I am still alive because of luck. Not skill, not good decision making, not experience. Beautiful brilliant luck.
Whenever the hubris starts to build and thoughts of my own capacity surface, I try to suffocate them with memories of all the times I got lucky. There are too many to count. That is where the small measure of experience I can draw on starts. The days where I know the mistake I made, and luck is what got me home. Everyone I respect in the mountains who is still alive today is lucky. It is the basic building block that you build experience on. You make a stupid decision and lady luck pulls you out of it. The trick is knowing it. When you get lucky, and you know it, you can learn from it. The problem today is that I see a lot of people blaming ‘bad luck’ when things go wrong; they should be thanking the lovely lady for hoisting them out of deep water and letting them have another chance at this crazy thing called life.
To be clear, I try to do everything I can to not need luck. If you read this and think that you are exempt from the same rules, that you aren’t yourself lucky, understand what I put into surviving out there. I train my physical fitness to survive the mountains five or six days a week – year round, often multiple times a day. In terms of the technical skill of the riding; I spend as much time hitting park jumps, rails, and resort as I can to ensure I know how to use my tool of choice. I come from a community of ice climbers and mountaineers, and still try to maintain the physical capacity to climb hard rock, to pull down on tools. I spent multiple seasons looking for moving snow, trying to hone the skill of riding fast in avalanches. I read all I can about the conditions and events going on, and then test it against what I see and feel in the snow when I am out there. I measure, question, and try and improve every aspect of my fragility. Yet still, above all, I refuse to hope that luck will show up when I need her.
The thing is, I can’t bank on luck. She is fickle. Some day she will be off saving other idiots and I won’t get her grace. So a big part of my analysis of days in the mountains, is trying to be as brutally honest as I can be about what was the result of experience, fitness, and skill as opposed to just happening to be a favourite of the lady. The problem is that it is easy to get the two confused. Survive enough days when the math should kill you and you can start to think of yourself as clever. It is incredible to me just how far we can all push the envelope, and how often, before the math catches up.
Eight years riding in the local backcountry. Somewhere between fifty and two hundred days a year, with the average sitting somewhere in the three digits. Give or take a thousand days of riding over that decade. Mix in a penchant for riding on days where the snow is deep and fresh, the colours ranging from black to red. Hundreds of days with moving snow. I have survived the most aggressive terrain I could find in those conditions for that many days, and it would be laughable for me to not admit that a bunch of it was luck and not skill. It would be foolish hubris to think otherwise.
The great struggle now is trying to untangle the two.