Basic ski tour planning

Why do we plan our ski tours?

Even if I will be going to my local backcountry skiing location, I go often and know as well as the back of Finlandia Vodka bottle; I take specific steps to prepare myself for the day. The first motivation for planning is safety: I can not tell anyone where I am going if I do not know myself. I always try to tell somebody who stays in the real world where I am going and when I am expected back! Also, understanding avalanche problems in different aspects and elevation bands is crucial for safety in the backcountry. Last but not least, understanding what weather will be up there and the objective we are planning to accomplish dictates the clothing and gear we shall carry. Also, especially in spring skiing, time management is crucial to hitting the couloir when the sun has melted the surface of the snowpack.

Selecting objective:

First thing I do is choose an objective. This depends on multiple factors! Here are the things I consider:

• Who am I going with? If I go with a family with children, I am not going for a 15kft monster mission or 50-degree couloir. In this case, nice meadow skipping is more suitable.

• What kind of weather am I looking at?

• What are the snow conditions? What is avalanche danger, and what are the snow conditions?

• Am I in physical condition to do this objective, or do I have to tune down?

• Do I have the gear or skills to do this objective?

In general, all these factors in deciding where I am going and what kind of gear is coming with me. Sometimes I go through these things in my head and go for a well-known place nearby, and that's it. Sometimes I spend hours upon hours on map solutions like caltopo

Snow conditions.

The first thing I usually do is try to find out as much as possible about my planned areas' snow conditions. The local avalanche forecast is an excellent source for this. If I am in the new location, I find it easiest to find local forecasts with the caltopo pro feature; I am looking at the map anyway, right? I can also see all weather stations at caltopo. (These are in North America) for European aviforecasts, I would go to the European Avalanche Warning Service webpage.

Weather

Most commonly, people in the USA will check the weather from NOAA Weather. However, this is not my favorite. I tend to check the weather first from SpotWx. This service will give raw data from the area from every available forecast model from North America. Some of these models cover weather globally. Spotwx will also give you the exact area where the forecast is valid and the last time forecast was updated (updates come automatically to the page). This page is free, so I tend to donate page owner yearly.

I also like to check the mountain forecast when going on more demanding outings. One more source for the weather I use is Windy.

Route plan

It is time finally to make a route plan! I already wrote about planning software here. For a simple ski tour, I typically start by deciding the areas where I DO NOT WANT TO go. I know that when I get to the field, I will be tempted to ski knar knar pow pow, and by closing areas on the map, I don't even have to think about skiing them. I know that powder madness gets the best of us, and it also affects me. By closing areas, I can ensure that even if I get powderdrunk, I will stay away from those areas. I tend to ski with narrow skis; steeper terrain is the only terrain where I move forward after big dumps.

Let's start simple example plan in Berthaud's pass. We will skip the weather (No wind, bluebird, and pow from 2 days ago) and go to aviforecast. We seem to have a persistent slab problem on the northwest-to-southeast aspects on basically all elevation bands.

Based on this, closing terrain is easy; I will be closing everything steeper than 30 degrees on these aspects.

Did you notice I extended closed areas quite far below steep sections? That is because persistent avalanches also propagate uphill, and you can tricker them from below. When the color on slope angle shading goes to violet-blue, we look at cliffs. Cliff band on closed area 1 sees an average of one incident per year when Grand County search and rescue is deployed. This is how it looks IRL. In red circle rescue that took place December 5th, 2022.

Time to plan a route.

Basic things before planning a route to keep in mind:

• Failing to plan is to plan to fail. Without studying the new terrain before going there, your tour will be close to the trailhead or, even worse, blindly following other people/tracks.

• Do not paint yourself in the corner. If you have time restrictions because of warming temperatures, or plan for the traverse from A to B, plan optional routes in case conditions are not what was expected.

• Do not try to plan for too-tight terrain corridors. Give yourself room for micro terrain management.

• Avoid planning long traverses; the uphill leg will burn out during the traverse.

• No reason to try to plan or draw every switchback either. This will destroy your distance and altitude gain readings and make your micro terrain management less efficient.

• Use handrails to help with navigation; this will help you with the uncertainty of knowing your location, and you will spend less time checking your map. (Handrails include roads, trails, cliff bands, ridges, creeks, etc...)

• If planning to move across an alpine or glacier, plan to have a point of reference like a peak to move towards. (obviously, this will not work on whiteout or greenout, but that is a different story and another subject)

Using these little nuggets, let's plan two simple tours. One warmup from the trailhead to the east and a longer one from the trailhead to the parking. On Longer, one plan is to hitchhike back to the trailhead.

After coming up with a plan, I usually do a quick sanity check on my plan by looking at satellite picture. I am looking at how thick the vegetation is if I can see tallus fields during low coverage, banks on creeks or good places to cross them, and how the terrain looks. If needed, I will make changes accordingly.

As you can see from the picture, I have been using roads and trails as handrails and easy skinning platforms for up. If I were not so keen on skiing in trees, I would have changed the end of the long ski down to the Southern route due opening in the trees.

The next step is to transfer this plan to an app on the phone for navigating the backcountry, but that is another subject.

This is an example of coming up with a basic plan for your backcountry outing. I will be writing blogs for more demanding outing planning, but this is a good start. Have fun and