There’s a particular smell to the first week of October in Mount Shasta. Cold air coming down off the mountain in the mornings, woodsmoke in the evenings, and that restless itch that every skier knows. I find myself standing in my garage this time of year, staring at my skis like they owe me money. I typically have already started checking the rest of my gear around this time of year as well. Not because there’s snow to ski; there isn’t, not really. Just because it’s October, and my hands want something to do that is snow related.
I think most of us who love being in the snow have some version of this ritual. We wax skis that don’t need waxing. We reorganize gear that’s already organized. We stand around talking about last season’s best day like it was yesterday.
This October, the itch has a soundtrack to it as well. Seemingly everywhere I go somebody’s talking about the Super El Niño and what that might mean for this winter. On September 10th, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center put out an advisory: greater than a 90% chance of a very strong El Niño this fall and winter, with real odds it becomes the strongest since 1950. After last winter’s statewide snowpack finished around 21% of average (the northern Sierra at 9%), I absolutely understand the hunger. I feel it too!
With that, I wanted to write about what that hunger can do to us. It’s a strange thing to think, but the most dangerous part of a forecasted epic winter isn’t the storms. It’s us, waiting for them.
So, here’s what I’ve been thinking about and wanted to write about this week: It’s passing on the knowledge that a lot of your winter is decided in October. Not in January, when the snowpack is deep and the decisions feel like they’re being made. It’s October, when nothing has happened yet and everything still feels possible. That might sound dramatic, but hear me out.
Why Is October So Important?
Believe it or not, the snowpack has a memory, and October is when it starts forming them.
The first snows of the season usually arrive as a thin, shallow layer. Then come the long, cold, clear October nights. Cold air above, relatively warm ground below. That creates a strong temperature gradient, and it does something specific to shallow snow: it builds faceted crystals near the ground. Think sugary, poorly bonded grains that don’t like sticking to anything.
Here’s the part that matters, but people don’t always realize. Those early-season facets don’t always go away. They can get buried by every storm for the rest of the winter and become persistent weak layers that can be behind deep. Sometimes they might show signs of healing, and other times, they might seem dormant before becoming those large, unsurvivable avalanches in January, February, or March. I’ve written before about how snow doesn’t fail randomly, that avalanches are mechanical outcomes of structure and stress. It’s important to know that some of that structure might be built in October, while most of us are still mountain biking.
So, October matters because the mountains are already setting the chess board and is starting to keep score, even when while some may not be paying attention.
What’s the Hardest Part to Practice?
Us…… It’s always us……..
If you’ve followed my writing for a while, you might remember that I wrote about us all carrying weak layers inside us. I wrote about some of those being fatigue, ego, fear, overconfidence, and the desire for acceptance. While we should start thinking about the snow layers that might be on the ground now, it’s important to realize the snowpack isn’t the only thing forming layers in October. We are too. Every year, we are laying down our own unique layers for that season.
Over the last year or so, I’ve written a lot about human factors and heuristic traps. The idea that some mental shortcuts can quietly undermine good intentions. I’ve thought about human psychology since my early life, and I believe that if there’s a season when those traps are at their strongest, it’s at the start of one. Here’s why for this situation.
Familiarity: “I’ve skied this line a hundred times.” Sure; in March, with a deep, settled snowpack. Not in November, with a foot of snow over boulders and a facet factory underneath.
Social proof: The first powder day, the parking lot is full, everyone’s grinning, tracks going everywhere. It is genuinely hard to be the person who looks at all that enthusiasm and says, “I think I’ll wait.” Nobody wants to be that person. I’ve been that person, and it’s lonely.
Scarcity: First tracks of the season feel rare and precious, which makes them feel urgent. Urgency is the enemy of good judgment. The snow will come. There will be other powder days. There won’t be another you.
Then there is what might be the quietest trap of all, the one most fall into every year: the fresh-start illusion. New season, new me. This is the year I’ll do everything right! Practice more, take that refresher course, check the forecast every morning. It’s a lovely thought that usually lasts until about December.
