Training Your Intuition

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Originally Posted by dewam

Occasionally when the skiing is good and nothing has been going wrong I forget that the wicked environment is still there, I am not seeing it due to my complacency. A good example was banging out good south facing lines on a early spring day, only to find that the line we skied an hour earlier has now slid, and even taken out the up track. Just a degree or two of temp, a degree or two of sun angle, and another year to forget about spring slides.

Perceived lenient consequences can kill when we forget the basics. This was a failure of intuition, and basics, among a very experienced group. The incident was extensively rehashed, is rehashed every year when the sun becomes more powerful, and has been passed on to many "

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Now that right there was some awesome instant feedback you got to pass on.

This kind of stuff happens a lot. An example - several years ago at Mt Hood Meadows, the AC crew fired some howitzer shells into upper Heather due to Avy concerns. No result.

So they sent a couple of guys over to throw some hand charges and kick stuff. Again no result. So they opened the area and a hordes of powder locusts descended.

That evening - after closing - the whole canyon slid fuckin Hudge.

Question for the avy instructors - do you perform a field exercise where you start directing your class toward riskier lines/routes, and then see whether someone speaks up?

I've never seen this in a class but seems like it would be a good drill, so long as you have the coachable moment - "what the fuck is wrong with you people? I'm leading you into what you should know is big shit and you say nothing!" - before Teh Suck happens.

If decision making were such a black/white obvious process people wouldn't associate value with intuition would they?

A bit like this gem from the paper

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The optimal conditions, under which intuition will be more accurate, include an environment that provides relatively consistent indicators as to its true nature. The second and perhaps more important aspect is whether the decision maker has had the opportunity to learn the meaning of these indicators.

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"if mountains weren't mountains and were regular and predictable, and if we humans were pretty good at analyzing everything with out some negative catalyst (eg an avalanche) it'd be really easy to generate good intuition on what they'd do"

Here's a little bibliography for people that are into the subject:

Klein, Gary A. Sources of power: How people make decisions. MIT press, 1999.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan, 2011.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan:: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility. Random House LLC, 2010.

And a podcast series...

http://youarenotsosmart.com/podcast/

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Originally Posted by telebobski

Now that right there was some awesome instant feedback you got to pass on.
This kind of stuff happens a lot.

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Often times, luck is the thing that keeps you alive long enough to learn. Den

^^^My Dad used to say "You started out life with a bag full of luck and an empty bag of experience. Yer supposed to fill up the experience bag before the luck bag is empty. Don't be a dumbfuck".

Interesting post !

8 pages to say that the qualities of the learning environment determine the effectiveness of the automatic decision making processes. Duh. Rather than footnoting the obvious (standard academic practice), this could have been useful if it had explored the extent to which trained intuition can be more effective than the application of protocol, because of its inherent capacity to simultaneously evaluate multiple constantly changing variables. In my experience Zen Buddhism provides a useful intellectual framework for understanding how and why this can be applied to managing risk in the backcountry.

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Originally Posted by kootenayskier

8 pages to say that the qualities of the learning environment determine the effectiveness of the automatic decision making processes. Duh.

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How the view from up on your horse?

how to train and develop intuition? well if you are just going on knowledge then you just have to practice but thats not intuition, intuition is what psychics use so perhaps you can ask at a new age spiritual forum? they probably know better than tgr :)

Seems there's a bit of a continuum in terms of environments being conducive versus not to developing intuition of the sort that's useful rather than dangerous. A fairly consistent and relatively benign environment sounds like some types of inbounds a/c work, for instance. Where decision making tools that override intuition become particularly useful includes things like highly variable environments with potentially severe consequences (including some types of inbounds environments, I don't mean to minimize the risks there). One thing I've taken to doing myself, for instance, is if I read a slide report, quickly calculating the ALP TRUTH score. It can be stark compared to a narrative where you can see intuitively why something felt safe.

I went looking for something else and found this thread from back in the day. Some good insights if you need some reading material.

Thanks for the bump, cool. I mostly operate on intuition guided by the published forecast. When I've skied in Chile, without any forecast, I've dialed it back a lot until I've developed my own internal model for the snowpack. Most of that intuition comes from many days out, often with more experienced people. My biggest mistakes have been made with partners who I don't get out with as regularly, maybe aren't as experienced, or who (in retrospect) didn't speak up about something they were worried about. The best partners question my judgement. I have been caught in some small, inconsequential slides that were good feedback to learn from. But the most learning was from a very close near miss with a likely unsurvivable slide that I escaped. Also, I learned a lot from a slide that almost killed a friend of mine in a tricky snowpack with danger isolated to specific aspects. The whole wicked environment thing is real. It helps me to have the attitude that I'm still learning about the mountains and to keep from feeling overly confident.

Good bump. It kind of makes me sad that I'm not sure if 2025 TGR has that kind of discussion in it anymore.

I'd agree with some of those old posts that intuition is often a function of time spent in the mountains. But I also wonder at which point some of that can drift over into "expert halo"

I believe it was Paul Baugher from Crystal who said, "Good intuition is the product of having a lot of slides in the memory carousel, a lot of close calls and near misses provided you survive them" Or words to that effect.

The old "Poor judgement leads to experiences that lead to good judgement..."

Well, a few observations from another 10+ years. We all want to ski good lines and experience those epic days. Even an old hacker like me gets some if I put in enough days. The first trick to putting in enough days is you have to come home so you can ski the next day. Amongst my regular partners there was discussion about training your intuition, or discussion of is it a six sense or just accumulated knowledge. The answer that works for us is we don't care what triggers it. If one of the partners is uncomfortable with a line, we don't ski it, we do not need a reason. There are plenty of other lines that do not tickle someone's intuition. Sometimes we do not have access to a Mentor, but having good partners can be a constant training environment. Poor judgement, close calls, and near misses are great motivators to learn, but it is the constant discussion with motivated partners that is needed the other 99% of the time. We are all learning each trip out, but without discussing what we are seeing and thinking there is not as much retention. Every pole plant, hand pit, and ski turn is telling a story if you listen. Every unexpected result should be discussed, and in high consequence situations discussing even expected results keeps the discussion open. Does skiing many hundreds of days with the same partners diminish the "Expert Halo"? Den

I didn't buy the intuition when it comes to avalanche.

Know the snowpack before you leave, then confirm with snow tests.

And don't go in avalanche terrain if there's a week buried layer.

There's no amount of intuition that will help you discern if a buried week layer will be triggered or not.

Sent from my moto g 5G using Tapatalk

I have done a lot of skiing with a guy who was buried for 20 minutes and talk about being buried to sharpen the intutition





buddy was always the first person to say you know we don't need to ski this you guys !

If there is truth to intuition, it is part of our brain has made a connection but we cant yet voice it.

People’s intuitions are wrong every day but just nothing bad happens too.

I really believe if you want to develop your "intuition" you should concentrate on your "situational awareness" (SA). "SA is a technical term for being consciously aware of your surroundings." wrote Emma Sutti.