Backcountry Safety Awareness Week Winter Safety Tips

RENO, Nev. (775 Times, NV Globe) – Due to all of the recent snowfall in the mountains, it is the perfect moment for Backcountry Safety Awareness Week. This is an excellent chance for us to learn about the hazards and how to be safe.

Several groups will hold in-person and virtual events to raise awareness during the third annual awareness week.

UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab lead scientist will examine snowpack changes and their influence throughout the fire season. On Thursday, you can learn about the greatest backcountry techniques at RMU in Truckee, followed by live music.

“It’s incredible to see all this great snow, everyone’s going to want to go out and play in it, I know I do, but it makes things incredibly dangerous. The risk of avalanche is high, and what we know about avalanche safety is that it just takes one person to not know what they’re doing to put everybody else’s life in jeopardy,”

She continued,

“When you have a really wet storm come in and then it gets light on top it creates what are called these slabs and they’ll just slide right off, and you could look at something and think of it as beautiful. You could trigger an avalanche quite easily. People are enticed to go backcountry skiing, but we really ask people to get smart and take an Avi-1 class / Area 1 class that way they are trained before they go into the backcountry.”

Palisades Tahoe will host a backcountry safety summit on Friday. The Hope Valley Snow-Park will conclude the awareness week with a snow sports user meet-up.

It is recommended that you verify conditions before venturing up to the mountains to ski, snowboard, sled, or snowmobile.

Credits: KoloTv