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It was the last day of a tour in Italy’s Ortler Alps, and Jeff Banks was guiding clients up the steep slopes in boots, crampons and skis on his back. Once he reached the top, he clicked on his bindings and descended, enjoying the deep powder and drinking well-earned beers and warm strudel. Another group led by leader Banks was about five minutes ahead of them, and about 40 other guides and their wards had climbed the same hill the day before. So Banks was only momentarily surprised when an avalanche broke out beneath his feet. So he thought: this is how we die.
Banks wasn’t just worried that his group would be buried alive. The slide definitely dragged him and his guests over a series of cliffs. Instinctively, Banks jumped uphill onto the still-steady snow above the rest area, and for a moment he thought he was safe. And when he remembered that he was roped to the customers below him, they pulled him away. “It was like going down Class V rapids in the Grand Canyon,” Banks said. “We were incredibly lucky because we made it through all three cliff bands and stopped at the bottom and were safe.”
This moment forever changed Banks’ perception of avalanche safety. “I made the wrong decision, the leaders above me made the wrong decision, and all the other guides who crossed that hill for days made the wrong decision,” he said. say. And if a guide like him, who has received the best training in the world and is certified by the International Federation of Mountain Guide Associations, could make such a fatal mistake, it’s hard to believe that the industry has long held back against avalanches. It was clear to him how he had worked on it. Safety and education have been destroyed. It would be more than a decade before he and his business partner JB Leach tried to solve it.
Banks met Leach at a Level 1 recreational avalanche safety class in 2020. He taught several miles from his hometown of Crested Butte. The snowpack was difficult to assess. The Colorado Avalanche Information Center (CAIC), the Colorado Department of Natural Resources program responsible for predicting avalanche conditions throughout the state, ranked the day’s risk as “moderate,” the second from the bottom on a five-point avalanche danger rating. It was set to .
A moderate designation means that natural avalanches are unlikely, but human-induced avalanches may occur in certain terrain, such as wind-stressed slopes where snow accumulates on the leeward side of mountain ridges.
However, complicating the forecast was a widespread weak layer of snow within the snowpack, which would be difficult but not impossible to induce. Banks liken it to a minefield. Even if a few dozen people make it through unscathed, an unlucky skier could fall and suffer fatal injuries.
This is a situation that can terrify even the most experienced backcountry skiers and boarders, so Banks deviated from the standard curriculum and gave his students the tools he picked up while guiding in Europe. I introduced it. It’s a color-coded graph with danger on the X-axis. The level and Y-axis are the slope angles at which you can safely ski. User Experience in the Technology Industry Mr. Leach, his designer, consulted Mr. Banks about graphs on-site during class. “He said, ‘This is my job.’ I distill really complex problems into simple solutions,” Banks says. The two wanted to bring a similar tool to the United States, but this time they decided to make it an app.
After three years of development, AspectAvy went live in November. The app costs $50 a year, covers at least seven western states (with plans to expand into Europe and Canada), and includes safety checklists, how-to videos for common but often forgotten backcountry skills, routes, and more. , has numerous features. It’s a tracker, but its key feature is the high-resolution terrain map. Instead of plotting which slope angles are safe on a graph, AspectAvy plots them directly on an elevation map. To further increase safety, a third variable is included in addition to slope angle and hazard level. This is the type of avalanche danger that local forecasters believe exists within the snowpack.
Unlike other GPS applications that include static overlays that highlight all slopes in the 30- to 45-degree range, which is typically the range where the majority of avalanches occur, AspectAvy identifies all slopes that are considered hazardous on that day. Add a shadow to the slope. For example, if the risk for the day is medium, the map will highlight all slopes steeper than 34 degrees. Skiers should avoid the majority of avalanche accidents by staying away from the colored areas on the map, Banks said. (At one point, his website at AspectAvy claimed he eliminated 90% of avalanche accidents, but that number has since been removed from the site.) I’m not going to teach,” Banks said. “We’re going to show you some shit.”
There may be some problems with that plan, but CAIC Director Ethan Green said. The first problem is data, or more precisely, the lack of data. Avalanche science is a relatively new discipline, and researchers don’t yet know the best way to measure certain things, such as slope angle, Green said. There is also evidence that different types of avalanches are more likely to occur at certain slope angles, but there is still no consensus among researchers. Michael Ackerman, executive director of Silverton Avalanche School, puts it more bluntly: “If you have a 100-year data set, it only takes one 300-year avalanche cycle to rewrite everything you think you know,” he says.
