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You don’t need epic terrain to have an epic time. Mellow tours can provide for a quality day out skiing minus the added hazard of traveling in avalanche terrain.
This past December, Doug, Manasseh, and I planned to ski together in the Northern San Juans. The days leading up to our tour looked something like this:
— Avalanche danger was rated at considerable by the CAIC for a majority of the week prior. Natural slides and skier-triggered avalanches were both observed throughout the region.
— There was a persistent weak layer lurking near the bottom of the snowpack with additional wind slab forming from strong and sporadic southwest winds.
— No new snow made for variable snow surfaces. Solar aspects were sun-affected and northerlies were faceted out from the cold and clear nights.
— The weather for today was forecasted to be overcast and windy with no new snow.
To sum it up: There was a lot of variability out there. Doug and Manasseh were only in town for a couple of days. We wanted to plan our tour around the conditions, but that’s a tall order with so much uncertainty and variability. Here’s how we approached it.
Ring Ring
Doug: ‘Hey Slator. What are you thinking for skiing today? The snowpack is pretty funky around here.’
Slator: ‘Doug! Psyched to get out skiing together. Yeah, there’s a lot of variability out there. I’m hoping for a mellow tour. It would be great to catch up, get some fitness in, and maybe find some good snow.’
Doug: ‘I’m thinking the same. Let’s just take avalanche terrain off the menu.’
Slator: ‘That sounds great! Want to meet at the top of the pass at 9:00 AM?’
Doug: ‘See you then!’
We met at the trailhead and reviewed our tour plan for the day. The three of us planned to ski to a summit above Red Mountain Pass. We connected county roads, pine groves, and a big San Juan summit without ever entering avalanche terrain. All the way up, we engaged in classic ‘skin track chat.’ Once at the top, we looked over an expansive San Juan vista. Skins were ripped, variable snow was skied, and wiggles were made. We ended back at the cars with big smiles, low stress, and lots of terrain traveled.
You don’t need epic terrain to have an epic time. Mellow tours can provide for a quality day out skiing minus the added hazard of traveling in avalanche terrain.
These aren’t the kind of backcountry experiences typically featured in TGR films or showcased on ski magazine covers. There were no blower face shots, no Alaskan-style spines, and no huge cliff hucks. That’s exactly what we hoped for. A mellow tour.
Merits of the Mellow Tour
My idea of a mellow tour is one that doesn’t enter avalanche terrain. Slab avalanches generally occur on slopes 30° or greater. Less than 30° and slopes are not steep enough for snow to slide downhill and cause an avalanche. With that in mind, we can stick to mellow terrain and still have a raging good time. There are a few lifetime’s worth of quality backcountry skiing terrain that never crosses that 30° measure. However, it’s important to still be aware of traveling near or under connected avalanche terrain when out on mellow touring missions.
There are also other risks involved in backcountry travel like exposure to cold weather and skiing-related trauma. Nonetheless, mellow touring can take the edge off of a backcountry experience by limiting the inherent risk involved with traveling through avalanche terrain. It can make for fun and safe outings that don’t risk life or limb. Let’s take a step back and assess mellow touring for what it’s worth.
Pros of the mellow tour
Reduce exposure to avalanche terrain thus lowering risk associated with backcountry travel.
Avoid crowds by exploring new, more mellow powder paradises.
Enjoy a new style of backcountry skiing. We can’t go ski mountaineering or freeride shredding everyday!?
Cons of the mellow tour
Low-angle slopes are tough for our splitboarder brethren with their inability to herringbone and two-poles through flat terrain.
Sometimes it snows too much or our skis are too skinny to manage deep powder. A pair of powder touring skis can fix this quite well.
Diminishing return is real. It’s a mental trap that we must fight against when our seventh low angle lap doesn’t feel as cool as the first and more avalanche-prone slopes beckon from beyond.
How to Plan a Mellow Tour
Here are a few steps for how to plan a mellow backcountry tour:
Use a mapping software like onX Backcountry to plan out a route that avoids avalanche terrain. (However, with all things digital, be mindful of the limitations of mapping software.)
Here’s a great example of what onX Backcountry looks like with Slope Angle Shading turned on. We can identify slope angle and thus avalanche propensity. Be careful, this data has a finite resolution and won’t show microscopic change in terrain that can still promote the possibility of an avalanche.
Upload that route to an app on your phone (or just save if using onX), print a backup map, and get a way to measure slope angle in the field. The combination of the app, a printed backup and an inclinometer are great resources for in-the-field navigation and terrain assessment.
