It’s that happy but busy time of year now where everything skiable is starting to look good…get it before it’s gone.

I’ve finally put together a trip report from my recent tour in the Cucamonga Wilderness, right after an April-Fool’s storm dropped two feet of snow all the way down to 5000′.

I decided to skin up Ice House Canyon and then traverse the ridgeline connecting Bighorn Peak and Ontario Peak. This turned out to be a long, strenuous tour, but it showcases the beauty and remoteness of the Cucamonga Wilderness in Southern California’s San Gabriel Mountains.

As for the skiing, the descent was an unexpected delight: fresh powder on intermediate, rolling, marvelously-open terrain (trip report).

NOTE: images in this new trip report are now clickable, thanks to technology pilfered from Broofa.com.

What good is a record-setting snowpack if you can’t ski it? That’s the question some Sierra skiers may be asking, especially after yesterday’s in-bounds avalanche at Mammoth Mountain.

Surveying the Southern Sierra this past weekend, I was stunned by the amount of snow I saw. Skiable lines were appearing in places that are normally bare rock—Langley’s north face, for example.

Yet beneath that gleaming white surface lurks an unusually quirky snowpack. The sheer depth of the snow seems to be slowing the consolidation of deep, unstable layers, even now, well into April.

Up top, the over-abundance of snow is getting cooked by warmer and warmer days, threatening massive wet slides. So we have wet slide and slab avalanche potential. What’s a Sierra skier supposed to do?

I’m guessing we’ll know more about the snow in a week or so, provided the storms finally fade away. For now, it’s probably best to consider the snowpack a hybrid of winter and spring—and a very unpredictable one at that.

Mammoth Mountain will contribute 100% of lift ticket sales on Friday, April 14, to help support the families of the three patrollers who died last week.

James Juarez, John Scott McAndrews, and Charles Walter Rosenthal (President and a founding member of the Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center) were killed while trying to fence off a hidden snow cavern created by a volcanic gas vent near Mammoth’s Face Lift.

If you’re unable to ski Mammoth Mountain, you can still participate in this extraordinary tribute by purchasing a lift ticket for Friday online. Mount Rose will also donate 100% of Friday’s lift ticket sales, and Vail Resorts and Aspen Ski Company will be making contributions.

The tragedies of this season remind us how fragile and precious life truly is. Let us remember to keep family and friends dear, reject fear and foolishness, and make our time count—on the mountain and off. Hope to see you at Mammoth!

Finally put together a trip report for my March 24 venture into Stockton Flats, loosely part of the proposed expansion area for the Mount Baldy Ski Resort in the San Gabriel Mountains.

This trip is notable for the extreme surface instability I encountered, due to very warm weather. For that reason (I probably should have turned back) and because this area is so easily accessed, I did hesitate to post the report.

Stockton Flats is very different from the benign glade it appears to be on the trail map. I strongly discourage anyone from entering the region unless they’ve studied a topo map, are prepared to travel through heavily cliffed terrain, and are properly equipped to get out.

We all have to make our own choices when it comes to the backcountry terrain we ski. But Stockton Flats is both unusually inviting and unusually deceptive. If you want high adventure without the possibility of getting very, very lost, go ski Telegraph Peak instead.

Multiple sources are confirming that Doug Coombs has been killed while skiing in La Grave, France. Coombs apparently slipped and fell while trying to aid a friend who had just fallen over a cliff.

Coombs, 48, was one of the giants of American extreme skiing. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he eschewed the flashier side of the sport, preferring instead to focus on ski mountaineering and guiding.

His quiet, powerful skiing style—and two Extreme Skiing World Championships—earned him recognition as one of the world’s best skiers. Coombs later founded Valdez Heli-Ski Guides in Alaska, and a steep-skiing camp in La Grave.

He is survived by his wife, Emily, and young son, David. A memorial fund has been established on their behalf.

Coombs influenced many throughout the skiing world with his flowing style, his generous personality, and his enduring ethics. He will be missed.

I’ve been reading a collection of articles on the SunRockIce website. One that caught my eye is called Decision Making for Wilderness Leaders, by Ian McCammon, of the National Outdoor Leadership School.

It’s probably no secret that the avalanche education industry has undergone a crisis of confidence in recent years. Disturbing studies suggest not only that traditional avalanche courses may be ineffective, but that they may even increase the likelihood a person will expose themself to risk.

McCammon’s article examines three ways we make decisions, and assesses them from the point of view of preventing avalanche fatalities.

The first method is called Analytic Decision Making. This is the process most often taught in avy courses, emphasizing the collection of data, using that data to compare alternatives, and then choosing a course of action.

We would expect Analytic Decision Making to be the most rational and therefore the most effective of the three methods. Surprise: in the topsy-turvey world of avalanches and mountaineering, the Analytic method is the least effective, particularly for novices.

To understand why, we need only look at the first step of the process: gathering data. This works well in situations where it is possible to collect and accurately assess all relevant data.

In the mountains, however, data is often incomplete and ambiguous. Additionally, it takes valuable time (itself a safety consideration) to collect the data. The likely result of trying to make an analysis of incomplete (or misleading) data is a bad decision, or the inability to even reach a decision.

The second mode is labeled Heuristic Decision Making. Mountaineers are probably familiar with the term Heuristic Trap, which refers to our tendency to apply rules of thumb inappropriately when making critical decisions.

Heuristics, however, can also be useful in the backcountry, provided those rules of thumb are appropriate to the situation. For example, a heuristic rule might be to avoid slopes steeper than 30 degrees whenever the avalanche danger is rated (by a professional forecast) considerable or higher.

Here, choice has been removed from the system in favor of a simple rule. For novices, this can be advantageous, provided the rule is adhered to—and provided the rule is appropriate to the context.

The last and most interesting method is called Expert Decision Making, or Recognition-Primed Decision Strategy. In this case, experts employ their extensive catalogue of knowledge to search for pattern matches.

That is, they gather information until they’re able to recognize conditions as something they’ve seen before, at which point they’re able to effectively predict what will happen, and make good choices accordingly.

RPD can be the most effective of the three methods. However, like heuristic decision making, experts can fool themselves into thinking they have expertise about a situation when in fact it is beyond their range of experience: the Expert Trap.

Ultimately, McCammon stresses the complexity of Human decision making processes, and how little we know about it. From these three examples, however, McCammon suggests ways to teach better backcountry decision strategies. If the topic interests you, do give the article a look.