I’m not saying this to be cynical. I’m saying it because I recognize it in myself too. AND if someone who teaches this stuff for a living still has to fight it, it’s probably worth naming out loud.
Now, here’s where I’m going to complicate the story a bit too. That’s because last week, at the International Snow Science Workshop in Whistler, Ian McCammon presented new research that challenged something I’ve believed for years. McCammon is the researcher whose work on heuristic traps basically created the modern conversation about decision-making in avalanche terrain. His new paper, with Sara Boilen, suggests the traps aren’t the whole story. Not even close.
It opens with a moment I bet every backcountry traveler recognizes: the “How did we get here?” experience. You’re standing somewhere you know you shouldn’t be, and you can’t quite reconstruct the small, reasonable choices that got you there. Afterwards, trying to figure out what went wrong feels like a murky hunt for causes that never fully explain it.
Their argument is that we’ve been looking for the wrong thing. Most of the time, there isn’t one bad decision to find. Instead, unremarkable conditions like a slightly late start, a partner you don’t know well, a forecast you half-read, a slope that looked fine from the skin track interact and snowball in ways no single piece could have predicted. They call it adverse emergence: critical risk emerging from the interaction of social, cognitive, and environmental factors, not from any one flaw.
Read that again, because it matters: most avalanche accidents don’t come from one spectacularly bad call. They come from ordinary ingredients combining in un-ordinary ways.
This is also why, in their words, simply knowing about biases “has a poor record of effectiveness.” I’ve taught heuristic traps for years. I’m not going to stop now, but this is a humbling reminder that awareness isn’t armor. You can know every trap by name and still walk into one, because the trap isn’t always in your head. Sometimes it’s in the space between you and your partners.
In reading the paper I was thinking a lot about previous SAR missions I’ve been on. I wrote not long ago about them not generally being caused by one large mistake but are more commonly a series of little ones that add up. Thinking of that while reading paper stopped me cold on one of their findings. McCammon and Boilen surveyed 918 backcountry skiers and snowboarders across the U.S. about what they struggle with most. The top of the list wasn’t reading the snowpack. It wasn’t terrain selection. It was reading each other: making sure the group’s perception of risk is accurate. Being honest about expectations. Making sure everyone understands the risks and shares their honest opinions.
Think about that. After all the courses, all the snow science, all the gear – the thing we’re worst at is talking to each other honestly.
I find that both discouraging and weirdly hopeful. Because unlike the snowpack, your partners are something you can actually work on. In October. In your living room. Before a single flake falls.
What Does a Starved Winter Do to a Hungry Skier?
Now layer the forecast on top of all of that. Last winter starved us! 21% of average snowpack statewide, and now the models are promising a feast. I want to be careful here, because it’s important to know a forecast is not a promise. El Niño loads the dice; it doesn’t roll them. A very strong El Niño tilts California toward a wetter southern storm track, but the storms run warmer, which can mean rain falling where we want snow. No outlook tells you what happens on any given slope on any given day though. The hype seems to already be real form many people though – and hype is a heuristic trap with a season pass.
Scarcity got a promotion last year. It’s not just first tracks anymore; it’s a whole season that might feel scarce, because last season seemed to barely count. When something feels scarce, it tends to feel urgent. When it feels urgent, some might stop doing the slow, unglamorous things like putting in pits, the discussions, the turnarounds, etc. – the things that might help keep us alive.
Expectation is its own trap, too. “This is THE year” is a story we tell ourselves, and stories are sticky. They shape what we notice and what we ignore. If you’ve already decided this is the winter of your life, you’re less likely to notice the day that isn’t.
Here’s the cruelest irony though, the snow-science one: the most dangerous winters are often the ones that start thin. If October builds its usual crop of facets and then a historic El Niño buries them under ten feet of load, that’s the textbook setup for deep persistent problems. The ones where the avalanches might break a meter deep (or more), propagate across entire basins, and don’t care how good your forecast was. It can create the type of problems we read about in magazines or news articles years later. The winter everyone’s been praying for is the same winter that can turn October’s weak layers into season-long land mines.
