Canadian, Grant Stathamgave a great TED talk recently on risk in avalanche terrain. Grant has spent a lifetime climbing, skiing and guiding in extreme terrain around the world and he has spent the past 10 years or so working as a risk management specialist for Parks Canada. I worked on a committee for 3 years with several Canadian and American avalanche experts, chaired by Grant Statham, in which we hammered out this conceptual model on the components of risk in avalanche terrain. Grant does a great job of explaining everything in this TED talk. See Grant's 12 minute …

Note: This was originally published as a blog at Backcountry.com on 10/23/13. Skiing and riding in the backcountry is a bit like driving on the freeway – when you know the rules and have some skills and experience, it has some risk but tends to work out ok. When you lack those ingredients, it’s confusing, embarrassing, and dangerous at best and nobody wants to ride with you. When you understand how to match your decisions to the current conditions, you can get out and safely have a great time on any day, regardless of the conditions. So how do you learn to …

There are a number of recently released smartphone apps which are designed to make smartphones usable as an avalanche transceiver. At the current time, we at the UAC do not endorse using any of these apps in place of an avalanche transceiver. These apps are still in their infancy, they are unregulated and they DO NOT MEET INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS FOR AVALANCHE TRANSCEIVERS. I personally encourage innovation and perhaps with more prototyping and testing a smartphone avalanche transceiver app may be a viable tool, however, the smartphones themselves seem to present …

What follows will be a very personal account of the 2012/2013 winter season. Read on and you'll understand. From my April 10th 2013 avalanche advisory... While an east wind blows Friend looks cancer in the eye Magnolia tree blooms I often like to say that nothing good comes of an east wind...but sometimes there are good things that are coincident with it. Just ask the old man in the haiku. One friend – a mentor – is cleared of cancer the day before…the following day a good friend, a colleague, a husband and father dies in an avalanche. From my …

Access to remote regions for our snowmobile specific forecasts has always been a challenging proposition, but since 2000, the Utah Snowmobile Association helped us form critical relationships with sled dealers and manufacturers. Since then, Tri-City Performance, Wellers Recreation, and Big Pine Sports in conjunction with Polaris, BRP/Ski-Doo, and Arctic Cat respectively, donate loaner sleds to the Utah Avalanche Center(UAC) each winter. This extremely generous partnership allows us to see more terrain, issue more accurate forecasts, and ultimately saves more riders …

Recent avalanche accidents in Utah highlight slope steepness as a primary contributing terrain factor and illustrate what seems an obvious truth, that the steeper the slope, the greater the danger. But, not only are more and more people venturing into the backcountry these days in search of untracked powder, but people are apparently also venturing onto steeper and steeper slopes for various reasons. Slope steepness might be considered more of a "human factor" issue in many avalanche accidents than that of mistakes made in "terrain assessment." Jill Fredston and …

I'd like to (re) introduce our Avalanche Route Ratings for Selected Touring Routes in the Wasatch Range You know the old saying..."If I had a dollar for everytime...." For years we fielded calls and emails from outta towners to scout groups to beginners - "The danger's Considerable - where can I go that's safe?" And we'd tell them here or there depending on what was going on. So we set upon a project to outline 30 routes in the central Wasatch and rate them based upon static parameters (as you'll soon find out). It was shelved for a number of years but now resurrected. …