Tyler's VUCA related musings from backcountry skiing in the La Sal Mountains Utah, February 2025

About 2 weeks ago, I ventured forth on a backcountry ski trip to a yurt in the La Sal Mountains, Utah with two friends. We found some serious structural instabilities in the snowpack, that seemed like at apt metaphor for humanity around this theme of surviving and thriving in VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity). How do we gather and share information, and at what scale are we looking at things, both in time and in location? How do we make good decisions with incomplete information, and avoid 'analysis paralysis'? What heuristics are we using and why? How does our 'gut instinct' and experience figure in? Should we just stay home and hide?!

So, the physical avalanche risk is the integration of a lot of complex variables like layering of previous snowfalls, weather patterns during and between storms, temperature gradients in the snowpack, steepness, sun exposure, elevation above/below treeline, etc). All of this information is good to know, but it turns out that we can infer a lot of this by close observation with an experienced eye. The red arrow is pointing at where the snowpack failed when we tested it.

Or even closer, we saw crystal formation (aka Depth Hoar) that told us a story of water vapor moving up the snowpack and re-freezing. Causing a layer of 'ball bearings' that a 2 foot layer of snow from the previous storm cycle was laying on.

However!!! It turns out that what kills more people in avalanches is not a lack of warning signs, or the skillset to read them. It's group psychology. There are too many tales of highly experienced mountaineers dying on their local backcountry ski zone, where they are the most confident and comfortable. What does that tell us about how we might have blind spots just based on where we find information, who we talk to, the assumptions we hold, what we hope is true???

Food for thought......

On the way home, driving through Navajo land in Arizona, we came across these impactful works on abandoned structures in the desert.