AIARE PRO 1--Becoming a Pro
It’s easy getting up early to take weather observations when it looks like this!
After finishing my AIARE PRO 1 course last season and getting the very relieving news that I passed, I felt so proud. I had worked really hard preparing for the course before and during the course to make sure I was getting as much out of it as possible. My previous post was about how I reached the point of being ready and seeking out this course after over 20 years as a backcountry skier (both professionally and recreationally)—and this post is some of my thoughts from after the course on what I learned and how it will affect how I approach decision-making, both personally and professionally in the mountains.
The AIARE PRO 1 that I took was a 5-day, intensive course from 7am until sometimes 6pm, plus studying at night. This is a course for folks looking to expand beyond recreational backcountry use, in order to work in the ski and snowboard industry as a guide, ski patroller, avalanche course instructor, avalanche forecaster, among other snow jobs.
The course was intense—after about 40 hours of pre-course online work, study, and practice, we showed up at the lodge to five full days of classroom instruction and on-snow practice, homework, and exams. We learned about weather observations, took a rescue exam, dug many pits and practiced identifying layers of concern in the snowpack through a variety of observations, measurements, and snowpack tests. We worked on risk management and group dynamics, terrain identification and route-finding, planning and de-briefing, and so much more. Whew! It was a big week, capped off with an hour written exam over the following weekend.
Not a bad place to be when it’s dumping outside—okay, maybe not my number one choice of places to be when it’s dumping outside, but it’s a pretty good one.
The instructors did an amazing job of the “model, mentor, measure” educational style where they first talked about something, then showed us how to do it, let us practice while they watched and gently corrected, and then let us practice a lot more on our own before getting tested.
The first test, the rescue exam, was one I was very nervous for. The standard is to locate and unbury 2 beacons in a 100 square meter area—each buried up to 1m deep—in under 7 minutes. Seven minutes sounds like a lot until you are under pressure running around with your beacon in your ski boots in deep snow, trying to manage your shovel and probe while not losing your skis, poles, gloves and backpack in the process. Just one mistake can really affect your timing, not to mention shake you off your game. For me, gear management was the name of the game. I needed to have a good spot to stash my beacon after I did the pinpoint search, while I grabbed my shovel and probe and used them, and then I needed to decide whether or not to put my skis back on to get to the next beacon, while carrying my shovel and probe in one hand and beacon in the other. I chose to leave my gear and go on foot, figuring that even as slow is it was to walk in the deep snow, I would be faster than clicking into and out of my pin bindings again in the deep, sticky snow. I was breathing so hard. I practiced a ton in the weeks leading up to the course and I had it under 7 but it wasn’t a gimme, and I was mostly on firm, easy-travel snow. But I did it! Practice practice practice was the key for me, and also having my fine search down from years of instructing intro-to-avalanche courses with SAFE AS.
You need to make your pit “THIS BIG”
Next up we had our observations test—we had to take and record a series of weather and snow observations while being watched by an instructor. This was something I had less practice in, but the instructors had us out there every morning practicing until we got our flow down. Again, finding a flow order of when to do things, plus gear management, were both key. I wasn’t perfect but I passed, and understood the concepts much better after the test, and why these observations mattered.
Then was the pit digging. I had watched folks dig pits a lot of times, and had helped out, but never had been leading the process myself, so this was one I needed to practice (and still need to practice). Again, flow of process, getting my order down, and managing my gear was how I made it happen. It was wild to me to be able to watch the weather over the five days (total dumpage with a few breaks) and start to be able to see it play out in real time when performing the column tests and within the profile. It’s something I had understood in a relative way as a recreational user over the years (“oh it rained last week and froze, then we got two inches of cold snow today, it should be dust on crust today”), but measuring and recording in a professional setting, learning about the snow grains and ID’ing them—really getting granular, quite literally—helped put a practical base under my knowledge that is so key. The what and the why behind the what and the why!
In the end, one of the best takeaways from the course was our instructor Anne reinforcing the concept that saying “I don’t know,” even in a professional setting, is far more safe, constructive, and progressive than trying to just go off of what you do know, or bend the data to fit your hopes and expectations. We used to be expected, as avalanche professionals, to know everything and always have the answer. But focusing on what we don’t know rather than what we do know, can show us the critical knowledge gaps, help encourage constructive discussion, and ultimately flip the way we approach the mountains, a sort of “guilty until proven innocent” approach. Not that all mountains are guilty—just that we want to make sure we know what we know rather than using our observations to confirm our bias and “hoping for the best.”
I look forward to continuing my AIARE education, and I hope to take my Instructor Training Certification course this coming season in order to further my knowledge and experience. Again, I encourage everyone to check out avtraining.org to see how you can start or continue your own avalanche education.
Wait, how big?!
