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https://coloradosun.com/2026/07/09/colorado-avalanche-center-survey/

We should all celebrate success; well done.

The work of avalanche professionals, educators, forecasters, rescuers, and the entire backcountry community is essential for our backcountry community and the public. Every improvement in forecasting, education, rescue, and communication represents people trying to help others make better decisions and come home. We all share that mission. The intent of educators, forecasters, and pros to serve and protect is not being questioned; the system design is.

Celebration must exist alongside humility. Most seasons, Colorado leads the nation in avalanche fatalities.

More than 179 people died in avalanches this year in North America and Europe. Those losses are not numbers alone. They are people – sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers, families, friends, guides, and communities. Their lessons must not be forgotten. They must become the foundation for how we continue to improve, not merely thoughts and prayers, but a reminder that deviation from the now is deadly.

When we enter avalanche terrain, we are entering HARM’S WAY!

The backcountry cannot be made safe. It is a complex adaptive environment where uncertainty, variability, and consequence are always present. The goal is not eliminating uncertainty; in an inherently uncertain system, that is impossible. But is it a rational expectation to call it “safety” then, since safety is not a neutral neurochemical operator?

The goal then must be educating, training and forecasting to the level of competence required to operate within it.

A common safety response is:
Risk exists → Remove exposure → Risk decreases
Sometimes this is exactly correct. We shut down unsafe equipment, isolate dangerous areas, and stop operations during extreme conditions.

The problem occurs when the intervention becomes the default solution:
All uncertainty → Remove participation

Because removing exposure also removes practice, feedback, calibration, and competence development.

The paradox becomes:
Less exposure → Less learning → Lower adaptive capability

A fence around the pool can prevent immediate harm. But if the fence becomes the entire system, people never learn the water. They never learn the currents. They never develop the awareness required to know when entering the pool is appropriate.

The answer is not removing the fence. The answer is teaching people why the fence exists, when it belongs there, and how to recognize when conditions change.
The goal is not unlimited access.
The goal is competence.

Avalanche science has already shown this is not only a snow problem. McCammon’s research examined the role of training, heuristic traps, decision tools, and human factors in recreational avalanche accidents. McCammon and McNeil examined risk management trends in U.S. backcountry avalanche accidents among skiers and snowboarders. McNeil et al. examined backcountry behaviors after participation in a recreational avalanche course, contributing to understanding how education, training, and human decision-making interact within avalanche risk systems.

The question is not simply, “Why did a person make the wrong choice?”

The deeper question is:
“What system shaped the decision environment that person was operating within?”

Humans do not operate in isolation. Humans operate through systems.
Forecasts, ratings, maps, language, training, and experience become the references people use to make decisions.

Claude Shannon’s information theory demonstrated that communication systems must preserve meaningful information as information moves through compression and transmission. The challenge is not providing unlimited information. Humans cannot process unlimited information. The challenge is preserving the information that changes decisions.

A forecast is not the mountain. A rating is not the snowpack. A symbol is not reality. They are tools designed to help humans interact with reality. The system succeeds when those tools maintain connection with the environment.

The pieces already exist: forecasting, education, terrain assessment, field observations, mentorship, experience, and decision-making.
The opportunity is connecting them.

Restoring the feedback loop:
Forecast → Conditions → Observation → Interpretation → Decision → Action → Outcome → Feedback → Update

A continuous learning system.
Nancy Leveson’s systems engineering research through System III, a new theory-based system approach to safety and risk management, shows that accidents often emerge from interactions between components rather than from one individual failure. She further states that complexity management is the tool for environmental systems management. Safety is created through system design, feedback, and appropriate constraints. Erik Hollnagel’s resilience engineering work shows that successful systems do not eliminate uncertainty; they develop the ability to adapt when reality changes.
This is the opportunity before avalanche education and forecasting.
Not simply communicating where problems exist.
Helping people understand how to operate within the conditions that exist.

High-consequence fields understand this. Military operations, aviation, medicine, and emergency response do not create capable operators by removing all exposure to complexity. They build capability through preparation, standards, communication, practice, feedback, and adaptation.
Discipline is not blind obedience.
Discipline is the ability to perform when reality changes.

Gary Klein’s naturalistic decision-making research demonstrated that experts develop judgment through experience, pattern recognition, and feedback from real environments. Anders Ericsson’s research on deliberate practice showed that expertise develops through structured interaction with meaningful feedback.
The mountain requires the same.
The backcountry cannot be made safe. But the system around it can become better connected.

A forecast should not only communicate where problems exist. It should also help people understand what objectives fit today’s conditions, where people can travel while maintaining margin, what observations should verify the forecast, what terrain provides the right learning opportunity, and what success looks like today.
Show the process.
Show the observations.
Show the decisions.

Use the forecast as a rudder, not an anchor.
An anchor stops movement.
A rudder allows adaptation.
The mountains are not the enemy.
The uncertainty is the challenge.
The responsibility of those who have spent their lives studying this environment is not to promise control over something uncontrollable. It is to lead the next generation into mastery of adaptation.
To connect forecasting, education, mentorship, experience, and feedback into one continuous learning system.
To be the guides.
The mentors.
The masters of the craft.

