{"id":8709,"date":"2025-02-23T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-23T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.voile.com\/blog\/?p=8709"},"modified":"2025-02-21T14:46:56","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T21:46:56","slug":"backcountry-decision-making-and-the-psychology-behind-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.voile.com\/blog\/backcountry-decision-making-and-the-psychology-behind-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Backcountry Decision-Making and the psychology behind it"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Decisions, decisions, decisions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We make an uncountable number of decisions every day. For each of them, there are two different processes at work. The conscious and the subconscious. Some decisions, we make with logic and thought. This is the conscious. Spoiler alert, most of our decisions are not made with the conscious. As you can imagine, this greatly impacts our backcountry decision-making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The decisions we don\u2019t notice we are making are usually more common faster-paced decisions and are made with mental shortcuts (heuristics) and\/or feelings. This is the subconscious. Our subconscious is a primitive process left over from our evolutionary process. It takes in everything happening around us (the burnt morning coffee, the promotion you just got at work, the feel of the snow under your feet, etc) and factors it into this feeling regardless of whether one thing actually influences the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both processes work by recognizing patterns and there are upsides to the way both processes work. The subconscious is fast while the conscious is slow. The conscious runs on logic while the subconscious runs on feeling. Before we dive into the backcountry decision-making side of this, I will ask you, which process is most common or dominant when you make your decisions in the snow?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To help shed some light on this I\u2019d like to share a story about a near miss of mine. We made some good decisions and some bad ones, and luckily all three of us involved made it back to the car with nothing more than an interesting story and a few slices of humble pie in our bellies. Ready? Here we go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A walk in the park<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In February of 2012, two friends and I made a plan to ski two separate couloirs on Prospector Mountain in Grand Teton National Park: The V-notch and the Apocalypse. Both of these are north-facing couloirs with start zones between 10,000 and 11,000 ft. Our plan was to climb up and ski down the V-notch before heading over to the Apocalypse and rappelling in from the top. Neither of my partners had skied either route, but I had skied the V-notch once and the Apocalypse upwards of 25 times. All these experiences had been great, like, best runs of my life great.<\/p>\n\n\n