You may remember from the AIARE 1 course that a part of planning for the day was to designate a terrain mindset for the day. This terrain mindset is in response to the hazard and uncertainty identified during Anticipate the Hazard. The relationship between that uncertainty and your terrain travel is clear-cut: as uncertainty increases you want to reduce your exposure to avalanche terrain. Likewise, as the avalanche danger increases, you want to reduce your exposure to avalanche terrain.

The terrain mindset helps us incorporate our desires and fears, hazards, and uncertainty into a background context that sets the tone for our decision-making process. By setting our mindset, we are setting how we will view the world for the day. It helps us adjust our goals and desires to appropriately fit the situation as we are planning and then sets the stage for how we communicate once we are in the backcountry.