations on the way up are pointing toward, yeah, the snow packs
really unstable right now.
And then we go through, okay, we're going to teach you guys how to do full profiles
and we do some profiles and the spot where we chose to dig, we get no results from a
compression test or an extended column test and people are like, okay, well, looks like
we're good to go.
Right.
It's like, what about everything else that we saw the whole rest of the day today?
People, you know, we're like, oh yeah, that's true.
But you know, we hadn't spent an hour in one spot, you know, going deep on the snow right
there, but somehow we just happened to pick a spot that was more stable than all the places
we had been elsewhere.
And I think that's, you know, I don't know what we actually.
I'm laughing with them because I was guilty of doing that really early.
Because when I did my early average courses back in the dark ages, that's what we were
doing was like, hey, we got the forecast.
Now let's dig on this slope and decide whether we ski it or not.
And I'm so glad that we've moved away from that paradigm and left that in the dark ages.
Yeah.
No, honestly, that's what set me on my path in the avalanche education world was I took
my first avalanche class and tell your I'd in 1995.
And you know, the whole class was focused on digging snow profiles.
And so I remember one time I'm like, skinning around with my girlfriend and we keep getting
these giant whoops.
And I'm like, okay, I remember from the class, this means like the snow is unstable.
So like, let's dig a profile and see what that looks like.
And so we kind of tuck into the base of this like small slope, you know, 40, 50 foot high
slope, and I dig a profile and I'm doing all the tests they taught us and like, I'm not
really getting any results.
I'm like, I'm so weird.
I know what to think.
My girlfriend gets bored.
She like starts skinning away.
And as I'm like climbing up out of the profile, I step onto the snow, my bare boots get this
giant wump.
The whole slope avalanches down around my feet fills in the hole.
I just dug.
I'm like, oh my God, it just pointed out like the folly of trying to like really understand
from a single hole in the snow.
Whereas the snowpack had been screaming to us just walking around on it like, hey, really
unstable structure right here.
I didn't need to pull out a shovel to see that and in fact pulling out the shovel only
confused me much more.
Yeah.
The snowpack is screaming in your ear.
Okay.
I got to figure this stuff out because this makes no sense.
So last week, we had some AMGA guides in town, Angela Hawes and Mike Hatcher.
And so they were pretty psyched to skiing Crest Dubuque because they'd never skied here before.
And I was putting myself in their ski boots because as we know, there's nothing more dangerous
than a bunch of guides out on their day off.
And it was considerable danger.
The day before it had been high danger.
So it's super touchy.
Yeah.
And we've never toured with each other before.
And I was like, hey, I'll tell you what, let's all get on the same page.
I've loaded up all the classic routes in Crest Dubuque on Aspect Abbey so you can go on the
laptop and open up the web app.
And you guys decide where we're going to go so that I'm not the keeper of the knowledge
and like trying to thread the needle.
That makes me really uncomfortable when I'm going to a new zone and it's critically unstable
with people I haven't toured before.
I want big buffers and I've seen it go wrong so many times.
And so it was pretty cool where Angela picked out where we were going to go and it was exactly
where I was going to have us go.
So of like the 50 runs on there, it was like she picked the exact same one that I was going
to do because it was in the clear.
It wasn't in the red.
And Mike totally agreed.
And that took us three minutes.
And we were on the same page.
And then we had a wild card come in.
And it was a really experienced local.
It was a phenomenal skier.
The ski comps all over the North America.
And as we were going up, we got like a dozen booming collapses up this low angle ridge.
So it's death to our left, death to our right.
And we're on this prow, this rib of under 30 degrees because we said, we're not going
over 30 degrees today.
We're going to stay out of the runout zones.
And we're getting all these booming collapses.
And the person who's not a guide said, hey, what if we skied over there on the North Face
and do those pillow drops?
They're not particularly big.
They're kind of small start zones.
And all three of us were like, oh, hell no.
The snowpack is screaming at us.
