You may have noticed the distinct lack of PNW ski reports on Wildsnow lately. That’s mostly because I’ve been granting my schoolwork an inordinate amount of attention. Oh well, skiing in the middle of winter in Washington is all rain, darkness, and heavy snow — at least that’s what I’m telling myself.
Anyways, as part of my schoolwork I’m researching how skiers tend to go about avoiding snow avalanches. As one aspect of this, I created a short survey. There’s quite a few avalanche surveys and tests out there, and we’ve even done a few here on Wildsnow in the past.
Most surveys tend to focus on evaluating how avalanche “safe” someone is. This one is much more focused on what tools and techniques you tend to use while backcountry skiing. As such, there aren’t really any wrong answers. I tried to make the survey as short as possible, and it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. So, if you have a minute, it would be great if if you could participate. Here’s a link
Once I get a good amount of responses, I’ll post the results up on Wildsnow for all to see.
Louie Dawson earned his Bachelor Degree in Industrial Design from Western Washington University in 2014. When he’s not skiing Mount Baker or somewhere equally as snowy, he’s thinking about new products to make ski mountaineering more fun and safe.
