MasteringSki Traverses: Efficient Mountain Navigation
Learning ski traverses calls for navigational ability to navigate you safely over the mountain. Many people call out mountain rescue since they lack navigational knowledge or use a GPS that fails. Knowing how to negotiate helps you to depend less on other people and technology, therefore enhancing your independence and mountain emergency readiness.
1. Know Your Landscape.
2. Understand Your Path of Travel.
Knowing your path forward of travel helps you to become effective in navigating. If you do not, at least you might find yourself travelling great distances to get back on track; at worst, it could result in costly taxi rides or even fatal collisions.
Particularly when you want to see difficult turns or lane changes ahead of time, planning your path before you leaves using a map might be beneficial. It also lets you better predict the movements required for your chosen path by helping you view the terrain from fresh viewpoints you might not have noticed before.
Try Google Maps to assist you get around quickly after you know where you are going. To provide a list of likely paths, enter your starting point's and your destination's addresses. To maximise your path, click and drag any of the listed sites to rearrange the stops as you choose.
3. Know Your Equipment.
Although mile after mile of one foot in front of the other can cause climbers to go into a haze, paying close attention to the terrain can assist keep them present and on target. Climbers latching onto notable natural features running in the direction they wish to proceed employ the "handrailing" approach. Roads, creeks/rivers, ridgelines, and valley bottoms are among them.
Good knowledge of side-slip—also known as a snowplow turn—is crucial while negotiating steep terrain. Apart from unweighting via downhill movement, a side-slip depends on effective edge control and a changed comma position. As seen above, Willy starts a side-slip by gently traversing a mild hill in an exaggerated comma position and slightly outwardly pushing his ankles. He lets his uphill edges loosen and moves weight to his new downhill ski when ready to turn. Route or danger marking can also be accomplished with wands and cairns, mounds of stacked rocks.
4. Understand Yourself
Mountain navigation depends on a set of abilities and methods cooperating to either repair or negate accumulated mistake. These methods let the navigator keep travelling by enabling them to remain on track even in shifting terrain.
Skier can look back and see that they are at the point they know is their intended aim instead of trying to ascertain their speed at the end of a navigational leg. Given the fast changes in the mountains, this can be a crucial check on timing, pace, and strategy.
In icy terrain, marking sites with wands or cairns makes sense since they are readily visible when compared to the unidentified path they might have taken. In these circumstances, depending just on a GPS device or smartphone runs the danger and a lot can go wrong in the mountains. Being proactive using a whiteout navigation scheme you have developed before traversing the area is the smarter approach.