Like there's not enough money in the world to go tickle those small avalanche zones because
they're like certainly big enough and rake through the trees.
And it was such a different perspective.
It was really interesting.
And I think it was very comforting where Angela spoke up and said, hey, we already
made our tour plan.
We are not deviating from it.
We're going to stay out of avalanche terrain.
We're locked in on that.
If you'd like to do a different tour, go ahead, but we're not going.
It was quite comforting to see that my guides day off experience is finally evolving from,
oh, let's push it right to the limit because it's a highly trained group to let's give
ourselves plenty of buffer because why?
We just don't want to be stressed.
We want to have fun and be relaxed.
You know, I feel like that's exactly what we talked about earlier when we said so many
recreational groups do is they just go out there with this loose idea.
And then when that person who almost by definition of what you described, they do ski comps,
like they have a higher risk tolerance than a lot of us are willing to jump off big things
and ski super fast, right?
They throw out this idea and it subjects the group to this pressure of like, hey, I'm
a good skier.
Hey, I can do this.
And suddenly there's a lot more emotion in the decision making than we want there to
be.
When it comes to the single critical decision that we get to make every day, which is where
are we going to go?
We want that done with as little emotion involved as possible.
And you know, you nailed it there because there was a disconnect because it was a last
minute ad and Angela and Mike were over for Curry at my house that night.
And even though we had each had like two glasses of wine and I am such a lightweight, I was
just like, oh my gosh, I'm you guys playing the tour.
We all have the same data because we're all looking at the web app and it was very clear
which runs were in the red.
And Angela was like, hey, there's only about five runs that aren't in the red zone for
tomorrow.
It's considerable danger.
We stay out of the Lanshtrain and these face north.
Let's go there.
And the fourth person didn't have the information coming in and didn't have that kind of operational
mindset of we do our run less before we leave.
We can only go more conservative, but we are not going more aggressive.
So it was like a cultural and disconnect, but also not having that same information to level
the playing field so that two folks from out of town who have never been here before have
the exact same information that I'm going off of.
And we can get to agreement in minutes and just be like easy done.
Yeah, done.
Hey, so Larry, I could literally talk to you all day.
But we're coming up on an hour and a half.
So let me ask you briefly.
Tell me about your role at Evoque coaching mountain athletes.
Yeah.
So Scott Johnson has been one of my closest friends and a long time climbing and skiing
partner for several decades.
And so, you know, he's written several books about training for Alpine climbing and training
for endurance sports, mountain running, ski mo, you know, training for the new Alpinism
and training for the uphill athlete.
Then he co-founded the company uphill athlete and which fairly quickly turned into a coaching
business.
And Scott has helped me back in the day when you and I were going through our guides exams.
Scott really helped train me to prepare for those exams.
And honestly, like, that's probably the height of my fitness ever.
Yeah.
Is, you know, when I had some real structure to my training in addition to just being out
there all the time.
And so, you know, whenever we'd go out on adventures, we would often wind up talking,
training methodology.
And I would often train with Scott in the shoulder seasons when I wasn't busy guiding.
And then a few years back, we started talking and Scott was asking me like, well, how long
do you think you can keep guiding for?
And, you know, what's your exit strategy?
Oh, wow.
And he's like, yeah, I really don't have one.
And my wife and I always joke that we've been living in semi-retirement for a year, so we're
just going to work until we're dead at this point.
And so a few years ago, Scott said, hey, you know, you should consider coaching for us.
You know, I could train you in sort of the methodologies.
You already understand a lot of these principles, but you could continue to do it while you're
working as a guide.
You don't have to commit to doing it full time.
And then when you want to cut back on your guiding, you'll have this other thing that
you can continue to do for many years.
And he said, honestly, one of the biggest things about coaching, much like guiding, is
that the job is about working with people.
You know, so you and I, we're not professional skiers or professional climbers, we're professional
guides, right?
We can facilitate people and the medium that we're using is climbing and skiing.
And so coaching shares a lot of that where you have to be good with working with people
and then understanding some basic training philosophies.
