Avalanche practitioners across the industry benefit from utilizing a structured approach to hazard and risk assessment. Throughout the last two decades, more focused discussion and collaboration have led to the creation of international best practices that can be applied across contexts with the goal of increasing worker and public safety. In North America, representatives from the US Forest Service, National Avalanche Center, American Avalanche Association, Avalanche Canada, and Canadian Avalanche Association have been instrumental in the development of documents and training programs that look to align the skills, proficiencies, and competencies of workers with the increasingly complex needs of the industry. In some cases, this alignment is obligatory in order to be a practicing professional. In others, it is an emerging cultural shift that has taken hold to produce more consistent ways of observing, analyzing, and documenting all the factors that contribute to making a hazard and risk assessment.

Team leaders and organizational decision-makers create and protect value, and are well served by implementing these best practices and emerging standards to reach the ranks of other Highly Reliable Organizations in different sectors. Operating in a complex and dangerous mountain environment requires an educated and dedicated workforce able to competently perform tasks related to:

• Analyzing snowpack and weather trends and their impact on stability across variations in terrain

• Assessing relevancy of data in terms of its strength and weight

• Recording relevant information using operational forms

• Forecasting the daily avalanche hazard within a given temporal and spatial scale

• Identifying sources of uncertainty in daily forecasts and targeting field observations to reduce that uncertainty

• Describing factors that affect forecaster confidence

• Communicating efficiently with team members

Furthermore, practitioners must strive to further their knowledge of avalanche formation and release and develop a repeatable methodology for gathering field observations that allow for extrapolation and interpolation across multiple zones. Understanding how operations in different contexts utilize a variety of risk mitigation strategies to reach their objectives allows for leaders to compare and contrast how their own organizations are meeting the expectations and needs of stakeholders. Lastly, allowing for a consistent monitoring and review process that focuses on the improvement of future decision-making is critical to creating and maintaining a safe workplace.

By the end of the module you will be able to:

• Identify foundational concepts of a risk management process

• List the four components of dry slab avalanche release as stated by Schweizer et al.

• Assess hazard using a conceptual model and identify the element at risk

• Recognize critical weather and snowpack factors from a week’s worth of storm data.

• Utilize templates and meeting formats for teams to use in documenting and assessing risk, and developing a risk treatment plan

• List the strategic mindsets and understand their corresponding operating strategy

• Fill out Terrain Catalog and Terrain Coding worksheets

• Identify mitigation strategies employed by different industry professionals

• Describe the difference between an operational avalanche forecast and a public avalanche bulletin.

• Understand effective tools for group communication among small teams in the field

• Understand the marking and evaluation criteria for Categories 1 and 2 for the PRO 2