Embracing Responsibility vs. Placing Blame

[covert]

A worthy read that touches on the foundations of how we respond to error. This discussion could not possibly be more relevant to avalanche safety. So, let's have it.

http://www.jhnewsandguide.com/sports...tqWrV.linkedin

Molly Absolon
POSTED: WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2016 4:30 AM
Mountainside / By Molly Absolon | 0 comments

"Hours after a Dec. 15 avalanche closed Teton Pass and forced a car off the road my Facebook feed had come alive with comments about the situation. A breaking news report from the News&Guide said that authorities suspected a skier had triggered the slide and the response on the internet was harsh. People called for blood. Someone should pay, they wrote. Someone had been stupid, reckless or thoughtless, they said. Someone had jeopardized skiing on Teton Pass for everyone, they asserted.

I hoped the accusations were false and wondered how we would ever know. If someone had in fact triggered the slide, why would he or she come forward in the face of the storm of hatred and anger that was raging in cyberspace? Why would anyone volunteer to confront such condemnation when it would be easier to say nothing until the clouds passed by?
I don’t know if there was a culprit in the Teton Pass avalanche situation. As has been reported in the News&Guide, sheriff’s investigators determined they did not have enough evidence to warrant criminal charges. Apparently a number of people were interviewed and rumors abound about what actually happened out there that evening, but no one is coming forward to accept responsibility.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us. According to a 2015 report by Alan Jones and Bruce Jamieson entitled “The Effects of Under-Reporting on Non-Fatal Involvements in Snow Avalanches on Vulnerability,” 90 percent of nonfatal avalanche incidents are not reported. Ninety percent. That means most of the people out there who’ve triggered or been caught in a slide aren’t telling anyone about their experience.

Why don’t people report the avalanches they’re involved in? My guess is that it’s largely because they are ashamed, embarrassed or afraid of the public condemnation that will follow, and I don’t blame them. If the comments that floated around after the Twin Slides avalanche indicate the type of response you can expect to receive if you speak up, it’s not hard to understand why someone might prefer to keep quiet.

Social media makes it all too easy for us to sit back and call people names. Public shaming is nothing new of course. History is full of examples: pillories, stocks, tar and feathering, public whippings, etc., were all ways to use humiliation and embarrassment to control behavior. In modern times we’ve done away with these primitive tools. Now it seems as if we’ve replaced them with the internet. In hours a story can go viral and trigger hundreds of vicious comments about a person. Even if the story is later proven to be false or inaccurate, the damage is often done.

I do not know if anyone knows whether the Dec. 15 slide was skier triggered. I guess there was some basis for that accusation, although it may just be an assumption based on the number of skiers and boarders who regularly use the area.

Statistically you could argue those numbers alone point the finger at a human-caused slide. But it was also dumping snow and blowing hard that evening. Mother Nature could just as easily have triggered that slide. Without a smoking gun, I don’t think it’s fair or safe to jump to conclusions about what caused this particular slide. And that’s not really my point.
My point is that public shaming silences us. We are afraid to speak up for fear of the consequences. But how can we learn from each other if we aren’t open and honest about our mistakes? How can we understand avalanches if 90 percent of them go unreported because people fear repercussions if they come forward?

Most outdoor education and guide services keep close track of their accident and near-miss statistics to guide their risk management. The underlying belief is that the cause of an incident should not be dismissed as simply a personal error or stupidity that can be solved by firing whoever was involved. Rather the idea is that the individual or individuals implicated are part of the organization’s system. They were trained by the organization and, unless there was a blatant disregard for procedure or negligence, an accident points more to shortcomings in the training than in the individual.

Shifting the idea of blame away from one person helps diffuse some of the anger and shame associated with a mistake. It allows people to learn from the situation and find the holes in their education that make them vulnerable to such errors.

Of course, that’s assuming the accident was an error and not negligence. There’s a big difference between the two. Intentionally testing an avalanche slope above a crowded highway to see if it is safe to ski is a reckless act and deserves to be investigated for possible criminal wrongdoing. On the other hand, accidentally triggering a slide from the Mount Glory boot track raises questions about our assumptions of safe zones and good route finding rather than negligence. But how are we ever going to be able to explore the difference if no one is willing to speak up?

