Why do we care about uncertainty?

On your AIARE 1 course, you learned a process to manage backcountry travel risk and learn from your experiences. Since then, you have been gaining experience in the backcountry using that process. You have encountered a variety of conditions, weather, groups, and different types of terrain. By now, you have hopefully not only increased what you know, but opened an awareness into what you don’t know.

What we don’t know is in effect our uncertainty. The reason we are interested in identifying and targeting our uncertainty is because it directly impacts our risk. The International Standards Organization (ISO) defines risk as “the effect of uncertainty on objectives,” so if managing risk is our goal, we need to be able to identify when and where there is uncertainty. We manage uncertainty and therefore risk, by targeting it - by gaining more information and having a plan that accounts for it.

The ISO defines uncertainty as “the state (even partial) of deficiency of information related to understanding or knowledge of an event, its consequence, or likelihood.” So our targets should be information that increases our understanding of an event, its consequence, or likelihood.

Uncertainty is both what we know we don’t know about something (known unknowns) and what we don’t know we don’t know about something (the unknown unknowns). This course is meant to equip you with more tools to target the known unknowns. Continuing to gain experience will help turn more unknown unknowns into known unknowns.

Targeting Unknowns: Sources of Uncertainty

For the purposes of traveling in the backcountry, we can categorize uncertainty into three categories: conditions (which includes weather and climate, and snowpack), people, and terrain (Jamieson, Haegli & Statham, 2015). This website is organized around identifying sources of uncertainty in these areas and more importantly tools you can develop to address these types of uncertainty.

The AIARE 2 is the course for learning new tools to address this increasing body of understanding about what you don’t know. These tools are a means to target those unknowns whether that is answering a specific question on a specific day or adding to your overall body of knowledge and experience.

Uncertainty affects where we go

Terrain is the tool available to manage risk. In an AIARE 1 course you learn to choose terrain appropriate for group and conditions. Depending on your experience, you might have encountered that what you didn’t know was the primary limiter of the types of terrain you could choose. Tackling new terrain might not be an option because everything else was new.

Less experience with a venue, conditions, or new partners means that you need to leave a larger margin for error by choosing simpler terrain that leaves more options to change plans. Your group might be choosing to rule out or close broad areas based on the hazard such as staying off all northern slopes, or staying below treeline.

In addition to the danger level, the amount of uncertainty also drives your strategy and mindset for how you will use terrain. The more uncertainty, the more you want to choose simpler terrain. Some uncertainty you can’t change, like certain avalanche conditions that come with high uncertainty such as persistent problems or weather forecasts that have even expert meteorologists hedging. But as you gain experience, you can target experiences that help you to reduce uncertainty - you learn more about weather patterns and their link to snowpack patterns. You can become more familiar with terrain. You become more familiar with partners. All this work leads to more options in being able to choose partners and choose where to go.

The work for this course, whether this is the first or fourth time you are taking it, is to identify and explore the area of known unknown, and continue to grow your quiver of tools that enable you to move those known unknowns into known knowns.