Please realize that none of these ingredients is dangerous on their own. A forecast. A dry winter. Stoke. BUT – put them together in a parking lot on any given day, with everyone telling themselves this is the year – that’s adverse emergence, and it doesn’t announce itself.
SO – What Does a Good October Look Like?
The good news is that October is also the cheapest month to get better at all of this. Nothing really counts yet. Nobody’s watching. You can be bad at the drill in your backyard and the only witness is your dog.
One more thing I want to highlight from that paper: no single defense works every time. Your transceiver (beacon), your forecast habit, your snowpack knowledge, your partner speaking up, they all have gaps. The strength is in the redundancy, in the layers of your system. So, think of October as the month you build layers. Here’s what I’d recommend doing:
Have the awkward conversation now. Before the season, sit down with your regular partners in your living room, at a brewery, wherever and start talking about those quiet parts out loud now.
- What are we trying to get out of this winter?
- What scares each of us?
- Under what conditions do we turn around, no questions asked, no grief given?
That survey found “everyone is honest about their expectations” was one of the most underserved needs in the backcountry. October is when you fix that, when the stakes are zero and nobody’s standing in a parking lot in ski boots feeling the pressure to just go. Especially in a hyped season: agree now that a big forecast doesn’t change the plan.
Pull the transceiver out now. Get those fresh batteries in it, check the firmware, then go hide it in the backyard or a park and find it. Time yourself. Be honest about it. If it’s over five minutes, that’s information, not failure. But it’s information you want in October, not in February.
Put your shovel and probe together. Assemble and inspect them now. Feel for the cracked ferrule, the bent section, a fraying cable. Believe it or not, gear can fail in the garage, or it fails on the slope. You get decrease the odds of it being on the slope by checking things ahead of time.
If you have one, check your airbag. Is the canister full, or is the charge holding? Trigger functioning? (Ask me how I know.)
Read last season’s accident reports. I know, it’s grim reading!!! It’s also the cheapest education in the mountains. Every report is someone else paying tuition so you don’t have to. The patterns tend to repeat. That’s the haunting part, and the useful part.
Take the course before you need it. Refresher, Level 1, Level 2, Pro 1 – whatever’s next for you. They fill up, and there’s a reason the smart money signs up in October instead of scrambling in January. We run avalanche courses all winter out of Mount Shasta, Bear Valley, and Mount Charleston, and I’d obviously love to see you in one of ours. Honestly though, I’d rather see you in anyone’s course than in no course at all. There are even free on-ramps – Ski-Doo just announced its 18th year of free avalanche awareness seminars across the U.S. and Canada, which tells you something about how seriously the broader community is taking this.
If a multi-day course isn’t in the cards this fall, look for your regional Snow and Avalanche Workshop. They happen all over the country every autumn. Spend a day listening to topics presented by forecasters, researchers, and guides sharing what’s new and what last season taught us. A lot of them offer online attendance now, so there’s very little reason not to catch at least one. It’s the best single-day continuing education going, and I’d bet good money you’ll walk out with at least one idea that changes how you travel this winter.
Start reading the bulletins now. Even before there’s substantial amount of snow. Make it a morning habit, like coffee. By the time the season starts for real, you’ll already being speaking the language.
I realize none of this is glamorous, and none of it will get likes. That’s kind of the point though, isn’t it?
The Deal
Every October I start pulling my gear out and tell myself this is the year I’ll do everything right. Every October, I mean it too. Yet, every season, I still catch myself. I’m still working on it. I’ll probably always be working on it. I suspect this is the case for most, but here’s the deal.
Regardless of who you are or what your experience level is, you deserve to come home. The mountains will be there all winter. Let’s make sure we are too.
I’ll be at a local park, the SAR barn, or in my backyard with a transceiver and a dog who is fairly convinced I’ve lost my mind. You’re welcome to join me – figuratively, I mean. Get your own backyard.
Written By Caleb Burns
SWS Mountain Guides runs American Avalanche Association-recognized avalanche courses all winter in Mount Shasta, Bear Valley, and Mount Charleston – including Pro 1. Courses