Why skiers and snowboarders should beware of the 'expert halo'
Enlisting the help of an experienced guide is a great way to enjoy the backcountry, but it shouldn’t be seen as a cast-iron guarantee of safety, writes Roger Cox
This winter has been the best of times and the worst of times for skiing and snowboarding in Europe: the best of times because many resorts have had more snow than they know what to do with; the worst of times because some of the heavier snowfalls of recent weeks have contributed to an unusually high number of avalanche deaths.
At time of writing, according to the European Avalanche Warning Services (EAWS), some 125 people have been killed by avalanches this ski season, the majority in Italy (32), France (30) and Austria (29). That’s already well in excess of the approximately 100 deaths per year usually recorded by EAWS, and given that the 2025/26 ski season still has several weeks left to run, it seems likely that the final number will be even higher.
Just to reassure anyone who might have a spring ski holiday to the Alps coming up: we’re not talking here about people being wiped out by avalanches while cruising around on marked runs inside ski resort boundaries. The skiers and snowboarders who have been killed were all people who had ventured into off-piste terrain; they all took a calculated risk, in other words, weighed the chances of getting caught in a slide against the chances of scoring some memorable powder turns, and, in the end, as sometimes happens in life, the numbers simply didn’t stack up.
At least, that’s what happened in most cases. The case of three skiers killed in an avalanche near Val d’Isère on 13 February is slightly different. Here, the skiers in question were with a professional instructor when the slide struck. On the day they died, the avalanche risk level was rated at a level four out of five, “high danger”. The extended description of level four avalanche risk includes the following: “avalanche conditions are very dangerous and travel in avalanche terrain is not recommended. Natural avalanches are likely and human-triggered avalanches are very likely.” Would the skiers who died have ventured off-piste in these conditions if they’d been by themselves, with only the official avalanche report to go on? To what extent did they outsource the decision-making process to their professional guide? It’s impossible to say, but their story is a timely reminder of the dangers of what avalanche researcher Ian McCammon describes as “the expert halo”.
Simply put, this is the phenomenon whereby inexperienced skiers and snowboarders assume they’re safe in the backcountry because they are being led by somebody they believe to be experienced. McCammon’s research suggests that, when a group of novices is led by a perceived expert, “the novices [are] more likely to follow the leader into dangerous situations than when novice groups make decisions by consensus.”
When I look back on the various ways in which I’ve allowed myself to be blinded by the expert halo over the years, I shudder. To be clear: this is by no means the same thing as saying that I don’t think some of the experts I’ve spent time with in the backcountry know their stuff. I’ve been fortunate enough to experience some of the best skiing and snowboarding locations on the planet in the company of some extremely knowledgeable guides. What I mean is that, when I was with these people, I happily put responsibility for my safety entirely in their hands, and I didn’t give that decision as much as a second thought.
In January 2008, for example, I spent a week cat-skiing in the Monashee Mountains in British Columbia with a company called Mustang Powder, run by Nick and Ali Holmes-Smith. It snowed so much during my time there that, when we finally returned to the truck stop in the valley where we’d left our cars, they were completely buried, just so many gentle undulations under a thick blanket of white. Still, in spite of the near-apocalyptic amount of snow that fell, not once during my time at Mustang did I think to enquire about the avalanche risk. I simply assumed that Nick, Ali and their team would make the right decisions to keep their clients safe.
A year later, when Chamonix guide Neil McNab asked me and the three other people on his Introduction to Backcountry Snowboarding course if we wanted to do a heli-drop onto the Trient Glacier on our final day, in order to have a shot at his favourite descent in the whole of the Alps, did it occur to me to ask a single question about contingency planning if anything were to go wrong on our day-long jaunt? As the roar of the helicopter receded and the five of us were left alone in the vastness of the Trient Plateau, did I have even a vague concept of the best route back down to the valley in the event that there was an emergency and we couldn’t get a mobile phone signal? Of course not – I was with an expert – everything was going to be fine.
In both of the above cases, then, I was 100 per cent blinded by the expert haloes of the people I was with. Happily, in both scenarios I was with very competent people and nothing went wrong, so you could perhaps argue that my faith in them turned out to be justified. Then again, with the benefit of hindsight a few calm questions about safety wouldn’t have made me look like a scaredy-cat – plus, I would have learned a lot from their answers, and been better equipped to make my own decisions in the future.
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