Have you heard about the snow? In parts of France, there’s been so much of it,
ski resorts were cut off for several days last week. Roads were closed,
lifts shut and – at times – guests advised to stay indoors.
Pat Zimmer, of the ski school Top Ski, founded in Val d’Isère in 1976, thinks
this is the snowiest start to winter since 1981. It’s not just France that’s
been walloped, either - Switzerland, Italy and parts of Austria have had
heavy and consistent snow for weeks.
It’s not all good news, though.
This kind of snowfall is fraught with dangers, creating tantalising conditions
away from the groomed trails and tempting far too many skiers and
snowboarders into the pristine powder beyond.
Only a fraction are properly equipped for this silent and potentially lethal
wilderness, or trained to read the complex relationship between terrain,
snow and weather. As a result, several have already died in avalanches.
How do you make sure it isn’t you? In Europe, there are two options. The first
is to hire a qualified guide who knows the mountain backwards and carries a
rucksack full of safety equipment to distribute to clients, giving basic
training in how to use it. This is the easy option, but it’s expensive. For
each day in the powder, you’ll spend at least £200 for a group of up to four
skiers or boarders.
The other option is to get some avalanche training yourself - and that’s what
I did when I joined one of the superb Snow and Avalanche Awareness Camps
(SAACs) in Austria. The courses were set up in the winter of 1998-99 because
far too many young Austrians were dying in off-piste accidents; to tempt as
many people onto them as possible, they’re heavily subsidised. A basic
two-day course is free. If you want to extend that into an entire week, you
can add 3½ or 5½ days of more detailed tuition out on the mountain from just
£295, including basic bunkhouse accommodation (but not flights or transfers)
- and the services of a highly qualified mountain guide.
The basic course starts with a three-hour classroom session - and I can’t
think of a more bracing or efficient way to strip yourself of a few common
misconceptions. Did you know, for example, that it doesn’t take fresh
snowfall to boost the avalanche danger significantly? All you need is wind.
It hustles the snow into deep drifts, shapes it into thick overhangs, known
as cornices, and breaks down the crystals, creating dense, heavy slabs that
can slide over looser snow below. By the time it eases off, a relatively
safe slope will have become lethal.
Most people will tell you that a slope with trees on it is less prone to
avalanches than one that’s open - but this is not the case either. Trees
often make the snow settle in irregular and unstable patterns - only when
they’re so close together that you can’t actually ski or snowboard through
them do they anchor the snow securely.
Perhaps the most startling misunderstandingconcerns avalanche warnings. A
universal system in the Alps rates the danger out of five. Off-pisters
should consult this every morning before they head up the mountain - 1/5
means that the snow is stable, and avalanches will be triggered only on very
steep slopes; 5/5 means “stay in bed”, because you won’t be safe even on
groomed and avalanche-protected pistes. Few people realise, however, that
3/5 denotes significant risk. It is, in fact, when the warning is at 3/5
that by far the highest number of avalanche deaths occur.
The SAAC classroom session is backed up with a day of practical tuition on the
slopes. The two elements are designed to equip pupils with strategies for
tackling the back country and make them familiar with safety equipment -
such as shovel, probe and the all-important transceiver, which allows its
wearers to search for someone buried in the snow and to be detected
themselves.
Perhaps surprisingly, it’s a lot of fun. I did my course in Mayrhofen, in the
Austrian Tyrol, last March - and, as luck would have it, it snowed heavily
on three of the five days. Visibility was nonexistent on exposed slopes, so
we were forced to stay close to the pistes, and restricted in what we could
do. Under the circumstances, Robbie Schellander, our guide, did the sensible
thing, leavening the tuition with plenty of hell-for-leather runs through
deep snow - sticking, of course, to slopes he judged to be safe.
