UKH

I moved to Norway (Bergen, to be exact) from the UK not so long ago and have been enjoying getting into the winter sports scene here. Despite similar features, the choice of equipment, approach to avalanches, and recreation activities are completely different.

As an example, last weekend I went on a two day 'fjellski' skiing trip organised by the Norwegian touring organisation (DNT). This was on cross country skis suited to mountains (steel edges, but no fixed heel, so the boots are more like hiking boots. You can quite easily walk reguarly off-skis in these boots) and we went through some incredibly gnarly weather conditions. We didn't, however, encounter any major avalanche risks despite a level 4 warning, because our route completely avoided all slopes over 25 deg and avalanche run-out zones by going on a regulated 'winter route'. Such a route can be easily found on ut.no (e.g. https://ut.no/kart#11.61/60.8246/6.3311) with slopes and run-outs found in the 'Bratthetskart' layer. We carried shovels and avalanche probes, but no one carried a rope, harness, or ice axe.

If Bergen is totally frozen, which happens a few times each winter, ice features within walking distance of the actual city centre are definitely 'in', but no one seeks these out.

Compare this to a photo facebook reminded me of from several years ago in Scotland where we're roped up with axes probing for avalanche danger. Seeing a group of people taking the Scottish approach in the hills of Norway would seem now somewhat ridiculous. There are also, so far as I can see, no useful resources like ut.no showing clear maps of terrain slope (please let me know if you know of one).

I think it's maybe clear that I am firmly on the Norwegian side, get outside in the amazing mountains, cover long distances, and just avoid avalanche risk insofar as is possible. So it got me thinking, how did this division occur?

I think the biggest thing is probably that there is rarely enough snow in Scotland for the kind of long-distance fjellski Norwegians enjoy, so we are left scrapping for the last bits of snow and ice that are quite often more marginal, steeper, and more avalanche prone. But I also wonder if it's something to do with the UK psyche? Kind of a will for suffering and a lust for getting the more extreme situations out of our limited winter resources?

Thoughts welcome.

I'll be honest, I'm slightly confused by what you think the Scottish approach is. A random facebook photo of people "probing for avalanches" doesn't sound anything like a Scottish approach to me.

We have vastly different ground and weather conditions and consequently a completely different approach to avalanches in the mountains. So for example, there might be a moderate hazard forecast for a certain aspect of slope, one would then read the details on this to see what the cause of this hazard was (e.g. cornice collapse due to sun or a weak layer or graupel would have totally different hazard mitigation strategies) and then plan a day out in a way which would minimize your risk. This might mean climbing a different route, approaching the route from a different direction or abseiling in or it might mean altering your route choice, going to a different mountain area or perhaps not going out at all. My understanding of the Scottish approach is that you evaluate the hazard and then change your behaviour to reduce the risk - have I misunderstood? I may have misread your post, but it sounds like the Norway approach as you describe it is to follow a path someone else has set out and said is safe?

The mountain air podcast with Mark Diggins is worth a listen and explains some of the unique considerations of avalanches in Scotland compared to other locations in Europe. Also chance in a million is probably the best read in terms of how to approach avalanches in Scotland. 

Your post did bring up an amusing memory of meeting a lovely Norwegian family in Corrour bothy about 12 years ago. They were carrying their skis across the country having read an article where the author had cross country skied from East to West in an exceptionally snowy winter. Sadly when they arrived, conditions were as would normally be expected at ground level however it didn't seem to dampen their spirits!

Not sure there’s much difference really.  Fjellski is  quite a special Norwegian thing with the network marked routes and hut systems, and it’s hard to compare directly to the UK.  I’d guess that anyone going bothy to bothy in Scotland in the winter would take the Norwegian approach of mitigating risk by route choice though.

Winter climbing wise and topptur/randonee skiing I’d say people generally take the same avi gear both places (i.e none for climbing and full kit for skiing). 

One thing that is common to the avi risk climbing in both UK and Norway (at least in the south) is that there’s rarely significant overhead hazard, so it’s a bit easier to mitigate the objective risk and justify the choice to leave avi gear at home. I’ve felt much more vulnerable in Canada and Europe on this front with big alpine bowls above a drainage line of ice being common. 

I don't think what you describe is the Scottish approach so much as the clueless approach. Those climbing and skiing in Scotland have got a lot more clued up on avalanche risk in the last decade or so.

I've done a reasonable amount of ice climbing in Northern Norway, and there the overhead risk is generally significant. Lots of amazing and massive ice features but often with huge slopes above them, and the icefalls being streams and waterfalls in summer are natural avalanche channels.

I've done a lot of ski touring in Lyngen and around. It's now a very popular area, but still no marked routes and avalanches are a major consideration on almost any tour.