Drew Hardesty, a longtime forecaster with the Utah Avalanche Center and a Grand Teton National Park climbing ranger, has been exploring the effect of shame on our behavior, particularly with regard to risk. He recently shared with me an article he wrote on the topic. In it he says, “For most of us, connection — being part of the fabric of the community — is important. We yearn for the trust and respect of our backcountry partners, friends … even loved ones. And this is central — even foundational — to how we see ourselves and, dare I say, where we fit and stack up in the community. Reputations take a lifetime to develop and only a few minutes to destroy.”

Hardesty goes on to talk about the work of Brene Brown, a University of Houston professor who has gained fame from her TED talks on shame and vulnerability. Brown talks about how fear of shame and vulnerability hold us back, stifle our creativity and innovation and prevent change. She goes on to explore how deeply ingrained shame is in our culture and how difficult it is for us to break down its barriers to true learning. The antidote, she says, is empathy.
Social media leaves little room for empathy, however. Studies have shown that in the absence of face-to-face contact, humans are more willing to be cruel, harsh and judgmental. It’s easy to call someone names with your fingers on the keyboard, harder when you have to look into his or her eyes and say the words out loud.

Empathy demands that we put ourselves in someone else’s shoes before we jump to any conclusions about their actions. Empathy requires listening even when we think we know the answers.

And yet, not all mistakes are honest, simple errors. Some mistakes do deserve punishment.
If we knew that the avalanche in Twin Slides was triggered by someone skiing the path on a day of high hazard despite the fact that hundreds of cars were passing below, that seems like enough cause for prosecution.

As Rich Mrazik, a Salt Lake City litigator and backcountry skier, wrote in the February 2013 Avalanche Review: “The law allows you to be as rad as you want to be as long as you do not cause injury to people minding their own business.”

So we are faced with a conundrum. To learn from our mistakes, we have to be willing to share them and probe into the root causes. We have to separate the individual from the act and try to listen with empathy. We have to recognize that failure is the incubator for growth and change and that only by examining our failures can we improve.

But we also have to realize that in a crowded world we cannot disregard the fact that we are not alone out there. If our decisions hurt innocent bystanders, we need to accept the consequences."

[glademaster]

I don't understand why there is so much debate over this issue. There is one solution, close all the terrain that drains down to the road to skier/snowboarder access. Simple, done. It works on Rogers Pass, it will work on Teton Pass. If you're so hardcore you'll walk a little farther for your turns, bro.

The maintenance of a route for interstate commerce and the safety of innocent motorists are both far more important than your "right" (I would say privilege) to ski powder on Teton Pass. Shut down the road shots.

[claymond]

I've spent very little time on Teton Pass or Jackson in general. And I know the area has a reputation for people thinking they are hardasses even if they're following a conga line up a bootpack. But I really doubt most of the people skiing on Teton Pass like it so much cuz it makes them feel hardcore. More likely it's because they can get a quick lap in almost straight back to the car before work or whatever else they have to do that day. So it's more then just a issue of jerks with plenty of free time going further out to prove they're tough. You'd affect alot of people wanting to maintain a work/ski balance while living in a expensive ass town. And what are road shots anyway? With the right conditions couldn't you remote trigger a slide big enough to bury the road just from the bootpack? Or trigger Glory Bowl itself from the ridge above the repeater? Closing the north side on certain days seems reasonable, but permanent closures not so much.

[adrenalated]

What to do about Teton Pass isn't the point of the article. It's about how we respond to mistakes/incidents and how that can negatively affect communication and ability to learn and improve. Teton Pass is a sidenote.

"Empathy demands that we put ourselves in someone else’s shoes before we jump to any conclusions about their actions. Empathy requires listening even when we think we know the answers."

One of my pet peeves is the way we armchair quarterback on social media after an avalanche incident. Most of the time, the very first thing that happens is someone calls the person involved stupid, or says something like "who the fuck thought it was a good idea to ski _____ on ____ day?!"

Having this reaction does not help you learn. Yes, sometimes people are just stupid. But MOST of the time, they are aware of the danger, and they don't want to die in an avalanche. They make a mistake somewhere along the way - maybe they miss a key observation, maybe they are influenced by heuristic traps, maybe they apply incorrect conclusions to the data and observations they collect. Point is, most of the time, they make a mistake that humans are susceptible to making. That includes you, and me.

