Click here to download Griffin’s paper.

Abstract

Snowshoeing and winter hiking has experienced a tremendous boom in the last decade. To better serve this community with effective avalanche safety messages, it is critical to have an in-depth understanding of the extent they travel in avalanche terrain, what level of avalanche skills training they possess, and where they get their information for undertaking winter backcountry trips. To obtain this information, we conducted intercept interviews with snowshoers and winter hikers at the main trail-head of several popular snowshoe and winter hiking trails in Mount Seymour Provincial Park outside of Vancouver, B.C, Canada. Our analysis dataset included responses of 510 participants. We used the maximum ATES (Avalanche Terrain Exposure Scale) rating of typical trip destinations participants shared with us as a general measure for their exposure to avalanche terrain. We found that all study participants expose themselves to at least some levels of avalanche terrain: 58% of participants re-ported to travel in challenging terrain, followed by 29% in simple terrain, and 13% in complex terrain. This is in stark contrast to the low awareness and concern for avalanches in general, low levels of formal avalanche skills training and use of avalanche safety gear, and low awareness and use of exist-ing avalanche safety products and services including the public avalanche forecast. The main reason participants did not use the forecast or take an avalanche safety course was because they do not think that they expose themselves to avalanche terrain, which contradicts their exposure on their stated trip destinations. These results highlight that initiatives raising awareness of what constitutes avalanche terrain and how to recognize it, as well as decision support tools that indicate appropriate trails under existing conditions offer promising avenues for improving avalanche safety among snowshoers and winter hikers.