Well, you know, Scott didn't invent, but he has really helped to just streamline.
And yeah, so I work with athletes, I would say primarily in the mountaineering world,
but also in the ski touring world, I work with a handful of guides that are either training
for guides, exams or training for big personal objectives they have coming up in their off
season from guiding.
But yeah, all kind of mountain sports people at evoke, we really only train people for
mountain sports.
So everything from alpine climbing, mountaineering, ski touring, ultra running, you know, we're
not training triathletes, we're not training cyclists or swimmers or, you know, really
any other style of athletes.
And we tend to try to pair people up with a coach that knows that sport really well.
So you know, people that want to go ski touring in the Alps, they'll often send to me because
I've done so many of those trips or, you know, so yeah.
Maybe the people fail to understand how specific the sport demands are, and that'll come through
oftentimes when clients are booking a trip and they'll say, oh yeah, I'm an Ironman triathlete
and I'm like, there's no way I could run a marathon, my legs would fall off and there's
no way my butt wouldn't fall off riding 112 miles and I'd drown on that two mile swim,
but it is amazing to see at altitude, throwing time zone change and you're on a six day,
seven day hut to hut tour and they're falling apart because the demands of the sport are
so specific and they haven't shifted their training to fit the demands of the sport.
And I think that's where taking a mountain athlete approach and being like, hey, let's
really zero in on your goals and tailor it and find out what your strengths and weaknesses
are already, leverage the strengths and ruthlessly train the weaknesses and get really prepared
for this trip you're going for.
So you're not just surviving and hanging on, you're thriving and enjoying it.
This is a trip of a lifetime.
You want to really get the most out of it.
Absolutely.
Now you're exactly right.
It's so much of it comes down to specificity of training so that especially in the later
phases of your training, your training looks a lot like the event that you are training
for and then you're exactly right.
We work with a lot of guide services.
They send clients to us to help them get ready for big climbs or big expeditions so that
the people have just a high chance of success and whether or not they get to the top of
the mountain, they can actually enjoy the time they're out there.
They're not just hanging on and suffering the whole time.
So and yeah, since I've been doing it, I get a lot of satisfaction out of it.
Similar to guiding in that you develop these really close personal relationships with people
and you get to help them achieve these long sought after goals.
But more so than guiding like literally with my coached athletes, we have some almost daily
contact so I know about their families and what they like to do and their jobs.
You really get to know these people.
They become good friends.
So yeah, that's something I really appreciate about that work.
Yeah, I can see that cross out climbing and skiing with perfect synergy.
Yeah, it's so satisfying.
I think for me, I've had basically 30 years of hardcore adventuring skiing climbing.
So it's really hard to move the needle and be like, Oh, that was an exceptional day just
because I've had so many good days in the mountains.
I've been incredibly privileged, but what I find now is it's more rewarding to facilitate
an experience and help someone build towards their goals and set them up to realize the
goals.
Yeah, that is so rewarding.
That's more rewarding than a great powder day or a great climbing day personally for me.
Yeah, no, I completely agree.
Yeah.
I think one of the things inherent in that is what I've seen training is like this long
term project.
It takes a while to kind of move the needle and to build fitness and to see those gains.
And so having a goal out there is such an important thing no matter who you are or what
you're training for.
And it's like been interesting.
I try not to coach my wife, and she's a pretty good athlete, but recently she saw another
mutual friend of ours do this incredible endurance event over in Europe, multi-day stage race.
And she was like, I need a goal.
And so we kind of developed this goal together, something her and I could do together.
And like since she's had a goal, she's been so much more disciplined about making sure
she's training five days a week.
She's just like before it was kind of a hit or miss.
She fitted in when she could.
She always tried to get exercise, but now then there's a difference between exercise and
training, right?
Which I think a lot of people don't meet that distinction.
And having a goal can help you make sure like all training is exercise, but not all exercise
is training.
