This past weekend I took a three-day avalanche training course up in Tahoe with a couple of friends. The course should be required prep for those contemplating some time in the backcountry, but unfortunately a lot of people skiing and boarding "out of bounds" and beyond do so without any safety instruction, which, having gone through this course, now strikes me as pretty much insane.
The classroom part of the class was a bit tedious; it's hard to learn how to dig avalanche test pits and spot suspect terrain when you're sitting in a room that's normally a daycare center (the beanbags, cubbyholes, and construction-paper art projects stuck to the walls made it hard to get serious) and when your instructor favors blurry overheads and only answers questions obliquely ("When would you use that snow test?" "Well, I don't use it." "Ok, when would one use that snow test?" Ack.). But we learned a ton in the field: how to use avalanche beacons, how to spot sketchy snow, how to pick good touring routes versus the kind that'll get you into some seriously bad but avoidable trouble. The toughest part was on Sunday, when we climbed a bald mountain in 35 mile an hour winds to investigate a slab avalanche that'd triggered a few hours earlier and then dug test pits really close by, which seemed a bit counter to the whole "safety first" directive. The best part: Monday's terrain tour, which gave me my first big taste of the flat-out splendor of the backcountry. No human tracks but ours. No crowded resort madness. Great views. Plenty of peace. Also plenty of "whoa-whoa-whoa!!" one-ski action due to my newness to telemark skis, which was a bit embarrassing. Converting from downhill to telly has its challenges, turning in powder apparently being one of them.
Here are some photos from our second test pit exercise. And here's a link to NASTC, the organization that put on our training.
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