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Mindfulness in the Mountains

October 3, 2015 by Keith Robine

This year, we’ll be adding more Mindfulness Training to our courses.

mindful in the mountains

Current research about the brain is showing that the better we learn to regulate our bodies before making important decisions, the better our decisions will be.  Although we’ve known for many years that human factors contribute to avalanche accidents, we’ve been scratching our heads how to teach human factors so that avalanche students will be less prone to making mistakes.  Perhaps this new knowledge about the psychology of the brain will help us when playing the avalanche game.

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Comments

  1. Laura says

    November 5, 2015 at 5:59 am

    Great to hear Keith, mindfulness and self awareness are worthwhile tools for the backcountry! I’m hoping to get to Rossland this year to do some turns and would love to hear how it’s going in the courses.

    I have to ask though, are people really ‘prone to making mistakes’? When I think of the countless hours of no-incident backcountry touring we see a lot of people doing a lot of things right and oftentimes we don’t know a decision is a mistake until we have a negative outcome to call it such. In that way, it appears people actually handle the backcountry dynamics quite well and only occasionally fail to make sense of the environment. Can we strictly attribute the failures to decision-making?

    Hope you are well, LM

    • Keith Robine says

      November 5, 2015 at 6:28 am

      Laura, thanks for your insightful comment. Yes, you’re right. There are countless hours of no-incident backcountry touring, however in many of those cases people do make mistakes yet don’t realize it. There was a study done showing that a completely uneducated recreationist could travel in the winter backcountry and 95% of the time would come home unharmed, even though they likely made many mistakes. Those aren’t horrible odds, but personally, I want much better odds, especially since I’m out there as much as 100 days in a season. Most backcountry skiers have some education, and that helps improve their odds significantly. Negative human factors are usually a main culprit in all avalanche related fatalities, but due to the statistic above, fatalities don’t happen every day thank goodness. The goal of using mindfulness in the backcountry is to promote the positive human factors that help a group make the right decisions to help them stay safe close to 100% of the time. Another side benefit may mean they also have a more fulfilling day in the mountains through that same mindful awareness! Thanks again Laura…I hope you get a chance to connect with me when you come through Rossland later in the winter.

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