More importantly, the recreational forecasts from avalanche centers like CAIC that AspectAvy relies on are provided over large tracts of terrain, not individual mountain peaks or specific backcountry ski trails. So, while CAIC may be predicting snowfall to be steady and low risk, its forecast is that it could cover 1,000 square miles. Every mountain and every slope has its own microclimate, so skiers can encounter areas of unstable, avalanche-prone snow that forecasters haven’t spotted.
Level 1 avalanche safety courses are designed to help skiers deal with these conditions. The danger, Green said, is that skiers use apps to shortcut the decision-making process they teach in class, or worse, to replace avalanche education.
AspectAvy urges skiers to stay away from slopes that are steep enough to cause a slide if the CAIC hazard rating is “substantial,” but it does not emphasize avalanche runout zones at the bottom of dangerous slopes. . Therefore, a skier who is unfamiliar with avalanche safety, or who simply has a laissez-faire attitude toward avalanches, can get caught in an avalanche, even if he is passing through terrain that is not marked as dangerous on his AspectAvy map. there is a possibility. (This app warns users that avalanches can be triggered remotely from flat areas, and provides another tool that allows users to calculate how far a potential slide could last but it is up to you to measure all slopes passing above or below it.)
“I remember that scene.” office “Michael and Dwight are using GPS to get into the car,” Ackerman said. In this episode, after Michael, played by Steve Carell, blindly listens to GPS instructions, he drives into a lake.
Banks makes it clear that AspectAvy is not a replacement for formal training. When a user first opens the app, they see the same disclaimer. But Banks agrees with critics that his product is a shortcut, which he says should be a plus. “[The industry] expects skiers to spend an hour each day during the winter reading avalanche bulletins and planning trips. and I look like this: I don’t have time for that. “I don’t know how normal people with kids and lives and responsibilities have time for that,” he said, explaining that the app is like having an expert looking over your shoulder.
That might be a good thing. Instead of completing a Level 1 avalanche safety course and feeling empowered to navigate the backcountry, skiers and boarders often find themselves lost. “It’s like when a college graduate is told they need experience to get a job, but you can’t get a job until you have experience,” says Gunnison’s Beacon Guidebook, which publishes the summary. said Andy Sovik, founder and CEO. A view of the backcountry route. AspectAvy could be another one of his tools to help skiers stay safe as they gain that experience.
Avalanche forecasters and educators are more concerned about less discerning users. Banks attribute this backlash to the industry’s fear of change and fear of liability for wrong decisions that lead to injury or death. “That’s where we differ,” he says of AspectAvy’s willingness to give skiers a go/no-go call by telling users they should be safe if they stay away from slopes marked as dangerous. mentioned. This is something North American avalanche forecasters have never done before, and if a user is injured or killed using the app, Banks is confident his team took appropriate precautions. ing. “We are clearly disruptors and this sector needs to be disrupted,” he says. “Our system was born in the days of rotary phones. Now we live in an era where we have access to all the knowledge in the world on our mobile phones. It would be foolish not to have one.”
Although Green has concerns about the app, he doesn’t rule it out. In fact, he says, the more information skiers have, the better, as long as they make sure they know how each tool works and can use it properly. “There’s a lot of devil in the details. In general, when someone offers to cure you of an incurable disease, you have to be careful about what you’re getting into,” he says.
Testing the app to understand how it works is something Green says he hasn’t had a chance to do yet. As of this writing, AspectAvy is not yet publicly available, and Greene said CAIC has not been asked for formal feedback on the app. Green said several CAIC employees have had private discussions with AspectAvy over the last year, but their discussions have limited them to viewing the company’s marketing materials and skimming the app’s beta version, and they have little knowledge about the product. It was too short to form an opinion based on (Banks said the CAIC forecaster he contacted canceled multiple meetings where he was scheduled to run the application.)
Beacon Guidebook’s Sovik, an avid backcountry skier himself, believes there are both sides to this debate. Despite his AspectAvy endorsement posted on his website for the app, Sovik still has questions to answer about the app, primarily how skiers will actually use it in the field. I admit that I have many unanswered questions. But Sovik also believes there is no point in resisting the kind of technological advances that AspectAvy represents. Because it’s coming whether the backcountry industry wants it to or not. “I think this has great potential and the goals are real,” he says. “I’m excited that someone is going to do it.”