How to plan a backcountry ski tour: Finn Iles’ 11 steps

A day on the resort skiing or boarding with friends is a great way to get exercise, add excitement to your life, and spend time outdoors in nature. The ski area is cleared by professionals every morning to ensure it’s safe for the public to enjoy.

There are ropes, signs, and bulletins telling you where to go, what to watch out for, and run difficulty. Overall, the resort is a fairly controlled environment. You don’t have to put a ton of thought into where you go and what you do.

Yet, backcountry skiing is different. There are more risks and more procedures to ensure your own safety. We’re here to help you prepare for a day out ski touring with your friends.

Backcountry skiing is the act of skiing outside a ski resort in uncontrolled terrain. You are responsible for getting yourself to the top of the hill, regularly powered by your own two feet.

Occasionally, experienced backcountry skiers use helicopters or snowmobiles to access a zone and then walk from the bottom to the top of the lines they will ride.

However, for the most part, skiers and boarders skin up using their energy to reach their lines. They use their decision-making, planning, and imagination to choose where they walk up and ski down.

Iles’ upbringing and time in the mountains have given him an expert outlook on skiing, terrain choice, and avalanche management, making him one of the best people to advise on how to go about backcountry skiing.

Avalanche education is the first step to keeping you safe in the backcountry. Start educating at least one month before your trip, so you’re well acquainted with the terrain and safety measures. Once you have at least the first stage of education (in Canada, it’s the AST 1), you will understand several safety elements. These include:

Once you have the initial education, you will have some of the tools to keep you safe during backcountry travel.

When you’re backcountry skiing, it’s extremely important to have reliable and knowledgeable partners. You’re responsible for each other’s lives while you’re out skiing, so find the right partners who you can trust to be knowledgeable, aware, and willing to speak up is undeniably important.

Whenever you are ski touring there should be a constant conversation between you and your partners on what is going on in the snowpack, potential hazards, and general fitness or fatigue levels. You are each other’s lifelines out there.

If there is an avalanche or an injury, you need to be sure you can rescue each other and get each other help.

Choose where you’re travelling and planning to ski. Location is important.

This decision can be made anywhere from a week out to the day before. If you are willing to nerd out on weather patterns, wind direction, and potential snow accumulation, you can spend hours trying to predict the best spot to ski for the day.

If you’re travelling regionally, you can check the forecast and cross-reference different forecast systems. But the most important forecast to check is the avalanche bulletin for the area to determine the safest places to ski.

Once you have decided on an area or zone you plan on riding, it’s a good idea to look at a 3D map of the area. Check out the topography, potential up routes, ski lines, and backup plans. Take note of areas with overhead hazards, areas susceptible to avalanche activity, convenient approach routes, emergency exit routes, and potential extraction points for helicopter rescue.

Have an understanding of the area so that during your decision-making processes, you can discuss potential issues that could come up and where the best skiing will be if you hit it right.

Look into the weather forecast to predict snow accumulation and weather for the day you are skiing. If you see warming in the forecast with lots of recent snow, it can create poor skiing and potential avalanche risk.

A cold and dry week before your trip, with snow forecasted the day of your ski tour could create a surface hoar layer in between the new snow and the layer below. This creates a weak layer where storm snow has not bonded to the layer below. When this happens it creates an easy sliding surface for the storm snow to release from, spurring the potential for avalanches.

Flexibility during ski touring is key.

Before departing on your trip, make sure your beacon, safety communication, and headlamp have batteries.

There are also some pieces of gear that many people new to ski touring wouldn’t always think to bring. For example, extra socks, gloves, a super puff, and a spare base layer can be useful.

There’s nothing worse than getting through three-quarters of your approach and having your toe piece fall out of your ski or a clasp falling off your boot. Check things like binding bolts, skin clips, pack zippers, headlamps, and transceiver batteries, and make sure your avalanche rescue tools are all in good working order.

The time has come to make a coffee and head out. Start skinning up the approach and into the untamed terrain of the backcountry. If you are new and just starting, try and bite off small tours with easy bailout options and less complex terrain. As you gain more experience, you can venture further into the unknown and partner with more experienced skiers and boarders.

Remember, you are always learning in the mountains and they are one of the best teachers. But they can teach lessons the hard way.

For a more in-depth understanding of the avalanche forecasting system, let’s break down some of the potential problems and why they might happen.

Problems can arise at anytime

Problems can occur in some aspects and not others. Depending on the weather systems, wind direction, temperature, and solar radiation, the snowpack can change from face to face.

Wind direction can change the snow from aspect to aspect. It can move snow and deposit it on other areas of the mountain, creating wind slabs and weak points in the snowpack. Wind also builds cornices, which can create issues travelling through complex terrain and finding entrances into a line. The overhead hazard of a cornice breaking and triggering an avalanche below is something to be diligent with while travelling in the backcountry.

The sun can have an effect on how aspects react and form the snowpack. North-facing aspects in British Columbia regularly hold shade for most of the day. This means the snow temperature stays cooler, keeping the snow bonded and chalky.

On south-facing slopes, the snow is susceptible to rapid warming and cooling, creating wet and loose avalanche opportunities and crust layers from the freeze-thaw cycles.

Overhead hazards should be kept in mind when travelling through avalanche terrain. Always be aware of what can come from above. When travelling uphill, it’s hard to respond quickly to avert hazards that can release down onto your group.

Be aware of slopes that could slide above you. Cornices, rocks, and other groups can trigger avalanches that can bury you while you travel up and downhill. Always give a wide berth to overhead hazards.

Changing snowpack at different elevation bands

Different elevations can have different snowpacks and problems. Due to different freezing levels during storms, the amount and type of precipitation that falls can differ depending on the elevation band.

Persistent weak layers can be difficult to navigate. They are normally buried deep in the snowpack and can become dormant for extended periods. However, they create a low probability, extreme consequence scenario.

There is a low probability of a very large avalanche, but the possibility is still present.

The navigation of this problem relies on how comfortable your group is with the scenario and communication of the excepted risk tolerance. Groups should make conservative terrain choices when there is a persistent weak layer problem.

A wind slab is a pocket of snow, sometimes isolated or widespread, where snow has been collected and deposited by the wind. It can be densely packed and pressed or deposited loosely for great skiing. The bond with the layer below can sometimes be weak, leaving possibilities for avalanches depending on the layer below.

A storm slab consists of snow that has fallen from a storm. This snow is regularly light and fluffy, making for great skiing. If the storm comes in warm, it can create a thicker slab of snow that adds a lot of weight to the snowpack, potentially triggering avalanches on weaker layers of the snowpack below.

A snowpack summary is a summary of all the layers of snow, the dates each layer occurred, and what weather event created it. You can track these layers from the ground up and they are labelled with their density.

To determine the density, you can try pushing with your fist, four fingers down to one finger, a pen, and a knife to determine how firm each layer is. They can give a lot of information on the snowpack and what has the potential to slide.

Stay educated on the snowpack

Continue to gain knowledge on what is going on in the mountains. Different retail outfitters and user groups have monthly snowpack seminars uploaded to YouTube to help the public stay up-to-date in an easy-to-follow format.

Overall this is a pretty in-depth overview of how to prepare for your first-day touring. The information should be used as a guide and a legend to the knowledge that you will acquire through the season.