Developing and Holding to a System of Cues For When it is Time to Run Away.
By David Richards
I recently made a mistake in avalanche terrain, running an avalanche mitigation route in high hazard and very low visibility. Although the signs were there, I pressed ahead into big terrain, and into the fog. Eventually I made up my mind. I would wait for the two patrollers in front of me to do their next shot and then I would key the mic and call us off. We were pushing a bad position. Unfortunately, I was too late. At that moment, one of those patrollers came over the radio and calmly gave the play by play of his partner being washed away into the milk bottle surrounding us. “He’s up, he’s under, I’ve lost sight of him. I’m going after him!”
In the end, the patroller who was caught came up on the surface. He was okay, and we gathered ourselves, turned our tails, and ran away. But it was too late; we had a very close call, and it was one that should have been avoided. I should have made the call sooner; we should have quit while we were ahead.
This of course is an example from an operational avalanche program. But there is a lesson here for all of us as both avalanche professionals and as recreational backcountry riders.
In her 2022 book Quit Annie Duke PH.D., an ex-professional poker player (even winning the World Series of Poker in 2004) and expert in decision making psychology raises valuable questions for the backcountry skier about how to know when to quit before you are “in the losses.” Duke uses examples of mountaineering, poker and business to lay out the argument that often times quitting is as valuable a skill as that of gritting it out and forging ahead. Too often people are unwilling to quit due to fear of failure or at times because of surrendering investment in the goal. In the backcountry this means those moments where you are staring at the objective only an hour away and considering the five hours of slogging that you have invested to get to where you are. It can be compared to having invested your life’s savings in a business which you know is failing but you feel the need to push ahead anyway because you are already all in, only to watch it fail. This is where the skier must ask what is of the most value, that grit, or perhaps quitting and coming back another day. Duke writes “what is true for grit is true for optimism. Optimism gets you to stick to things that are worthwhile. But optimism also gets you to stick to things that are no longer worthwhile.” In short, optimism can be dangerous.
When we go to the mountains there is a place for grit. Without a certain level of grittiness, a willingness to push ahead when things are tough and perhaps suffer a bit one will only rarely succeed at their great objectives. In fact, at least in my opinion, it is those days that require grit that lead to the greatest challenges and often times the greatest backcountry ski experiences of one’s life. Even type two fun is still fun. Yet even for the grittiest of us, those most willing to push ahead in the face of challenge, there still must be a time when we have to fold our hand and quit. The goal of course is to quit while you are ahead and come home alive. But the question is, how do we know when to quit?
I have raised this question to a number of professional avalanche workers as well as experienced recreational backcountry users and have found the answer to be highly inconsistent. Many of us, myself included, mention the obvious clues of avalanche events, but waiting for these clues, most agree, means that we have stayed in the game too long.
What are the more subtle cues that it is time to fold your hand? This answer is difficult. Many people told me that it is their gut that tells them when to turn around. This gut instinct or expert intuition works for some, but I would pose that it only works for the most experienced amongst us, and even then, it doesn’t work every time. Not every backcountry skier has spent enough time in the avalanche patch to have a developed intuition that can truly be trusted. Too often it is easy to set that instinct aside and try to outthink the avalanche. Don Sharaf, a highly experienced Alaska ski guide and avalanche educator says, “when my gut says ‘no’ or even ‘I don’t know’, I walk away.” But he followed that up with a quote from Don Carpenter, an avalanche educator and previous owner of the American Avalanche Institute who says simply “DBFW,” Don’t be fucking wrong. Both of these knowledgeable insights leave much to be desired. Knowing when to quit is harder than it seems.
With that in mind I asked people to define what Duke calls their “kill criteria.” These are predetermined cues based on the measurable state of a situation that when laid out in advance make a precommitment to walk away when you see these signals. With preset kill criteria on a ski tour, a person would be more likely to follow through on backing away in the face of hazard even at the risk of losing investment in the goal. With this question I tended to get a more defined response. Drew Hardesty of the Utah Avalanche Center, and former Jenny Lake Climbing Ranger cited his kill criteria as changes in weather and “pumpkin hour.” But he cautions that getting too caught up in those criteria can even lead to losing sight of other hazards that may be more important. In my case, the onset of natural avalanche activity is usually enough to send me home.
I would propose that all of us take some time to develop more defined rules for quitting or kill criteria that we can easily identify in the heat of the moment; and then, importantly discussing and agreeing on these criteria with our travel partners. Examples of this are turnaround times, minor complications that begin to compound into major hazards, changes in weather that lead to increasing avalanche hazard, or that all important “gut.” As I write those examples it seems so simple. But as we all should admit there are great complications to following through. Powder skiing is just too damn fun for one. Sunk investment is another. And finally, a fear of failure. But as smart people we should know that living to ski another day trumps all of those countering arguments. The goal of developing your own personal quitting criteria and putting it into play on each and every ski day is not to make you always quit and go home, and it is not to make you quit too early. Instead, it is to give you the tools to know when to say “when.” Because, on the flip side, we all know quitting after the accident is too late.
Traveling in avalanche terrain comes with a huge amount of uncertainty. And it is to some extent the desire for certainty that lures us into grit and the need to push ahead against obstacles, because if we don’t push on, we will never know how things could have worked out. The act of quitting, like any decision, will be made with some level of uncertainty. But quitting is a highly valuable option that allows the backcountry user to react to changing conditions and a changing landscape. Developing tools to tell you when to quit is an exercise that will help you to know that it is time to fold a bad hand while you still have a choice.
