Very helpful report (yet again)—thanks a lot for the careful work, David. Seemed shorter this year, perhaps fewer details on each incident, but more telling insights.

Case where new technology saved somebody, another case where they might have hoped new technology would save them, but it didn’t.

What fits for me most was the problems of the long-term psychological factors: such high percentage of risk level 3 days, so few weekends with sunshine. So when a sunny spring weekend day finally appeared, people tried tours they’d been waiting for a long time, and some died.

I think for experienced skiers, a restructuring of the whole context of our times and places around the snowy mountains—so we’re less tempted by those psychological pressures—gives the biggest gain in safety probability. But difficult and costly and to execute.

The more common approach seems to be, “I’ll take on some extra risk for just a couple of days each season. So in the overall scheme of the other bad things in my life which might get me, e.g. car crashes, the proportional increase in annual risk of early death is not enormous, and seems acceptable to me.”

I have no intention of denying them that freedom to choose risk - (though their family might wish differently).
Then when lots of skiers take that same risk management approach, it makes the statistics look bad—especially for holiday weeks when lots of people who ski fewer days than me get to exercise that strategy.

Ken