THE FEAR FACTOR

Published in the March 14, 2026 edition.

When you take an avalanche course, there’s a lot you skim through in the online portion because it feels a little… fluffy. Don’t let your veto get lost in a big group. Don’t change your plan just because the snow looks good. Trust your group. Know your group.

All of it can feel like workplace HR training when you’re powder-hungry and eager to move on to the more interesting snow science sections of the course. Or, honestly, just eager to get through the online modules so you can spend the next two days skiing with the mountain guide you paid a handsome fee for.

Which is why it’s been so striking to watch the aftermath of this winter’s avalanche tragedies across the American West. After each accident, people scramble to explain what happened: wind-loaded slopes, persistent slabs, buried weak layers.

But the conversation always circles back to the psychology of backcountry skiing.

Because it’s straight-up perplexing that four guides and 11 experienced backcountry skiers ended up in the deadliest avalanche in California history under predictably dangerous conditions. Or that one of the most established ski patrols in the country lost two members of its own team to a slope that regularly avalanches in one calendar year.

When things go wrong in the mountains, we stare at the problem asking what if.

What if they had picked a different route?

What if they had gone a different time of day?

What if they had listened to the avalanche report?

And once the dust settles, we start asking the harder question: what for.

The first time I went backcountry skiing, it was with my dad at a small, woodsy patchwork of private land in Vermont. It was cold as hell – negative ten with windchill.

I had an old pair of used skis with bulky frame bindings that wrapped around my heels and doubled as resort bindings. They were the only skis I owned.

At the top, I suddenly became overwhelmed. My fingers were frozen solid, my legs shaking, and all I could think about was how no one would save me if I fell. My dad would try, sure, but we were deep in the woods in the coldest weather I’d ever felt, and help wasn’t coming.

Eventually the panic passed. I ripped my skins off and straight-lined the icy track back down, screaming “like a banshee,” as my dad later recalled.

Looking back, that ride wasn’t a complete disaster. It was a lesson I’ve carried into every tour I’ve led since, and I’ve led more than I expected to. 

Over the past year, I’ve convinced three friends on the Eastside (and two of their boyfriends!) to buy backcountry setups of their own.

What I’ve learned from introducing people to the sport is how differently people think about risk… and how little some people think about it at all.

The beautiful thing about backcountry skiing (really, about the backcountry in general) is that you have to know two things at once. The mountains and yourself. You cannot read the mountains without reading yourself. And you cannot read yourself and ignore the mountains.

It’s a psychological experiment, one we probably should consider in any outdoor environment.

With lift service and ski patrol, people forget that Mammoth Mountain is still an 11,000-foot beast. In-bounds deaths or serious injuries shock us, when really it’s like putting a safety on a gun just to play with it.

The same thing is happening in the backcountry as it becomes more accessible. 

When my dad started touring, a beacon was basically an earbud. It beeped louder as you got closer to someone buried in the snow. That was it. When you were out there, you were really out there.

Now avalanche beacons have arrows, distances, and accuracy indicators. Airbags can save you in many avalanches. 

Because of these technologies, we’re starting to treat the backcountry like a resort. But should we even be treating the resort like a resort? 

A steep slope will still avalanche, even if it has a lift. Snow can still be too deep in bounds. Trees wells still exist. Rocks are still hard enough to crack your skull.

When friends tell me they want to get into backcountry skiing, everyone is eager to get started.

But the people I trust to keep skiing with are always the ones who are a little bit scared.