And so, you know, with the limited time we all have, you want to make sure the stuff
you're doing is actually moving you closer to that goal.
And so that's something I really appreciate about coaching is just helping people do that.
Yeah.
Hey, Larry, I've put you in the hot seat and peppered you with a whole bunch of questions.
Because none of this was canned so you didn't know what was coming.
Do you have any questions for me or one question for me?
Because we've been talking for a while.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, I've been playing with the app that you developed and been kind of sharing
it with other people and one of the questions that just came out recently is I have a number
of friends in Canada that are wondering if they can expect at any point to see the app
being available up there.
And, you know, I actually initially thought it was in a friend of mine that I was just
talking with.
I was like, oh, let me zone in on your area.
And I was like, oh, it's there's no avalanche forecast on the app.
And so, yeah, I was curious about that.
And just, fortunately, rain there is up there.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, Canada is really far behind the US on its lidar mapping.
So that's laser mapping.
And that's the high-resolution mapping where they shoot 18 lasers per one meter tiles.
And that's what we absolutely have to have is high-resolution mapping.
And so I don't know how many years until Canada starts to get many of the ski zones mapped.
Right now, they have a couple urban areas mapped, but very little in the back country
that overlaps where we would go riding.
So I'll have to get back to you, but it'll be a couple years.
The countries that are fast on the laser mapping are Switzerland and Norway.
So those will be the next places where you try to expect to have me.
Yeah.
Be able to use that.
Until you guys wind up.
Yeah.
It's got to be high-resolution mapping.
Yeah.
And you're probably looking at investing in some planes that can do this lidar mapping
under the auspices of Aspect Avi, right?
Are you acquiring your planes?
Yeah.
It's incredibly expensive for them to gather that data.
So we'll just wait till the USGS makes it available for free or the Canadian version.
Yeah.
But it brings up an interesting point where I think operationally, like if you had a
heli-operation in Canada, you could actually map out your own zone and then have your own
version of Aspect Avi that's in-house proprietary.
And then you can set your parameters.
And I think for guides meetings, it's really tough.
You mentioned before, like if you're working in a large tenure, like I think you said North
Cascades is like 30 square miles, right?
About that?
Yeah.
So that's really big, but some of the Canadian operations are even larger.
And when you green light a run, it doesn't mean that you can ski everything on that
mountain.
It means it's like, okay, the guide needs to choose the terrain appropriately.
However, it's so much easier for people to visualize it where if you can see, oh yeah,
half the run is in the red and then the slight aspect change to the south, that's in the
clear.
Okay, that's lower angle.
We're going to ski there.
And I think it's a great visualization tools for morning meetings.
So you can be like, oh yeah, whatever the name of the run is, the left side is closed,
but the right side is open.
So that's really cool.
And then lastly, Larry, how can people get a hold of you if they want to engage your
services as a mountain guide or get coached as a mountain athlete?
What's the best way to get a hold of you?
People can find me through either my company's website, North Cascades Mountain Guides or
Evoke Endurance.
Both those companies on Larry at NC Mountain Guides and Larry at EvokeEndurance.com.
You can find me on social media, but you'll wonder if something happened to me because
I'm not super active on there.
So yeah, email or the websites are probably the best way to track me down.
Okay, great.
And then they can also listen to you on a podcast, right?
Yeah, so the Evokecast is our in-house podcast at Evoke Endurance.
And yeah, I've been the host of quite a number of them.
All of the coaches kind of take turns, but it's largely focused on training for mountain
athletes, but we've branched out a bit from that.
And it's just topics of interest for mountain athletes.
But certainly with a heavy bias toward training philosophy.
So yeah, I think that could be of interest to a lot of people out there.
Yeah, great place to go geek out and hear new ideas and a little bit of banter.
Yeah, cool.
Yeah.
Larry, thanks so much for joining us.
Really appreciate it.
Yeah, you're welcome.
It's great to be here with you.
Thanks for having me, Jeff.
All right.
Cheers, Larry.
Thanks.
Take care.
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