Get out for a tour and test your route. Was the terrain too steep? Was the terrain too mellow? How was the snow quality? This constant stream of improvement and self-assessment will lead you better and better mellow outing in the future.
Make sure you’re having fun while out on a mellow tour. Otherwise…what’s the point?
Make it fun!
Have a focus for your tour to spice things up. Some ideas are:
Mission Tour: Plan a tour around an objective like reaching a lake, summit or historical site. Think about loops or traverse with this mission style in mind.
Fitness Tour: Center a tour around fitness. Can you tour for X amount of hours/miles/feet of vertical gain. Planning longer tours on a ski resort is a great way to get out for a fitness tour. The best on resort fitness touring in the US has to be Aspen Snowmass.
Social Tour: Focus a tour around the question of WHO not WHERE. Think about who you want to ski with first, then what you want to ski. Ski touring is a great way to spend quality, present company with old or new friends.
Sharing powder turns with quality friends is one of life’s finer pleasures
A Few Examples of [Very Fun] Mellow Tours
Red Mountain Pass Vista Tour
Length: 2 miles & 1,800′ vertical gain
Starting Elevation: 11,000′ / Ending Elevation: 12,800′
Quality: This is a scenic tour with high potential for low angle wiggles. It begins up a county road, then weaves through a pine grove, and finishes ascending an expansive alpine bowl.
Berthoud Pass Hot Lap
Length: 0.75 miles & 1,200′ vertical gain
Starting Elevation: 11,200′ / Ending Elevation: 12,400′
Quality: Easy outing up and back right from the car!
I have no intention of reinventing the wheel with the idea of mellow touring. People have been doing this for centuries (millenia?). The advent of skiing steep terrain is a much more recent endeavor. I am merely psyched on blowing the dust off a forgotten segment of the backcountry ski world. Let’s celebrate conservative decision making. Let’s relish in the safe serenity of <30° terrain. Maybe one day we'll even get a segment in TGR of some AWESOME low-angle, powder-wiggle skiing in a far flung remote destination. Until then, I'll continue to root around for mellow tours, quality snow, and hopefully share it all with my best pals.
For more ideas on mellow tours, check out Lou’s book Uphill Skiing and Light Tours of Colorado. For thoughts on ideal mellow touring gear, check out the Merits of a Powder Touring Ski.
Slator Aplin lives in the San Juans. He enjoys time spent in the mountains, pastries paired with coffee, and adventures-gone-wrong. You can often find him outside Telluride’s local bakery — Baked in Telluride.
27 comments
Mapping tool that provide slope angle info are extremely useful, but promoting them without discussing their limitations borders on irresponsible:
https://avalanche.state.co.us/caic/acc/acc_report.php?acc_id=685&accfm=inv
https://theavalanchereview.org/digital-mapping/
I think you should edit your post to reflect the above.
That could be an article in and of itself.
Added a small edit, however, we did include a caveat in one of the captions, as well as the recommendation to always have a real-time way of analyzing slope angle.
Yes to low danger days! The last couple of years and particularly this year I’ve been ‘polarizing’ my skiing (cheeky endurance training cross-reference). More and more fitness and exploratory ramble days as the bread and butter, sprinkling in ‘skills’ sessions on those days (avalanche, crevasse rescue, first-aid/evacuation), with one targeted spring 5-7 day self-support ski mountaineering glacier/traverse/peak climb and surgical/opportunistic (good conditions) spring day trip missions (cool loops/mini-traverses, couloirs etc). The former (80%) is the foundation for the latter (20%).
To add: this is in part influenced by/consistent with my take-away from ‘Solving for Z’….keep those dice roll days very targeted, high value, and mitigated to the max. Minimize the mushy middle where my attention/focus/decisions not 100% aligned with actual risk.
AARONT- that reminds me of the barbell theory of risk management Nassim Taleb writes about in Antifragile. 90% low risk/low reward, 10% high risk/high reward. Stay away from 100% moderate risk in the middle where a total loss is more probable.
You miss the point I think. Low risk does not have to mean low reward – in fact the point of the article is that low risk low angle slopes can be loads of fun. If fun is the point then they hold high return. Agree on the other end. His point is that in the middle there are average rewards so no big wins/losses – from an investor pov there is no point. When we ski moderate/average slopes are we really just having no real fun? I don’t think so.