When I hear about an avalanche accident, I don't call the person stupid. Calling them stupid automatically puts them on a lower plane than yourself, and implies that you couldn't possibly make the same mistake as them... because you're not stupid, right? That's the kind of arrogance that will get you caught some day.

Instead, I prefer to try to walk myself through the group or individual's day. Take as much information possible, either from the accident report or the individual's story, and walk myself through their day, their decision making process, and figure out why they made the decisions they did that led to the incident. Sometimes, yep, they were just stupid. But most of the time, I find some little mistake or mistakes that the party made and realize that I have made that exact same mistake in the past. Or could be susceptible to making in the future. It makes me more aware, and more likely to be able to avoid those mistakes in my own travels in the backcountry. It makes me better. I learn something.

If I just discounted the victim as stupid, I would learn nothing. All it would do is feed my own ego. And, as the author above notes, if I publicly shamed the victim, people involved in avalanches in the future are less likely to report or share their experiences. This makes the forecaster's jobs more difficult and reduces the ability of the backcountry community - recreational and professional - to learn more about avalanches, and how to make good decisions while traveling in avalanche terrain.

[My Pet Powder Goat]

I've been on the receiving end of the Internet whipping post; I don't really care, but the hateful judgment without facts sucks.
i always figured it was best to report any incident and learn from it as well as let the patrol in a sidecountry situation know everyone was ok.

Watched a Couple of knowledge, but high profiling e friends trigger an avalanche, he escaped, but inflated his bag etc. They didn't consider reporting it, in sure because of the stigma involved.


I hate to say it but in the future I'll probably follow their lead and keep any minor incident to myself

[summit]

It is no stretch when we say that most near-miss and non-injury avalanche incidents are not reported. It is all about the culture.

When I teach, I first tell students that avalanches are not something you can get in legal trouble for... unless you are in a closed area or cause a problem on a road.

I then explain that it is better to share in a way that allows us to analyze and learn so we can avoid repeating mistakes. I say that being involved in a near-miss doesn't mean you are a failure, an embarrassment, a "bad" backcountry user... unless you fail to learn and help others learn from it.

When examining accidents in class, I establish the ground discussion rules that we are looking for red flags missed, mistakes made, things that could have been done differently in mindset, planning, and execution. We aren't looking to vilify or judge. I'm glad I've had those rules as it turns out sometimes we get someone who knew the victims.

I've definitely been guilty of being too judgmental in the past, and I've tried to change that in my approach because it wasn't a good thing. I hope modeling a different mindset for new users will help change the culture from where we are and what I was taught.

[kootenayskier]

What to do about Teton Pass isn't the point of the article. It's about how we respond to mistakes/incidents and how that can negatively affect communication and ability to learn and improve. Teton Pass is a sidenote.

"Empathy demands that we put ourselves in someone else’s shoes before we jump to any conclusions about their actions. Empathy requires listening even when we think we know the answers."

One of my pet peeves is the way we armchair quarterback on social media after an avalanche incident. Most of the time, the very first thing that happens is someone calls the person involved stupid, or says something like "who the fuck thought it was a good idea to ski _____ on ____ day?!"

Having this reaction does not help you learn. Yes, sometimes people are just stupid. But MOST of the time, they are aware of the danger, and they don't want to die in an avalanche. They make a mistake somewhere along the way - maybe they miss a key observation, maybe they are influenced by heuristic traps, maybe they apply incorrect conclusions to the data and observations they collect. Point is, most of the time, they make a mistake that humans are susceptible to making. That includes you, and me.

When I hear about an avalanche accident, I don't call the person stupid. Calling them stupid automatically puts them on a lower plane than yourself, and implies that you couldn't possibly make the same mistake as them... because you're not stupid, right? That's the kind of arrogance that will get you caught some day.

Instead, I prefer to try to walk myself through the group or individual's day. Take as much information possible, either from the accident report or the individual's story, and walk myself through their day, their decision making process, and figure out why they made the decisions they did that led to the incident. Sometimes, yep, they were just stupid. But most of the time, I find some little mistake or mistakes that the party made and realize that I have made that exact same mistake in the past. Or could be susceptible to making in the future. It makes me more aware, and more likely to be able to avoid those mistakes in my own travels in the backcountry. It makes me better. I learn something.

