Pause before you leave the piste
Dangerous snow conditions in Europe have led to a winter of carnage, writes Tom Robbins
In the middle of last month, I stood near the summit of La Saulire in France, peering down a steep couloir. I’d skied it many times in previous years and was eager to jump in, but the instructor I was with was more cautious. For several minutes we debated, craning our necks over the edge to try to see what the snow was like, me gently egging him on, he gently resisting. In the end he prevailed, and we took an easier route, looping down around the shoulder of the mountain and coming to rest close to the resort of Méribel – by chance, almost on the spot where Michael Schumacher felllast Sunday. Looking back up, we could see right into the couloir, now revealed in its true state: scarce snow meant that instead of the usual smooth white slope, the surface was ripped across by bands of sharp rock.
I was appalled; the instructor was unsurprised. Even then, he, and countless colleagues across the Alps, understood that this winter’s snow conditions were unusually dangerous and that trouble was in store. "I could see what was coming a mile off," Andy Perkins, a Chamonix-based mountain guide told me last week. At the height of the Christmas holidays, their fears were realised. Mr Schumacher’s head injury has preoccupied the media, but it was just one in a litany of accidents and the death toll rose daily. In the six days between Christmas and the new year, at least 18 people were killed in avalanches in the Alps and Pyrenees. Several more died in non-avalanche related accidents, many more were injured. "The holidays are becoming a massacre," wrote Italian newspaper Il Giornale. The problem goes back to December’s snow drought: in many European resorts nothing fell from the end of November until Christmas. Rocks that would normally be safely sunk beneath a rising white tide of snow were left dangerously exposed – the probable cause of Mr Schumacher’s crash. More insidiously, it also led to the formation of a weak layer in the snowpack. If the top layer is left exposed to cold air, but the ground below is relatively warm, the "temperature gradient" can cause the surface snow to become sugary (a phenomenon also known as depth hoar). When new snow eventually arrives – as it did over Christmas – it sits precariously on top of this weak layer, which can collapse at any time, sending vast slabs of the new snow crashing down in avalanches. But there is a wider problem, too. The sport has changed. Once, off-piste skiing was an activity reserved for a tiny elite, something practised only when conditions were ideal. That has changed with growing pace over the past decade, as new wider, specially shaped skis have made it easier for relative novices to master deep powder. The marketeers pounced on this new technology – coining the term "freeride" as an update to the simple "off-piste" and relentlessly promoting it with posters and films of skiers leaping off cliffs and scything through fields of virgin snow. The result has been an explosion in the number of off-piste skiers, which in turn has seen resorts caught up in an atmosphere of fevered competition. Where once skiers would wait several days after a storm to allow new snow to settle, now the overriding sense is, "If I don’t ski it now, someone else will". Experts such as Mr Perkins refer to it as the "scarcity heuristic". Doubts about snow stability, or the possibility of rocks, are overridden by the sense of urgency. Decision making is clouded. Virgin snow is only virgin once. A weak layer in the snow is not unprecedented. Nigel Shepherd, safety adviser to the Ski Club of Great Britain, likens current conditions to the black winter of 2005-06, when avalanches killed 57 in France alone. But combine it with the growth in off-piste skier numbers since then, and their increasingly reckless behaviour, and there is the potential for unparalleled carnage. This is a winter for pausing at the top before jumping in, thinking twice and taking the easy way down.