The risks

The different classes of risk

Off-piste travel introduces the participant to a whole class of potentially fatal risks never usually experienced in a controlled ski environment. These risks fall into five main classes - which form the basic structure of the this guide. In order of severity these are:

• Avalanche: Off-piste conditions often produce unstable snow packs which can release naturally or (more commonly in accident situations) be triggered by the passage of a group of travellers. The worst avalanches can reach speeds of up to 300 kph and kill victims through suffocation, trauma, or through cold injury after total or partial burial.
• Steep ground: Unlike the piste there is no safety netting, no crash barriers and no careful slope design to reduce the risks of steep and dangerous cliffs. Many off-piste skiers and climbers are killed or seriously injured from the trauma sustained by plummeting long distances onto rock or hard ice from exposed spaces. The converse risk comes when rocks or seracs (large ice cliffs ) fall on you.
• Cold: Cold injury is often the ultimate killer in accident situations. Low ambient temperate, altitude, fatigue, getting wet and - above all - wind chill all expose the off-piste explorer to the risks of death through chilling of the body core. Early stage hypothermia occurs when the body core temperate drops just two degrees (to 35oC). Modern technical clothing goes a long way to mitigating the risk. But even the best clothing has its limits if you get caught out in a storm, stuck on the mountain overnight, or simply exposed to cold conditions for too long.
• Getting lost: Again, unlike the piste, there are no route markers or helpful signposts to tell you which way to go. Navigating in a snow-covered environment is a complex and challenging task at the best of times. Navigating on skis or snowboard adds additional complexity in judging both speed and direction. Bad weather and white-out conditions can rapidly transform a difficult situation into a desperate one.
• Crevasses: Travel on glaciers - common in many parts of the Alps and North America - exposes you to the danger of crevasses. Formed when pressures on a glacier cause the smooth flow of ice to break up, crevasses are vertical slits in the ice from one to twenty metres wide and the worst can be up to several hundred metres deep. Sometimes "open" and clearly visible, sometime "covered" and invisible on an apparently smooth snow field. Falling into a crevasse transforms a comfortable horizontal world into a terrifying vertical ice cave and kills victims through the trauma of the fall, or the onset of hypothermia if a timely extraction cannot be effected.

Ranking the risks

Rescue professionals will tell you that accidents can have multiple causes: the onset of bad weather, fatigue or lack of experience amongst the party, simple errors in navigation and so on. Sometimes a combination of otherwise small problems (late start, equipment trouble, minor errors in navigation, worsening weather) can build up to produce a potentially dangerous situation. The technical term is “incident spiral” as small incidents compound each other to produce a potential tragedy.

That said, it may be helpful to get a sense of the relative level of each risk. To do this, we have analysed statistics on the recorded causes of death in fatal accidents in the Europe and North America. On average, over the past 20-30 years, more than 300 people have been killed off-piste each winter, with over 150 of those deaths occurring in the European Alps.

Hard statistics on causes are tricky to come by, and this is by no means definitive, but the conclusion of our analysis is pretty clear:

1. Avalanche: around half of all fatalities,
2. Falling on steep ground: a further one in four,
3. Cold injury: one in six,
4. Getting lost: one in ten, and
5. Crevasse fall: the final one in twenty.