If I just discounted the victim as stupid, I would learn nothing. All it would do is feed my own ego. And, as the author above notes, if I publicly shamed the victim, people involved in avalanches in the future are less likely to report or share their experiences. This makes the forecaster's jobs more difficult and reduces the ability of the backcountry community - recreational and professional - to learn more about avalanches, and how to make good decisions while traveling in avalanche terrain.

The quirks in human psychology responsible for poor judgement in the mountains are amplified in modern mediated communities, and prove stubbornly resistant to sensible critique. I see no productive (though sometimes entertaining) way of participating in the inevitable social media circus around recently reported errors, with even the role of detached observer (as sensibly outlined above) inciting unhelpful egotism. I find professional historical accounts (Avalanche incidents in Canada) useful to study, but true clarity is between me and the mountain.

[covert]

I would argue that any process devoid of feedback is incapable of true clarity, but I get that you don't think pressing for change will accomplish anything.

The focus on empathy points towards the fundamental attribution error, where we assume that an individual is somehow at fault (stupid or reckless) as opposed to doing the best they can to manage a complex environment.

Industries (like aviation) that learn to embrace and capture error and suck all the information they can from it make dramatic safety gains. I don't think it's too far fetched to believe that communities can learn to accept responsibility instead of placing blame. Maybe not this one, but some.

Of course, I think we already mostly know what mistakes people make...over and over again. Modifying our behavior is the hard part.

[goldenboy]

We had a pretty good example of this recently in Crested Butte. 4 skiers descended Red Lady, but then a couple of hours later, a solo skier set off this slide:


Amazingly, solo skier wasn't caught, but he/she never called it in so the CBAC had to put something out on social media trying to figure out if anyone was buried. SAR was on standby, etc, etc. The TH has cell service, so solo dude could have called someone. As far as I know, solo skier and their story remains a mystery.

As for the 4 that skied it first (and might have thought they made good decisions had han solo not shown them otherwise) not much is known about them or their story, either. Supposedly 4 dads, whose teenaged kids were taking their L1. One of them wrote a letter to the Gunnison paper- sounds like they made their go/ no go off of a pit. They didn't read the CBAC, which issued an avalanche warning the day before, and discussed 3" SWE being a rather large load in 36 hours.

Of final note is a post on the Gunnison Marketplace, a facebook group that I'm sure most areas have where people sell stuff and sometimes bitch and moan. It basically read "Who are you, solo dude? Fess Up." Or according to one post, "To see who caused the avy. It's dangerous and fucks it up for everyone else." That shit is weak, IMO. No one is going to talk about it in that atmosphere (to be fair, many of the posts in the FB group seemed genuinely interested and respectful.)

Maybe there wasn't anything to learn. I don't tend to ski the day after an avalanche warning in the bc- I'd rather ride lifts personally. The line choices were interesting, at the very least. The "4" center punched the thing and nothing happened. Solo dude hugged the rocks.

[jono]

I hope modeling a different mindset for new users will help change the culture from where we are and what I was taught.

This has been demonstrated to work. In aviation, accident reconstruction faced the same difficulty when interviewing people (minus social media). But at this point the standard procedure is thoroughly dispassionate thanks to years of practicing the approach that it is about finding the truth not placing blame--and indoctrinating newbies about why that is critically important. Despite the fact that selfish motives might be the root cause of the root cause (profit or powder lust) the need to find the truth is too important to allow the practice of withholding blame to be compromised. This is not unique to avalanche heuristics, it applies to everything we do, but avalanches provide the significant advantage that we can't hide from reality with clever arguments. Recent research says medical mistakes are the third leading cause of death in the US, but we can't even collect the data correctly on that--heuristic problems and hiding from the truth are very pervasive and costly.

If we're looking to fix the culture of shaming the obvious solution is to fight fire with fire: start shaming the shamers. Point out the real consequence of snarky bandwagoners when and where we see it and call those people out for their ignorance until no one can claim to be ignorant. Social media problems are stupid, but they can be addressed on the medium that creates them. A quickly-pasted standard response might be a good start.