Because the ultimate mission remains the same: Helping people come home. With the full toolbox that just might be possible!

I am pleased to share my abstract for ISSW Whistler 2026. After 7 years of research, thousands of days in harm’s way, and peaks skied, the work has finally been accepted after peer review by the ISSW committee. Every backcountry user is affected by the human factors in decision-making. However, there is a solution to the problem. At its root, the human factors are not an individual error; they are a systems error where representation projection deletes information, leading to exponential information loss that is divergent from the potential of the environmental system as a whole. Pieces of this work are in peer review in other journals as well.

If we reframe the human factors as maladaptive, nonadaptive, and absentia behaviors, then adaptivity is the solution. Safety is a fraudulent guarantee and results in closure to new information through neurobiological forcing. This leads to effect = cause. Please feel free to comment, and I look forward to everyone who shows up to ISSW to talk about the problem and the solutions we must employ to combat the known mechanics of low likelihood and deadly consequence. It is time to move beyond simplicity and overconfidence to competence through adaptive training. This is the mandate: once an error state is known, continuing shows intent to harm. We must move on from the undeliverable delusion of safety; it is a fraudulent guarantee in a space that is inherently unsafe and cannot be made safe so to expect that as the only allowable solution is without merit or logical standing.

The Avalanche Safety Paradox:
How Representational Compression Causes Information Loss in Complexity,
The Solution To Human Error As Deviation From Now And The Paradigm Shift by Fritz Sperry

Abstract

The backcountry community has made commendable progress in fostering a culture of vigilance. However, our reliance on the term “safety” has reached a functional limit. By defining our objective as “safety,” we create a framework that defends against liability rather than managing the nuance of harm, inducing a dangerous complacency based on an undeliverable guarantee. It is time to retire “safety”—the very effort to secure it has become an engine of risk due to the information loss simplicity in complexity forces..

Problem: The Avalanche Safety Paradox (ASP)
The Avalanche Safety Paradox is a structural failure where methods meant to communicate safety—such as categorical hazard ratings—actually degrade the practitioner’s ability to evaluate the environment. By forcing high-dimensional, natural phenomena into binary frameworks, the system mandates a “representational compression” that necessitates the loss of high-fidelity physical data. This loss leads to decision-making paralysis when reality fails to conform to the simplified model. This structural contradiction originates from Smutek (1980), who identified that systems designed to enhance safety often induce cognitive closures leading to human error.

Diagnosis: Deviation from the Now
Human error is deviation from the Now (T0n)—the failure to integrate immediate, ground-truth observations and adapt. Our diagnosis identifies four maladaptive states:

• Maladaptive: Distorted environmental perception via ego-protective bias.
• Nonadaptive: Rigid behavioral loops sustained by heuristic substitution (e.g., familiarity, social proof).
• Absentia: Cognitive shutdown in the face of insurmountable uncertainty.
• Human Error: A structural drift where decision-makers act on past continuities rather than present data.

Solution: Adaptive Backcountry Management (ABM)
Since these human factor error modes are now identified, the current paradigm is no longer defensible. A shift to ABM is the only way to protect against foreseeable negligence. We must transition from categorical avoidance to a Five-State Value Architecture (0, -, n, +, 1), which restores adaptive capacity—the ability to maintain non-reductionist interaction with the snowpack. ABM eliminates the artificial professional-recreational (pro/rec) split by re-conceptualizing hazards as evolving trajectories rather than static points. This ensures decision-making remains aligned with the mountain’s dynamic reality, replacing the false, self-authorizing closure of “safety” with persistent, interpretive flexibility.

Keywords: Adaptive Capacity, Avalanche Safety Paradox(ASP), Representational Compression, Semantic Closure, Five-State Operational Architecture, Neurochemical Reinforcement, Hazard Trajectory, Locus-Coeruleus–Norepinephrine Modulation, Structural Diagnostic Resolution, Recursive Semantic Priming, Human Factors, Backcountry Competence, FACETs Solution

After almost 10 years with the same website, it seemed like time for an upgrade. It might be simpler, but WordPress has changed, and it was certainly harder to design this time around, I hardly recognized all the functions of the control panel.

Well, it was an awesome summer and fall, so many hikes, summits, flowers, and lakes, and the colors this fall were the kind of eye candy I needed. Usually, I am against hiking, like fundamentally opposed to it, if you’re walking down the mountain you’re doing it wrong, downhills are for skiing. But this summer I realized that if I hiked enough my knees didn’t hurt as much, the calves are strong, and the quads are ready for winter vertical. So enjoy the site and check out the new book coming in December, MakingTurns in Colorado’s Tenmile Mosquito, 2nd Edition. It’s packed with plenty of “new” routes and the whole range is now consolidated into one tome. I also redesigned the original book routes to my current standard and am including the new ATES 2.0 for all the routes. You can pre-order your copy and have it shipped for free. Enjoy the pics of summer and here’s to the winter to come, may the snow be bountiful.