I’ve seen people try to apply NT’s investment lessons to skiing- he is not your normal investor and is willing and able to take huge risks/losses. I’m not sure we want to approach normal skiing in that manner.
Not familiar with that Taleb theory, but these mental models are not meant to be absolute nor do we have a shared interpretation without deeply unpacking it. I agree that low risk days can be/are high reward in their own way – intrinsic forest bathing stuff, social time, solo time!, fitness, and now that I have DPS Tour1 112 fun!!! etc …these are the days that keep me sane and whole; but no doubt those big days are the ones that stand out in my memories. My thinking is that the middle risk area (e.g. 30-35 deg pow in mod-considerable with somewhat to more consequential terrain) done too much breeds complacency in communication, objectives, decision making etc and are rolls of the dice that accumulate but not might be recognized as such. It is amazing how long one can get away with this in a low validation environment.
When I do bust out bigger trips I do find me and my partners ‘turn on’ in a different way.
Ryan I love seeing Taleb woven into a thread on BC risks! As with most quant, academia based investors, their absolute theories are never perfect as markets typically prove their absolute theories to be flawed over longer timeframes but they remain never in doubt which makes them enjoyable to read. Taleb has been proven wrong since his peak with Black Swan and as an ex-institutional trader and career financial professional, along with a longer career in the BC I respectfully disagree with many of his assertions. So as for now I’ll stick with low risk/low exposure BC skiing and maybe, with spring consolidation, I might mix in some moderate exposures. Ok, back to my other screens where moderate risk portfolios are well diversified and 100% loss is highly improbable BUT risky asset exposure sprinkles into certain aspects of my efforts:)
Excellent article and very applicable for current conditions throughout the western U.S. For added stoke on low-angle tour days, dig your old leathers, 3 pins and skis with no sidecut out of the back of your closet and drop some knee! I recently did this on some 20 deg dust-on-crust fast snow conditions and found it absolutely terrifying (in a great way). The sense of accomplishment when I got tot he bottom and gazed upon my continuous long-arc tele turns was 9/10 on the satisfying scale. What’s the sense of “sending it” on low-angle terrain in your tech bindings and carbon boots that you drop 50 degree, sunlight-tight couloirs with? Not much of an adrenaline rush there. Oh, and toss in some tight trees for added effect.
Great call THEWOODSMAN but I cannot drop a knee and I fear my old Fritschi Freeride heels might not survive nor would my Dynafit radicals as one of the heel towers is broken! Lets hope Colorado BC skiers/riders, actually everyone, takes this article to heart as we have lost too many adventurous souls this year!
No knee-dropping?? Great year to learn The Turn (on low-angle terrain).
Great article. Curious why you say ” Less than 30° and slopes are not steep enough for snow to slide downhill and cause an avalanche.”
In Canada the general rule is 25 deg. Maybe we have different snow? I have seen slab avalanches on persistent weak layers on slopes of less than 30 deg where I personally measured the slope angle. To be fair I agree with your general point but 30 deg is a decent angle and in some cases you might have to go really gentle so i wanted to stress that. I also agree that with some wide powder skis its still possible to have fun on a 25 deg slope.
Less than 30 and not attached to anything steeper? I don’t doubt it I just haven’t seen it myself. But I’m not about to argue with someone who literally wrote the book on coast mountain ski touring. Love that book?
Not sure why it put a question mark at the end.
My tech gear has been gathering dust as I’ve been gathering powder with T4s, 78-waisted Madshus (formerly Karhu) and Voile Switchbacks. This season I’ve relocated to deeper mellow pow and found to my delight that can swing a pair of Rossignol BC 125s with my T4s.
Ripping skins and stepping out of tech bindings to go into tour mode is so much more work than unbuckling the top buckle. Often I don’t even put the Switchbacks into tour mode- that makes it much faster to run up a bit, herringboning.
I’m considering ditching the tech gear entirely, getting a slightly taller boot, a modern releasable tele binding, and adding skins while retaining the waxless BC 125s. Though I bet I wouldn’t like that on corduroy, my ski days have trended 24:1 BC:Lift this season.. so..
Now you’re talkin’!! Totally agree. 25 degree slopes on skinny skis and free heels can be as satisfying as 45 degree slopes on AT gear.
RCL1 talks about a “modern releasable tele binding”.
Not sure one exists for 75 boots. I skied 7TM so called releasable binding for years, and felt that if heel was flat on ski, the binding might release, but not sure with bellows flexed. I had the 7TM Powers, not the Power Tours. I did have my boot twist out of this binding a few times too, in bumps with ski flex, so no plate release.
