J2Ski Forum Posts and Replies by ise

Dave Mac wrote:

admin wrote:Dave, I suspect David means 100 metres by 50 metres x50cm - or 2500 cubic metres. 8)

Dozy me.

)

Dave Mac wrote:Given a very low coefficient of friction exiting in a hoar layer, and taking into account the force from a snowboarder would not be a static, but a dynamic force, then you might expect avalanche conditions.

But that's a fairly neat description of most avalanches. Hoar layers having about the lowest coefficient of friction but other weak layers having relatively COF's.

Hoar layers of course being formed during cold weather rather then cold weather "stiffening up" the snow as some J2Skiers think.

Gooseh wrote:but add in the tendency for 1% of situations to receive 99% of media coverage and it can go lead to quite misguided judgments.

quite, I saw a headline in a UK newspaper recently screaming "14 people die each year from errors in medication", I fancy those odd's ,14 out of some 70 odd million sounds ok to me )

It's pretty much the prevailing condition locally, one poor layer on top of another. This is a lee slope, actually very slightly off lee, so wind transport is a factor on this particular slope. The layering is similar on other local slopes of the same aspect.

SLF are still giving graphic warnings :

The snow layering is of highly varied structure. In some areas, faceted, weak layers are evident, interspersed with rain crusts up to altitudes of approximately 2500 m. Loosely packed snow lies atop the surface in many areas, in some places accompanied by surface hoar. More deeply embedded layers are inadequately bonded to each other in some regions.

SLF suggest risk is escalating as well, personally I'm supposed to be in the Jura for a few days where SLF don't produce forecasts so I'm going to be interested to see first hand the conditions there.

tino_11 wrote:
So everyone should live in bungalows then to prevent injury or death due to stair use?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/790609.stm

That's a perfect example of those instincts from the Serengeti misleading you ) The classic newspaper trick of providing an extreme example of something without any context.

This is tuned to tweak your availability heuristic, the mechanism your gut has to look at a situation and judge the risk by finding an example, the gut's all emotion and doesn't analyze how good the example is though. That worked pretty well on the plains of Africa, when Ug heard a lion roar his gut searched for an example and found that when he'd heard one before the lion came and ate Ugi his mate, so the gut says run.

Most people reading that story see it's so extreme and know it's safe to use the stairs, if there's 70 million people in the UK and 1000 accidents then it sounds good odds to me :)

tino_11 wrote: Humans have lost the natural sense of instinct due to being wrapped in cotton wool and having risk removed from thier lives. This makes them a bad judge of risk in many situations. Knowing your limits, listening to your inner voice, and acting accordinly is far more valuable in my opinion.

Humans developed their natural instincts living on the plains of Africa as hunters and the hunted for a quarter of a million years, those instincts are pretty good at telling us when to run from a lion or how to capture a wildebeest but we've not developed a natural instinct telling us anything about skiing either in the 100,000 years since spreading out from Africa or in the last 100 years or so that people have been recreationally skiing.

Far from helping it's precisely those hardwired instincts that make people so bad at judging risk. Even things like our perception of distance and speed are shaped by this heritage and work better on the Serengeti than the slopes of Verbier.

On the other hand, if you're regularly attacked by lions while on the slopes, have to hunt chamois for your dinner or get attacked by the neighboring tribe then those instincts are probably going to be pretty handy )

I was over that way this morning actually, there's a fair amount of snow on the ground. There is a webcam :

http://www.lesmosses.ch/cam/cam.html

That's outside the door of the Tourist Office looking over at the ski area which goes from the right to the left. It's all one lift up, one run down stuff with the best run being over to the far left as you look at the picture.

ir12daveor wrote:Risk is always going to be relative and open to perception. The reality is that banging your head does not only happen in the park, and no matter how small the risk is... it is still there.

People do attribute different risk levels to the same activity so you might say that's perception, but if that were really true we'd see a lot of people being killed in a huge range of activities. But risk is a fairly easy thing to define, it's a function of the probability of an event with the potential outcome and a risk assessment is nothing more than plugging numbers into that. In the case of ski helmets it's pretty simple, millions of people ski all over the world so incidence or probability of events is well known as are the outcomes. That's why people that supervise others in activities as varied as mountaineering or scuba-diving aren't killing their clients on a regular basis, they're able to calculate the risk of of the activity and manage it. Insurance companies employ armies of actuaries doing exactly the same thing, if they weren't able to calculate risk they'd go out of business, they might have looked more carefully at their own risks in their investment activities though :roll:

The fact that people are appallingly bad at assessing risk and arrive at different conclusions doesn't make it relative, it generally means they can't distinguish between the probability of an an event and the outcome. There's nothing particularly odd about that, it's a heuristic trap that's wired into our brains and we all suffer with from time to time. The different opinions you get on helmets are a perfect demonstration of that happening. On the one side you see people taking precautions against something that's not going to happen, this is represented as being prudent in someway or justified by a interpretation of the precautionary principle which is mistakenly assumed to be real immutable principle rather than just another heuristic trap liable to lead faulty conclusions. While on the other you see the low probably of one event creating a blind spot to all other risks.

Mostly people just try to transfer risk, they identify some other group, like boarders, bladers, people skiing off-piste, someone with an iPod on, another nationality and so on as either being more at risk then they are or of representing a risk to them. It's just the way our brains work unless we step in think more clearly.

Personally I find it fascinating as I'm interested in risk and how it's measured and managed but mostly people are just on holiday trying to relax and it's hardly reasonable they walk around with actuarial tables :lol:

ir12daveor wrote:I was having the helmet discussion with some friends on a lift in Davos (Jakobshorn) on Sunday. While we went up on that lift we did not see one person skiing or boarding below us not wearing a helmet!!! In the areas I ski (Central and Eastern Switzerland) helmets are now totally normal. People not wearing them are the exception.

I think that's got a lot to with the fact the health insurers here have been keen to encourage people to wear helmets, my insurer sends vouchers each year for money off helmets. I assume their actuaries have worked out it's cheaper for than treating the minor head injuries that make up the majority of accidents. They really ought to get more people on sledges to wear helmets in my opinion as well.

Admin wrote:
Be careful out there...

...heavy snowfall in recent days have prompted officials to warn of a heightened avalanche risk in the Swiss Alps.

These warnings are going on deaf ears, people on holiday have some bizarre ideas about why and where avalanches occur and how and why snow is unstable.









This slide is at the top of the Orxival drag lift in Grimentz, it's quite small and looks like it was triggered from above by two snowboarders who decided to take a couple of extra turns by walking a few metres up from the lift and then riding down. Neither were equiped, no transceivers, no probes or shovels.

The small slab that detached then hit the piste below, we just arrived as the pisteurs were probing the snow and were ready to assist but they were happy no one had been hit by the slide.

In the final shot you ought to be able to see how badly consolidated the snow is, there seems to be two distinct slabs both of which failed.

None of which is particularly worthy of comment apart from that at the same time as the piste security are probing the snow people are climbing up on the ridge above them and looking over the cornice at the top to the pisteurs below. Simultaneously, about 150m behind us skiers without any equipment are skiing into the Abondance itinerary which was clearly closed. In some bizarre and potentially lethal parody of safe skiing one particular group ski the slope one at time before regrouping below it, the spot they picked would be to within a meter or two the maximally exposed position in the bowl and slides on any the slopes around it would have reached maximum depth exactly where they were stood.

And all day we saw the exact same thing, skiers and boarders without any equipment at all on slopes that were extremely dangerous, moving in groups from 2 or 3 to 7 or 8 only a few meters apart, stopping for a chat in positions of extreme danger or terrain traps.