Download the original article that appeared in Ski+Board's November, 2008 edition Download Ski and board Mag Nov edition HAT
Here is a transcript of the interview
Keeping
the jaws of the mountain empty
Poor early-season
snow conditions in last year in Europe meant that
avalanche fatalities were relatively low. But as this season gets underway,
Daniel Elkan meets tireless avalanche safety campaigner Henry Schniewind, to
get some essential advice and hear his plans to keep the bodycount down.
Pick any bar; in any ski resort, with a
TV screen. Guaranteed, at any time of day, you’ll see videos of skiers and
snowboarders bursting through fluffy, exploding piles of untouched fresh
powder. The images are enticing enough
to make you want to drop your gluvine and dash out to do the same. What the
films don’t show, of course is the hidden danger that such great terrain holds:
avalanche. For the past ten*** years, avalanche expert Henry Schniewind has
been on a mission to redress the balance and give skiers and boarders the
knowledge they need to reduce the risk of getting caught.
S+B In
recent years, the percentage of off-piste skiers and boarders getting
avalanched has increased – especially in areas relatively close to the pistes.
Why is this?
.
It’s a
combination of a number of things. One
is the evolution of equipment. Wider
skies make it easier to ski off piste and in deeper snow and snowboards
obviously do. So you get more people able to go off piste - and more
quickly. It used to take at least 20
weeks of struggling in deep snow to be able to develop a technique for
off-piste. Now with wider skis you can
be off-piste within a couple of weeks and on a snowboard it only takes a few
days. But when people learn so quickly they miss out on resort experience and
informal education during which they would hear about the dangers of
avalanches. The end result is that people’s off-piste skiing ability far
outweighs their mountain awareness, especially of avalanches.
S+B Is
marketing part of the problem?
There are
so many videos, adverts and magazine photos of people charging through
beautiful, deep, white powder snow. You
could call it powder adventure marketing. It comes through the resort tourist offices, through equipment
manufacturers. The images are lovely but
they don’t just attract people to the sport and the resort; they encourage
people to venture off piste. The
industry is providing people with the means to get off piste but it also has a
responsibility to give people the knowledge of how to have fun and stay safe.
S+B Is
that happening?
lA number
of the tour operators are beginning to educate their staff. Ski World, Crystal , Inghams, YSE and Le Ski have been
consistent in doing that over the years (at least those are the companies that
hired HAT last year and the year before). The
typical employee of a tour operator wouldn’t have much knowledge of what is
happening in off-piste, and they are a prime risk. But the industry needs to do
a lot more.
S+B Do
people really listen to the advice they are given?
Generally
I think they do. But even if people have the knowledge, they can get caught out
by human factors such as peer pressure. “Powder frenzy” is definitely a
significant factor.. When it has just dumped overnight people look out their
windows the next morning and think “If we don’t get there right now, we won’t
get the first tracks,” That is when the basic principles go out the
window. No amount of experience or
knowledge is useful to you if you don’t apply it.
S+B There
is trend toward more experienced people being killed in avalanches. What is
behind that?
It is
partly the human factor. But I think
there there is something else too: even
in unstable conditions, most of the time a slope that should avalanche won’t
avalanche. So in the minds of those out
there riding, the credibility of the people who are warning that there is a
high avalanche risk, drops. On an unstable day, you could probably ski on 95
out of 100 really dangerous slopes and nothing would happen. Of the four avalanches you would set off,
maybe one would kill you. But that means
you can get away with it a lot. And
people who ride a lot of dangerous slopes don’t consider themselves to be lucky.
They think they are skilled, Instead they think people like me are alarmist
and do not confront the dangers or they think: I’m really starting to get good
at judging the slopes, I will be Ok. In
my opinion that is why we had the biggest number of deaths (57) in recorded
history in
in 2005-6. Many of those were very experience
people. For eight or nine years before
that, the conditions were very stable, or if they weren’t stable, there wasn’t
a great deal of snow on top of the unstable layer. So once there was a very unstable layer with
lots of snow, they were going back to these same places that were dangerous
before but then deadly on those occasions.
S+B Does safety equipment entice people into
taking more risks?
Very
probably, people with helmets, airbags, beepers end up taking more risks, even
if it is a subconscious process. But you are much more likely to survive an
accident with this equipment, so you do need to take this equipment with you,
especially the beeper, shovel, probe combo. You just have to be aware of how it
could influence your judgement of risk.
S+B If
you get caught in an avalanche, how does carrying a beeper, shovel and probe
affect your chances of survival?
In a
nutshell, if you are still alive when
the avalanche settles down you have 15 mintes to live. If your friends have this equipment and know
how to use it, then they can find you in less than 15 minutes. But this is no guarantee, people have to understand that at least one
fifth of all people caught in an avalanche are killed outright by the movement
of snow. You can get smashed into trees, into rocks, taken over a cliff, into a
gulley or a lake and your equipment won’t help you. If you think you can ride
out an avalanche, you are playing Russian Roulette. That being said, if you get
fully or partially buried and are still alive, the fact that you and your group
are carrying beepers, shovels and probes increases your chances of survival by
****%.
S+B
Whether a slope will avalanche depends on so many delicate factors. A little
knowledge can a dangerous thing. Is it really worth trying to educate people?
It is
absolutely. People will go off piste
without a guide, doing this with ignorance is far more dangerous. If you
understand the basics then at least you know what you don’t know, even this
basic knowledge can help you manage your risks
S+B What
can people achieve from attending your presentations and courses?
When
people come to a talk, they gain an awareness of....
On the
courses we want to enable people to assess slope safety without having to stop
every two minutes and dig a snow pit. The courses involve lots riding, lots of
slope angle judgement, which is one of the most important skills.
At the
end of the day, we want to give people the ability to enjoy the powder more
safely.
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