More modern the, NTN boots and bindings. I have Outlaw, and Freedom bindings; the later might release in a fall, but you end up skiing with a heavier boot and binding. The Meidjo, a lighter NTN binding, has a release function, but you need an NTN boot, with inserts in the toes.
Of course, on a tele binding, you always have a forward release, with the free heel. 😉 .
Pursuant to the idea of emphasizing and finding joy in lower angle/lower risk terrain… an Instagram ad recently invited me to join. podcast with a prominent ACMG (association of Canadian mountain guides) member. The subject was “why you should come to British Columbia’s backcountry lodges” and in the tagline, (I paraphrase), it stated ‘this isn’t about super steep couloirs, its about 30º-40º powder blessed isolation’
I found it odd that the company (not the ACMG!!) had emphasized that the primary goal was to ski terrain identified as basically avalanche terrain. I don’t doubt that this tour operator/ bookings clearing house has no concept of what they have just said. Of the expectation bubble they are blowing up. They probably looked at average angles for inbounds advanced intermediate runs and chose that.
I have spent a fair amount of time this season reading through public/general media about BC travel. Overwhelmingly the discussion focuses on thrills, adventure, and ‘getting the goods’. And my experience in travelling with many BC clients at lodges is that people do become blind in the field. When nothing goes wrong, there is tendency to push closer to the tipping point, and forget that the last 100 turns were super fun with minimized risk…
Education is a facet of keeping people ‘safer’ in the BC, but we can’t fix stupid or cure the powder jonesing. Case in point is today’s (Feb 17, 2021) Utah Avy forecast… all black… and still people are asking what that means, or where is it safe to ski.
Ok… off topic from the article… maybe we should all practice training our strategic mindset to be “let’s have fun”.
Travel safe…
27 back country deaths and climbing. Any and all resources need to be focused on preventing more deaths. Just wait until Spring when the big storms start kicking in.
The advantage to aggressively measuring angles with a slope meter(often) is that it allows you more terrain options by increasing the limits of what’s actually skiable on a given day. They allow you to accurately measure small test slopes and pit profiles for more accurate results. One one have to include accurately measuring Alpha angles in some circumstances. A pit profile/test on a properly measured 28 slope is full of real time data compared to a pit/test at lower angles (but that depends…. of course.) I want to ski the steepest, safest angles every time I go out as do 95% of skinners Why waste good skiing when you guessed it was 28, but it was actually 30 and you could have gone further safel. When you say “less” or “more” than 30 when looking up or across a slope with an eye or two or more, you’re all guessing without the proper tool for the job I takes a minute to do it right.. BTW…If straight skinning up a slope, take the time to measure the angle in which you start to back-slip and keep it for reference as you move along. Typically 22-25 at max. I just never liked estimating slope angles.
ECTs results are independent of slope angle. So a profile that shows a weak layer that propagates is all the info you need. Basing go/no go decisions on test scores is a recipe for getting fooled badly. Thinking you’re getting more or less accurate info depending on slope angles assumes shear is primary failure mode when it’s not.
With my progression from truly skinny nordic to the AU edged Europa 99 to Tua Express o and finally to TLT’s and now today’s beef pin tech, I try to never loose sight of my roots and all the good years of ski tours below treeline!
Thanks for this article; fun is always at hand with friends and family on gentle terrain!
Voile makes 4 BC model skis with the fish scale traction base, the fattest & most rockered is the V6 BC. Got a pair for Christmas & they are a game changer & the right tool for these low danger low angle ski tours. Highly recommend.
And for those who still prefer The Turn, Voile is one of the few remaining AT ski manufacturers that warranties their skis when mounted with telemark bindings, at least last I checked they still did. I know BD does not. I currently powder tour with Switchback mounted V8s but I might have to check out those V6 BCs. Thanks for the tip!
if its low danger why go low angle? 😉
Really? I think you missed the point.
Yup, really. I got the point, and I do appreciate the intention. I found the title to be misleading. In avalanche communication common English words, and terms, have been given particular definitions. Danger being one of these words. In avalanche safety and avalanche communication it is best to use these words accuratley. The words risk and danger are not synonymous. Risk is a function of danger. Consider the Low Risk, Low Angle Ski Tour; or even the Low Slope Angle, Zero Avalanche Risk Ski Tour. 🙂
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