This year, I spent a significant chunk of December, January, and February in the Southern Hemisphere. In Antarctica I saw almost nothing but white for most of that time, although a few February days in New Zealand offered a chance to bike through hills of grass, rock, and dirt. For the most part, however, my austral “summer” unfolded under distinctly wintry conditions.
I returned to Montana on February 22 expecting an immediate immersion in the boreal winter. As I flew into Bozeman, though, it became clear that my northern winter would come with another dose of seasonal dissonance. The mountaintops were white—after all, it is February in Montana—but almost everywhere else the landscape was bare. Grass and dirt dominated the valley floor. People wore shorts outside. There was no ice on the roads and no familiar piles of snow stacked beside the parking lots. Clearly my brain was still struggling to reconcile geography with the calendar.
Although my season this year is shortened, I work part time as a backcountry ski guide. I take folks with a range of ski abilities and mountain savvy away from the chairlifts and resort crowds, into the untouched powder they see featured in ski porn movies. Their expectations are as varied as their abilities—some just want a new outdoor experience. Others are narrating some version of a Warren Miller film in their own minds. Those guys (and yes, they’re always guys) should probably recalibrate.
The conditions I arrived to were clearly messing with my expectations for the remainder of the winter, but I was determined to make the best of it.
All my clients so far in this weird, truncated winter guiding season have asked for my thoughts on the avalanche accident that occurred in the Sierra Nevada on February 17. Very briefly, a group of 15 skiers—including four paid ski guides—were caught in an avalanche while departing a backcountry hut during a snowstorm. Twelve people were buried, and nine were killed. Those nine bodies were recovered several days later by search and rescue personnel.
For anyone with even a passing interest in backcountry skiing, this is as insane and tragic as it sounds. I’ve dug bodies out of avalanche debris on multiple occasions as a search and rescue volunteer. It’s awful. The accident occurred just as I was preparing to switch gears from an Antarctic research vessel to working as a ski guide. I work for a small company that takes clients on private hut trips. This one hits close to home, and it’s hard to process.
My clients have been asking out of genuine curiosity—and probably a justifiable concern for their own safety. The parallels are obvious to them too. I can’t and won’t speculate on the decisions that were made leading up to the event. That isn’t fair, although there has been plenty of speculation in the media. I’ve participated in enough avalanche case studies to know that there were tough decisions, imperfect information, and real humans involved.
I’ve been telling my clients a few things. First, there are several people alive today because the people who remained on the surface did many things correctly. An avalanche rescue requires moving roughly 2,000 pounds of snow within about 15 minutes of burial. They did this three times, and kept those people alive for hours before help arrived. Heroic.
My second thought is a little harder to articulate. In general, I think about risk management as leaving enough margin to account for uncertainty. On a normal day of guiding, this might mean some fairly simple things. I assume the client who checked the “expert” skier ability on their waiver form is actually “Intermediate” until proven otherwise. I assume unfamiliar groups will take longer than clients I’ve skied with before. I carry repair and first aid kits that would make MacGyver proud.
Usually, a few routine strategies provide enough margin to deal with a few mismatched expectations. But once you’re operating near the edge of your margin, there isn’t much room for reality to diverge from what you expected. I can all but guarantee this was a factor in the Sierra avalanche tragedy.
So what is the point?
Expectations aren’t inherently bad. In fact, they’re essential. Without them we’d be paralyzed by the complexity of the world. Science relies on them. Guiding relies on them. Everyday life relies on them.
But expectations come with a catch: they quietly define the range of possibilities we’re willing to notice. Anything outside that range becomes easy to miss. In the mountains, that can be dangerous. In everyday life, it’s just as common—only usually less dramatic.
Reality has a habit of ignoring the plans we’ve constructed for it. The trick is knowing how much margin you have left when it does.