Avalanches - A Guide to Assessing and Reduce Risks

This guide, aimed at winter sports enthusiasts and professionals, can help you learn the skill of avalanche prediction. It will help you understand and predict avalanches, evaluate the risks and reduce the dangers. This practical, pocket-sized guide is for use on the mountain and when planning a trip.

People say avalanches are unpredictable. Is that true? And even if it is, is that an excuse for throwing your life away?

It is certainly true that no-one is in a position to claim that they can predict every avalanche, and it has to be said that some are particularly baffling, even for the most experienced. Nevertheless, an avalanche is not a supernatural event, and one does not need to be able to describe the release mechanisms in all their complexity in order to identify the majority of hazardous situations. It is enough to be able to ‘read’ the mountain to reduce considerably the threat posed by the ‘white death’.

This little guide will assist those who wish to undertake this apprenticeship. In the first instance it will give readers a wider understanding of the phenomenon, using not only objective data but also the accounts of witnesses and survivors. It will go on to reveal some of the indications which, for those who know how to interpret them, will enable a local assessment of avalanche hazard to be made and a number of pitfalls to be avoided. Finally, it will put forward some rules of thumb, be it for free-riders*, ski tourers, walkers or climbers, that will permit safer travel on the mountains.

* Experts in snowsport on all terrain, all snow types