Back when there was reliable snow cover in Scotland (I'm talking 1980s-1990s) quite a few of us did ski mountaineering on the kind of equipment you describe, often covering long distances and sometimes overnighting in a bothy. There are photos in my gallery. We didn't own transceivers, just borrowed them for trips to the Alps, but usually someone in the group would take a shovel in case we needed emergency shelter. The best conditions were typically in the longer days of March and April, sometimes even May. 

Global warming has pretty much put paid to that type of touring in the Highlands, apart from on the Cairngorm plateau. There are now far more skiers on Alpine gear than Nordic, they're often looking for steeper (and potentially avalanche-prone) descents, and because the snow cover is so transient people are often out straight after a dump of snow.   

TBF, avalanche awareness was a reasonably big thing when I moved to Scotland in the early 90s. The MCofS produced a leaflet "this leaflet could stop an avalanche" available in outdoor shops, and A Chance in a Million was already out as I have a copy. When I first went to Norway, 98 I think, to Lyngen with a bunch of Finns, I was trying to teach them about avalanches, digging snow pits etc. No one had transceivers on that trip from memory, and my mates seemed oblivious to avy risks.

Did you mention taking avalanche transceivers ? I might have missed it ?

Well, if travelling is what you seek, then you can fully avoid avalanche terrain. If what you seek is to reach a climb or truly enjoy putting a track somewhere then, it is almost inevitable you will come across avalanche terrain.

Avoidance is always better than being fully equipped (free riding video style with airbags et al). Yet if what you seek is the soft snow or just the white stuff (increasingly the case in the UK) you will be at risk.

It seems to me that you describe 2 different activities: no point carrying a rucksack with water and snacks if you’re running a 1500m! Or spikes if you’re running a cross country!

Equally, if you know you can avoid all slopes remotely at risk and you also know there is a decent reliable snow cover then you can plan accordingly.

As such, I think that it’s not fully different approaches but different activities you described. As an aside I fancy that Nordic skiing you referred to (fjellskiing?) though part of me love the turns too much to fully avoid trying to “mark” the slopes I may encounter! The group would lose patience with me.

I read your post earlier today but didn't reply as I had to go out. My intended reply would have been similar to that by Rif.

When I started skiing in the 1980s in Scotland nordic gear was used by many, possibly the majority, for ski touring, especially those who mostly skied in & around the Cairngorms with some skiers making long trips across many tops maybe most famously by Adam Watson with his traverse of the Cairngorm six tops (since repeated by others, including I think by Rif). I no longer live in Scotland but still use similar gear from time to time here in the Alps but mostly for tours on forest tracks rather than open high plateaus. In France this style of skiing is known as ski de randonnée nordique but the gear is the same as for Fjellski.

I also remember my first time skitouring in Norway (1990) where it was obvious that the Norwegians we met in various huts in the Jotunheim & Dovrefjell had never seen transceivers before.

That’s not my experience of the routes up north at least in Spansdalen, Sørdalen, Lavangen, Lyngseidet, Skibotn, Kåfjord etc - I didn’t find them to be significantly threatened from overhead terrain. On the approaches there may be sketchy slopes, and there are terrain traps (the canyon in Kåfjord springs to mind with a shudder, having been in there once when we shouldn’t have been), but not much from above. 

To generalise a bit, I reckon where the high ground is the typical Norwegian mountain plateau and the valley sides are uniformly steep from bottom to top (i.e most of the country from Trondelag southwards with the notable exception of Jotunheim) it’s much less of an issue for climbers compared to the Euro or Rockies alpine mountain regions where big lower angled bowls are common above

This sounds to me like you’re just learning properly after a while of doing things an odd way. If you’re probing to see if snow will avalanche, you’re a) already in the wrong place, i.e. a potentially dangerous one, and b) using a poor method to assess the snowpack. Probes are for finding bodies, not for checking snow conditions.

But still rarely carry transceivers, shovels, or probes, so there is a way to go yet I think. 

This sounds completely terrifying. Why would you be out looking for avalanche danger with axes?! SAIS tells you where the hazard is likely to be, so you plan a day which doesn't involve travel on those aspects. 

I'm not sure if you're talking about skiing specifically or just winter sports in general, but certainly the professional mountaineering community is very clued up on avalanches and there is plenty of learning material available for those wishing to learn more. As climbers and mountaineers we can easily choose not to engage with the avalanche hazard in Scotland and pick something on the safer end of the spectrum given a specific forecast. 

Would these items be of use in Scotland?