[Buster Highmen]

. People called for blood. Someone should pay, they wrote. Someone had been stupid, reckless or thoughtless, they said. Someone had jeopardized skiing on Teton Pass for everyone, they asserted.

why would he or she come forward in the face of the storm of hatred and anger that was raging in cyberspace? Why would anyone volunteer to confront such condemnation

Social media makes it all too easy for us to sit back and call people names. Public shaming is nothing new of course. History is full of examples: pillories, stocks, tar and feathering, public whippings, etc., were all ways to use humiliation and embarrassment to control behavior. In modern times we’ve done away with these primitive tools. Now it seems as if we’ve replaced them with the internet. In hours a story can go viral and trigger hundreds of vicious comments about a person. Even if the story is later proven to be false or inaccurate, the damage is often done.

My point is that public shaming silences us. We are afraid to speak up for fear of the consequences. But how can we learn from each other if we aren’t open and honest about our mistakes? How can we understand avalanches if 90 percent of them go unreported because people fear repercussions if they come forward?


We yearn for the trust and respect of our backcountry partners, friends … even loved ones. And this is central — even foundational — to how we see ourselves and, dare I say, where we fit and stack up in the community. Reputations take a lifetime to develop and only a few minutes to destroy.”

Hardesty goes on to talk about the work of Brene Brown, a University of Houston professor who has gained fame from her TED talks on shame and vulnerability. Brown talks about how fear of shame and vulnerability hold us back, stifle our creativity and innovation and prevent change. She goes on to explore how deeply ingrained shame is in our culture and how difficult it is for us to break down its barriers to true learning.

The antidote, she says, is empathy.

Social media leaves little room for empathy, however. Studies have shown that in the absence of face-to-face contact, humans are more willing to be cruel, harsh and judgmental. It’s easy to call someone names with your fingers on the keyboard, harder when you have to look into his or her eyes and say the words out loud.

Empathy demands that we put ourselves in someone else’s shoes before we jump to any conclusions about their actions. Empathy requires listening even when we think we know the answers.

And yet, not all mistakes are honest, simple errors. Some mistakes do deserve punishment.
If we knew that the avalanche in Twin Slides was triggered by someone skiing the path on a day of high hazard despite the fact that hundreds of cars were passing below, that seems like enough cause for prosecution.

As Rich Mrazik, a Salt Lake City litigator and backcountry skier, wrote in the February 2013 Avalanche Review: “The law allows you to be as rad as you want to be as long as you do not cause injury to people minding their own business.”

So we are faced with a conundrum. To learn from our mistakes, we have to be willing to share them and probe into the root causes. We have to separate the individual from the act and try to listen with empathy. We have to recognize that failure is the incubator for growth and change and that only by examining our failures can we improve.

But we also have to realize that in a crowded world we cannot disregard the fact that we are not alone out there. If our decisions hurt innocent bystanders, we need to accept the consequences."

I blame it on the Reformationists and the degree to which that ethos is ingrained in American culture.
Punish, burn, condemn, isolate, alienate, castigate.

History is a wheel we forge. It only repeats if we let it. Add some empthy to the spokes.

[summit]

If we're looking to fix the culture of shaming the obvious solution is to fight fire with fire: start shaming the shamers. Point out the real consequence of snarky bandwagoners when and where we see it and call those people out for their ignorance until no one can claim to be ignorant. Social media problems are stupid, but they can be addressed on the medium that creates them. A quickly-pasted standard response might be a good start.

I like it. Let's do it.

[dunfree]

If we're looking to fix the culture of shaming the obvious solution is to fight fire with fire: start shaming the shamers. Point out the real consequence of snarky bandwagoners when and where we see it and call those people out for their ignorance until no one can claim to be ignorant. Social media problems are stupid, but they can be addressed on the medium that creates them. A quickly-pasted standard response might be a good start.

If someone skis a bold line on a high hazard avalanche day what should the feedback be online about it? Should there be a bandwagon QB-ing them? Or praising them? Both responses can have problematic feedback cycles.

Instead of adding a knee-jerk feedback of any kind, be constructive. Hard to do in practice though.

[hatchgreenchile]

One of my pet peeves is the way we armchair quarterback on social media after an avalanche incident. Most of the time, the very first thing that happens is someone calls the person involved stupid, or says something like "who the fuck thought it was a good idea to ski _____ on ____ day?!"
.

