Transition time. A fine place to embrace deep experience. Photo: Alex Lee
Compressed Experience—the idea of compiling a ton of experience in a relatively short period and then setting out on a lofty goal—does it have a place in the backcountry?
Get to know the community; this was my prompt to reach out to readers over the summer. “Compressed experience” was a new term I heard, chatting with a tech-hub denizen. I recall asking, “Compressed experience, what does that mean?”
In the tech start-up world, it appears the idea of compressed experience is an experience trajectory where someone goes deep and gains some experience over a somewhat short period. In other words, one gains experience rapidly (read as shorter than most) by immersing oneself in a particular endeavor—in our case, backcountry skiing/ski mountaineering.
The idea with start-ups is to ensure a company is able to compete effectively in a high-speed marketplace—to keep up with or catch competitors, to scale up faster.
Collecting background information, I came across this article, “Understanding the Experience Algorithm.” The author lays out a short argument that compressing experience is possible. The value of that compressed experience depends on the “quality” of the experience and the “ability to learn” from that experience. Hard to argue with that. Yet, in the business realm, where the consequences of low-quality experiences and/or an inability to learn from experiences results in debt, the likelihood of going out of business, and, by extension, a bruised ego, there’s still no F = GMm r2. In the backcountry, be it climbing or touring, that recipe of low quality and failure to learn could get you killed. As they say, gravity is undefeated.
Ambition; we all likely have it. Another word for this is goals. Beginning tourers, especially ambitious ones, focus on specific objectives. Often, as one gains experience, those objectives become more complex. They have harder problems to solve and, likely, grave consequences if mistakes are made.
So, what does a compressed experience look like for a ski tourist? Suppose the end goal is skiing off the summit of Rainier, down the Emmons Glacier route. Is the experience compressed if the skier spends a season poking around Snoqualmie Pass, skis the South Face of Adams, then skis off Hood the following spring, and ultimately pivots to Rainier? Hard to say. Did the skier/rider school themselves in crevasses rescue and reading glaciated terrain? Did they take any formal avalanche education? Were they guided or on self-supported missions?
Further, did the skier/rider make numerous mistakes in their decision-making, but no ill consequences befell them? In other words, they routinely got lucky. (It’s hard to learn when unaware of your luck.)
During Covid, IFMGA guide Jed Porter hosted a few public video conversations called Mountain Beta Chats with potential clients. For example, Porter discussed a specific objective, like skiing Rainier, with a mountain aspirant. His focus was decidedly on the skills needed to meet an objective competently. Call it gaining experience.
Mountain Beta Chat #2: Climbing Ham & Eggs (Moose’s Tooth—AK. Range)
I reached out to Porter to get his thoughts on the idea of compressed experience for backcountry adventurers. To establish some context, Porter describes himself as a lifer, not someone who embraced compressed experience in his own practice of the craft. But, he fully understands the desire and need “especially at different phases in the path, to do more, do the next rowdy thing.” He adds, however, “Getting through this process faster has never been the point to me.”
The point of it all could be a whole other treatise. Let’s assume we do it—accelerate the journey—for personal reasons spanning the gamut from vision quest to look-at-me social media posts.
Porter responded via a voice memo from his summer commuting car, organized below by topic. His thoughts helped frame the idea of compressed experience in the outdoors and the cost-benefits of the approach. Let’s begin with his thoughts on Mt. Rainer as a ski objective.
Porter On Mt. Rainier as a Specific Goal:
I’m going to refer to the lifer-type approach versus other approaches or other ways people participate in this. There are those who come out for life, and there are those who come out to try it out, tick a box (or 10), and then, maybe, move on.
I think a compressed-experience trajectory or path to something specific, like Mount Rainier, can work. If you want to ski Mount Rainier, you can intentionally pursue that on a fast track. To great effect. If you want to be an all-around ski mountaineer, one of the things you might do is Mount Rainier, but it will take longer to get to that level of broadly prepared competence.
The specific path to Mount Rainier is fitness, going skiing, navigating permits and crevasse hazards, and following the boot track the masses have put in during peak season. You know, that’s kind of it. It’s blue dot app navigation, and Mount Rainier can require pretty high-level navigation skills. But if that’s the specific goal, the specific technique set is not as complex as that required for a broader practice at this level.
Porter On Season Long Goals that include an Objective like Rainer:
If you want to ski a whole season or have a career worth of Rainier-level objectives, that will take much longer. You can get to Mount Rainier specifically in a season or two: two years, max, from resort skiing to skiing Mt Rainier. But if your goal is the competence to do any of the things like Mount Rainier in the ski mountaineering world—Glaciated peaks, high altitude expeditions, Winds or Sierra traverse, steep powder skiing in the Wasatch and the Tetons, Colorado fourteeners, skimo races—you know, kind of a broader level of competence, that’s going to take a lot longer.
Steep powder skiing in the Tetons, for example, is similar in overall challenge to skiing Mount Rainier. Still, it requires a very different skill set-–what you do to compress your experience to get to Mount Rainier has little to no application for similar difficulty objectives like skiing off the Middle Teton.
The snow science is different, and conditions assessment and monitoring are different. And that might be one of the things that makes us bristle a little bit. “Lifers” think of Mount Rainier as one hard thing in a broad practice of ski mountaineering, while the more goal-oriented segment sees it differently.
Some would insist you must learn avalanche assessment before going to Mount Rainier. But that’s actually not true. You have to learn avalanche assessment before you go to other things of a similar difficulty to Mount Rainier. But skiing Rainier in the primetime May-June season, you don’t have to know much about avalanches beyond the predictable freeze-thaw cycle of spring mountaineering.
Similarly, go to the Tetons or the Wasatch for powder ski mountaineering, and you don’t need to know a thing about crevasses or white-out navigation.
Porter On building a Long-term Foundation for the Lifer:
Oftentimes when teaching advanced avalanche courses, I (Jed) have asked students to go forward with making their development in five different contexts.
- You have to get formal education. This is obvious. But just one of 5 important contexts. Avalanche courses are mainly what we do here. But, also, crevasse rescue courses, medical training, gear study, reading on history, philosophy, technical matters, decision-making etc.
- Mentored practice. Execute, in the driver’s seat, with a more experienced practitioner watching over your shoulder.
- Go out and flail around on your own and with equal partners. Apply what you know, on your own terms and at your own pace. Better learn what it is you don’t know.
- Go out with someone less experienced. Nothing distills knowledge like presenting it to another. Further, watching someone learn can point out what is truly important.
- Finally, go out with people more experienced than you and hold on for the ride. Soak in what you can, but understand that the real value in this will sneak up on you. Again, a point here is see what you don’t know that you don’t know.
One key here is that a person can partake in these five contexts discreetly, and slowly, or with more earnestness. One’s development is going to be more rapid with intentional pursuit of these different contexts than if an individual focuses in any one context. A whole bunch of formal courses are no good without the other four practices. Flailing around is no good without some formal education. Mentored practice is way more valuable if you’ve also spent some time figuring it out on your own by flailing around. Similarly, watching others practice at a high level is mystifying without academic and practiced understanding of at least some of what you are seeing.
Conclusion
Experience has a lot of looks. Porter makes that clear. Person-to-person timelines vary. The key here is to be a master of self-assessment. That’s not an easy thing to do. Ego suppression can be difficult. Then there’s this: Pushing boundaries and limits is the fabric of true adventure. Sadly, pushing those limits in an illogical way is part of the fabric, too.
This is to say nothing about the complexities of avalanche terrain. Even those with the least compressed experience trajectories get in trouble.
Two steps forward, one step back. Have an adventure. Proceed with caution.