It would be interesting to see statistics on how many people involved in an avalanche are (a) burried and (b) in a location which an avalanche could not easily have been predicted. I was under the impression, perhaps incorrectly, that full burrials were thankfully quite rare in Scotland. And if an avalanche could easily have been predicted in that location then the answer isn't to carry a shovel and a probe.

Backcountry skiers in Scotland usually do, climbers less often.  I think one thing that's changed is that climbers not taking SPT is more likely to be a reasoned decision rather than it just being not what climbers do.

My impression is that's it's the norm amongst ski tourers now, but almost never done by climbers still. I remember my mate borrowing a transceiver for me from another friend when he lived in Fort William back in IIRC, 2000. So it wasn't unheard of among skiers back then. We went over the Aonachs and down into Glen Nevis. I had my own shovel and I think my own probe by then though.

I'll look in the SMC Ski Touring guidebook from the late 80s (?) and see if they mention avalanches and transceivers in that.

Thinking more in terms of Norway, but there are people who will say that if you're out in the mountains enough in winter then sooner or later you are going to be involved in some sort of avalanche, despite due diligence with following forecasts. More so with ski touring where there might be potential local avalanche traps on descents. Most people take avalanche gear for that reason. 

Really don't recognise the "Scottish approach" you are referring to from any form of avalanche education or practice I've been exposed to on both the mountaineering and ski touring end of things.

Ut.no looks good and Fatmap is the way to do similar in Scotland (or Norway). Paid app rather than freely available website (although I think there's a free/basic one that does slope angles you could have a look at). Really useful for route planning before heading out touring, based on current conditions and forecasts. Also good if heading out on foot or approaches to climbs too. 

The approach to mountain safety planning (wrt avalanches) has developed massively over the years i've been walking and climbing in Scotland. There are excellent resources at https://beaware.sais.gov.uk/ and https://be-avalanche-aware.teachable.com/p/be-avalanche-aware.

In short, the informed, advocated approach in Scotland is essentially 'design/plan the risk out' when planning your journey, and then during the day / journey use continual observations and your knowledge to corroborate your understanding of conditions and decisions, check your plan, and make changes if necessary.

The Norwegian approach you've described is also risk 'planned out', but with more open space and more reliable snow conditions in Norway, safe corridors can be put on a map (or waymarked) and that works. Scotlands open space has less reliable snow conditions, and so fun seekers (walkers, climbers, skiers) are, relatively speaking, compressed into a smaller area in the higher mountains which would inevitably make the definition and setting in stone of an 'always safe in every kind of condition route' more challenging, if not impractical.

Sorry, I have to disagree on this a bit. Norway is a long country with huge differences in snow cover between north and south, and a strong climate gradient between coastal areas with a maritime climate and inland, more continental climate which also affects snow cover. So the reliability of snow in Norway is very much dependent on where you are.

I think the main problem with the original post is that there are two very different disciplines/activities being compared to each other, rather than comparing an approach which is typical of either Norway or Scotland. Fjellski aren't meant for travel in steep terrain, so fjellski type tours aren't typically going to be based in avalanche terrain either and avalanche gear isn't going to be necessary (although I guess its possible you could still use them to walk through valleys with steep sides which could avalanche).

Scotland (from what I can still remember) has a lot more freeze-thaw cycles making the snowpack typically hard and frozen for a much greater part of the winter, so this type of snowpack isn't likely to give the type of avalanche danger that you'd get from fresh windtransported snow or persistent weak layers in the snowpack. So I guess for those days where this kind of avalanche problem isn't present, there isn't much need for avalanche gear. There are times when we have had the same kind of rock hard, transformed snowpack during winter in Tromsø and I haven't bothered taking avalanche gear in steep terrain with me either.

In the same way I don'r expect to be in a car crash but I still wear my seatbelt. 

To extend your analogy, would you wear a car seatbelt on a motorbike on the basis that it improved outcomes in car accidents so it must also do so on motorbikes?

I find it interesting that some of those advocating tranceiver (etc) use for climbers seem to assume that climbers not using them is based on some lack of education/understanding or an irrational resistance.

Rather than repeat the arguments for and against I think it's worth considering the thought processes of climbers and what is the more likely explanation for climbers not using tranceivers.

I know a lot of really active winter climbers. Most of them are very thoughtful and reflective individuals, particularly around safety matters and will readily adopt new equipment or procedures if they have merit. Many of them use tranceivers when skiing or are familiar with tranceivers through their professional (instructors) or voluntary roles (MRT). Lots of us have had conversations around tranceiver use in climbing.

What is more likely?  That for lots of climbers, not using tranceivers is a reasoned and informed response to their pros and cons or that all these experienced people are wrong and the penny is yet to drop.

In the past I think the latter could well have been the case but I really don't think so now.