I think everyone has gone through that thinking in some point or time. I know I have and still do, even though I recognize that's not helpful to anyone as a learning experience.

It will never be that cut and dry, unless everyone meadow skipped on considerable/high days.

[Buster Highmen]

If we're looking to fix the culture of shaming the obvious solution is to fight fire with fire: start shaming the shamers.

Respectfully, I couldn't disagree more.
Empathy is the route I'll choose.

[jono]

Of course I'm being flippant by calling it "shaming the shamers." In reality it is a process of educating them. But in the social media circus, well...flippant happens. Which is actually the reason I suggested storing a quickly-pasted response: so that a thorough explanation of the hazards of the shame-culture can be presented extremely quickly. If the snark-hounds drown in verbiage at least their voices will stop being dominant, but of course the best result is that they understand and join the other side of the discussion. The point that must be made is that a culture of safety (which we are all seeking, even the caller-outers) incorporates an open-minded and blame-free approach to learning the facts. Social media contributions which do not further this culture are counterproductive to the goals of the contributor.

[doebedoe]

If someone skis a bold line on a high hazard avalanche day what should the feedback be online about it? Should there be a bandwagon QB-ing them? Or praising them? Both responses can have problematic feedback cycles.

Instead of adding a knee-jerk feedback of any kind, be constructive. Hard to do in practice though.

I've got to say -- I still have knee-jerk reaction when I read some avy news. Happened just a few days ago when someone got killed skiing sidecountry in WA. Most posts were about what a cool dude and shredder he was. My immediate QB reaction was who skis avy-prone terrain on a high-danger day with no gear.

Hard to shirk those guttural responses. I suppose the key is balance. If when those stories get spread around they make it seem like inevitable consequence of skiing bc vs. a stroke of bad luck or string of human errors it makes it hard not to pipe up.

[Buster Highmen]

Of course I'm being flippant by calling it "shaming the shamers." In reality it is a process of educating them.

Sometimes I have a poor sarcasm meter?
I think there's more I can do about my own behavior than others. So "educating others: puts it more on others than me.

Change by setting an example.

But in the social media circus, well...flippant happens. Which is actually the reason I suggested storing a quickly-pasted response: so that a thorough explanation of the hazards of the shame-culture can be presented extremely quickly. If the snark-hounds drown in verbiage at least their voices will stop being dominant, but of course the best result is that they understand and join the other side of the discussion.

I'm not following that.

In the hopeless cases, there's room for flippancy. Cynicism and sarcasm are necessary tools for managing the modern world for me. But that's really different from being punitive.

The point that must be made is that a culture of safety (which we are all seeking, even the caller-outers) incorporates an open-minded and blame-free approach to learning the facts. Social media contributions which do not further this culture are counterproductive to the goals of the contributor.

Well, yeah, but we all have input to the social media culture. I can't change others behavior, I can only recognize my failures and try to improve.

It's more about me than them. I accept my failure to be empathetic more often. So I try to improve.

[::: :::]

History is a wheel we forge. It only repeats if we let it. Add some empathy to the spokes.

words to live by
(aint easy, tho)

[jono]

It's more about me than them. I accept my failure to be empathetic more often. So I try to improve.

There's no disagreement here. There is never a time when any of us suffers from too much empathy. And communication only occurs if your audience understands your message. If you think about my suggestion I'm sure you'll notice it only works if the pasted response text is generic enough to be broadly applicable, and thus it has no place for personal attacks.

But there are two audiences in social media, and if the (hopefully shrinking) group that is posting call-outs is less often reached than the other viewers that still changes the conversation. I think it's important to remember the role that peer pressure plays in these discussions: shaming happens many times because it's socially acceptable, and that can be changed. Ideally that happens while educating everyone, but any progress is an improvement.

[hatchgreenchile]

I've got to say -- I still have knee-jerk reaction when I read some avy news. Happened just a few days ago when someone got killed skiing sidecountry in WA. Most posts were about what a cool dude and shredder he was. My immediate QB reaction was who skis avy-prone terrain on a high-danger day with no gear.
.

