Should You Carry Avalanche Gear on Spring Ski Tours?

Carrying rescue gear every day is also a way to hedge against risk compensation. That’s the (il)logic that argues if you use safety equipment like rescue gear, an airbag, a helmet, or even a seatbelt, you’re more likely to engage in risky behavior like skiing a questionable slope or hitting a 20-foot drop in the backcountry. If carrying rescue gear isn’t a choice you make each tour and instead is an automatic behavior, it shouldn’t change the way you approach your risk, Huetter argued.

The next question goes like this: when is a spring diurnal snowpack no longer springy? This year in the Eastern Sierra, we’ve experienced wildly unsettled weather. A strong corn cycle built in April, and then in May it snowed over a foot in a single storm.

Each subsequent weather event disrupts our spring diurnal cycle and our assumptions about its safety margins. Huetter told me that last week after a few inches of snow fell and got blown into drifts by the wind, the sun came out and baked it. He cut a D 1.5 wet slide while skiing near Yosemite National Park on May 4. If you’re spending an extended period in the backcountry without good access to weather data, bringing rescue gear could make or break your trip.

“My question for the general user is this,” Huetter said. “There’s so much nuance that we can’t teach people in a Level One [avalanche course]. You can’t break the rules until you master them. If you’re out on a big High Sierra ski tour in the spring knowing what you know now, would you be psyched to travel without rescue gear?”

The average weight of a shovel and probe is just north of one pound, or 500 grams. That’s hardly a weight penalty for most average days in the backcountry. But ski mountaineering is where that logic begins to change.

All of a sudden when the days lengthen, higher objectives deep in the mountains become more appealing. Those faces and couloirs often require ice axes and crampons to access, maybe even a harness and rope along with pitons or nuts. These heavy and bulky pieces of equipment can be vital to avoid another type of hazard in the mountains—slipping and falling on firm slopes.

At the same time, those longer days and higher sun angles cause the snow to heat up earlier and earlier, requiring you to rise earlier and move quicker to get off slopes before wet avalanches become a problem. Every gram counts in the spring and summer in a way that it often didn’t matter when you were chasing powder in the trees a few months prior.

Greg Cunningham is the director of ski patrol at Kirkwood. He’s also a prolific ski mountaineer who, along with his partner Jenna Kane, completed the rare and coveted Redline Traverse in 2023. Cunningham and Kane skied 145 miles and over 80,000 vertical feet of technical terrain between Mount Whitney and Mammoth Lakes, connecting the highest peaks in the Sierra in one continuous push. But when they gave a slideshow on their mission at an Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center event the following year, they were shocked at the negative feedback they received for not bringing avalanche rescue gear on the Redline.

It snowed the first few days of their traverse, but Cunningham says he didn’t regret leaving his shovel and probe behind. “We were dedicated to sticking to the route as best we could, but our biggest asset for mitigating avalanche hazard was time,” Cunningham told me. He said that because they had cached food at various points on the route and had meticulously selected their gear to be able to move as quickly as possible, they were able to truncate their days or start early depending on the terrain and snow conditions they were moving through.

“Being out there all day every day, you have more information on this zone than anyone in the world, as long as you know how to process it,” Cunningham said.

Cunningham was quick to demure that leaving gear behind is not advice he’d give to casual skiers. He’s spent decades in the Sierra backcountry and has amassed an enormous amount of experience. But he does think that the ski industry has massively overemphasized avalanche rescue training and de-emphasized other skills that he thinks are more likely to keep you alive in the mountains. He’s been doing research on accidents for a paper for the Avalanche Review that will press his argument further, but Cunningham questions why partner rescue skills are non-negotiable in skiing and not in climbing (how many climbers actually know how to escape a belay or pass a knot?), where other hard skills are left by the wayside.

“Avalanche gear is for digging out someone who’s buried,” Cunningham argued. “Is the avalanche problem going to bury you? Or is the problem a giant cornice fall where your avalanche gear isn’t going to do squat?” He is frustrated when he sees skiers get in serious trouble in firm snow. Sure, they brought their shovel and probe, but they neglected to practice steep firm skiing on their backcountry setups and they slid 2,000 feet off a cliff.

Instead of following only an avalanche safety program that can keep you safe from one kind of hazard, Cunningham suggests that each day before they enter the mountains, skiers do a rigorous assessment of all of the hazards they may encounter and carefully consider what equipment they may need to safely manage them.

Cunningham lamented the idea that with proper rescue training inexperienced parties think they can get involved in a slide safely. “Ideally you go through your whole career never having an involvement, so why are we so focused upfront on rescue,” he asked. He let on that mid-winter, if he’s going to ski firm snow (as is often the case during long high-pressure spells that plague the Sierra in January), he may not carry rescue gear. But instead he may carry a pyramid tent which he can use as a wind shelter in the cold, blowing conditions.

“On the professional side I pride myself on being a really strong rescuer,” Cunningham said. “At work I’m carrying avy gear every day. I try to make sure everyone else does too, though it’s not a hard-and-fast rule on patrol.”

But in the mountains on his own time, he’s balancing his objectives, the hazards, and a speed-is-safety ethos. “I don’t necessarily put rescue gear on a pedestal because there are a million things that can kill you in the mountains,” he said.

Ryan Huetter pointed me to an essay published in 2014 by Roger Atkins called Yin, Yang, and You. The essay, now a seminal work in the snow safety community, urges backcountry skiers to reconsider how they balance their subjective judgement and rational analysis with you, the emotional human who’s responsible for resolving those two factions into a dynamic system. Both Huetter and Cunningham offer different schools on how to reduce your uncertainty in the mountains. It’s worth pointing out that for those with less experience in the backcountry, Huetter’s approach of bringing rescue gear every single time is often preferable.

For those refusing to give up on their ski seasons in June and beyond, honestly, I hope this discussion brings you more questions than answers. Keep building your skillset and refining your approach to skiing in big mountains. ‘Keep debriefing with your partners about when in the day you faced the greatest hazard and what you did or could have done to mitigate it. There is a lifetime of experience to be gained by skiers with patience and brains.