Yeah, those are the tough ones to get over.
We'd like to think very basic conditions for backcountry safety are met, but that's not always the case.

How much easier would it be to have serious conversations about avalanche accidents if the following were met?
The party chose not to go out on high or extreme days.
No solo skiing, except for truly low angle-meadow skipping days.
Each member had a beacon, shovel and probe and knew how to use each appropiately.
The party read the avalanche report that morning
The party worked to avoid highlighted terrain.

[adrenalated]

Yeah, agree with you guys - it's hard not to have that knee-jerk reaction. I still do too. Every time somebody triggers the convexity on the west side at Berthoud. The recent fatality in WA. I feel that reaction every time something like that happens.

I just think it's really important to not call out that reaction publicly. And then to consciously step back from that and try to put yourself in their shoes. I'm waiting for the report from NWAC on the White Pass fatality before I pass judgement. As both a recreationalist and low level educator, I really want to understand why people that should know better make seemingly glaring errors - like traveling into the sidecountry with no gear under dangerous conditions. Maybe there is no answer. I want to try to understand what I can though.

I think kootenayskier has a good point that even this approach involves ego. Specifically, it speaks to my own ego that a) I'm better at analyzing an accident/more empathetic than those who shame and b) that I have the knowledge and capability to actually understand what went wrong anyway. Those are both assumptions on my part.

But while I think kootenay is right that the most important thing is between me and the mountain - ultimately that is what determines whether I live or die in the backcountry - I think that covert is right that any process that lacks direct feedback (and traveling in avalanche terrain does, in a huge way) is not capable of true clarity.

[PNWbrit]

Yeah, agree with you guys - it's hard not to have that knee-jerk reaction. I still do too. Every time somebody triggers the convexity on the west side at Berthoud. The recent fatality in WA. I feel that reaction every time something like that happens.

I just think it's really important to not call out that reaction publicly. And then to consciously step back from that and try to put yourself in their shoes. I'm waiting for the report from NWAC on the White Pass fatality before I pass judgement. As both a recreationalist and low level educator, I really want to understand why people that should know better make seemingly glaring errors - like traveling into the sidecountry with no gear under dangerous conditions. Maybe there is no answer. I want to try to understand what I can though.

I think kootenayskier has a good point that even this approach involves ego. Specifically, it speaks to my own ego that a) I'm better at analyzing an accident/more empathetic than those who shame and b) that I have the knowledge and capability to actually understand what went wrong anyway. Those are both assumptions on my part.

But while I think kootenay is right that the most important thing is between me and the mountain - ultimately that is what determines whether I live or die in the backcountry - I think that covert is right that any process that lacks direct feedback (and traveling in avalanche terrain does, in a huge way) is not capable of true clarity.

Yeah, those are the tough ones to get over.
We'd like to think very basic conditions for backcountry safety are met, but that's not always the case.

How much easier would it be to have serious conversations about avalanche accidents if the following were met?
The party chose not to go out on high or extreme days.
No solo skiing, except for truly low angle-meadow skipping days.
Each member had a beacon, shovel and probe and knew how to use each appropiately.
The party read the avalanche report that morning
The party worked to avoid highlighted terrain.

Well said both of you.

[dunfree]

No solo skiing, except for truly low angle-meadow skipping days.

Other findings are more surprising. Though going out alone in the backcountry tends to be seen as risky, project respondents who were solo travelers tended to make safer choices than those who traveled in larger groups.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/science/avalanches-skiing-snowmobiles.html
so, lower likelihood (better decisions) but higher consequence (minimal chance of party self-rescue). risk = probability * consequence.

being serious I think there's a tension from what people want from skiing - namely pleasure, freedom and some accomplishment and a culture of safety. Safety's boring, tedious, repetitive and not much fun. No drugs, sobriety, regular following of rules. Extra overhead - to prepare avalanche reports in a timely manner (part of the reason for reporting) you need people to spend their time/money or someone elses on doing it.

[jono]

I feel that reaction every time something like that happens.

I just think it's really important to not call out that reaction publicly.

At the risk of deflecting this away from avalanches, I think this identifies the societal problem. People mistake online discussion for verbal communication where our emotional responses are understood for what they are and don't become part of a lasting public record, and subject to endless quoting. The medium's impact on the meaning is easily forgotten.