In episode 3 of The High Route Podcast, we bring together two high level practitioners of their respective crafts. Kelly Cordes and Adam Fabrikant.
If you are unfamiliar with Cordes and his work, you are about to familiarize yourself with a gem. He’s a notable alpinist, mixologist, and even a better writer—which is saying something. If you haven’t read his classic book The Tower, please do. It’s such a good and in-depth read. Although a fine, very competent skier, Cordes comes to mountain travel as an alpinist first and skier second.
Fabrikant is the opposite—he comes to the conversation more as a sharp end ski mountaineer seeking first descents than an alpinist.
For this reason, we wanted to bring the two together and learn about their similarities and differences when approaching more cutting objectives in the mountains. Although separated by roughly twenty years, Cordes and Fabrikant share similarities in how they have prioritized their lives around their mountain pursuits and made a go of it.
Adam Fabrikant in his element. Photo courtesy Adam Fabrikant.
Kelly Cordes: a man of the chicken coop and the chess board. Courtesy photo.
The original intent of the conversation was to explore the idea of risk and risk management in the mountains and how that may evolve. Part of our prompt for the risk side of the discussion was a Will Gadd social media post where he writes about the classic equation Hazard X Probability = Risk.
Gadd notes, “Hazard X Probability = Risk is a simple baseline tool for risk management. But get the probability or hazard level wrong and the equation is worse than meaningless because it leads to bad decision making and statements like, ‘Driving to the mountains is more dangerous than climbing them.’ Bullshit. Climbing the Grand Teton is about 250 times more dangerous per hour of activity than driving to the Grand Teton.” There’s more in Gadd’s post; we encourage you to read and posit it.
In the discussion, Cordes and Fabrikant eventually land on risk. But before we get there, we clarify the differences between “sketchy” and “spicy” and the quest and practice of becoming comfortable in high consequence terrain as an alpinist or ski mountaineer.
You can find us at the-high-route.com. Yeah, there are two hyphens for redundancy, which is a good policy in the mountains. For weight weenies, hyphens weigh next to nothing.
The theme music for The High Route Podcast comes from Storms in the Hill Country and the album The Self Transforming (Thank you, Jens Langsjoen). You can find a link to the album here—there are so many good songs on this album. And if you think you’ve spotted a UFO in the past or visited the 7th dimension, “Beautiful Alien” is a good tune to start with.
An excellent podcast again.
I’m glad you mentioned Will Gadd’s post because I’ve seen it in a few places and it has been the subject of few podcasts. But I feel I must nitpick, because he is making comparisons between an unknowable risk (being in the mountains) and driving which has data from billions miles driven per year. Per Gert Gigerenzer, we can only move from uncertainty to risk if we satisfy things like propensity (the properties of a thing) and frequency (how many observations do we have?). A mountain is not like a Paire of dice, and when it comes to avalanche deaths we are working with 150 total per annum globally. Climbing cannot be compared with driving where the property and frequency categories are satisfied. Our perception of “risk” (like avalanche risk) is an educated assessment but ultimately still represents degrees of belief.
I actually think it is more helpful to think of mountain safety in terms of reducing uncertainty, but we humans have desire to quantify everything and there is an assumption that the snowpack can and will be quantified, because so much of the rest off our lives is probabilistically determined from insurance to finance to healthcare. If we can’t accurately assess tail risk in the mortgage back securities market, we have little chance of determining the risk of objective hazards in the mountain. A rock is a rock and a serac is a serac, but knowing when they will fall is like trying to accurately predict when an earthquake will happen. Reducing uncertainty relies on weather and avalanche forecasts, digging a pit, replying on trip reports, having the right gear and many other things that form an acceptable level of preparedness. But there is a constant tradeoff between uncertainty and the joy of stepping out into the wilderness. We can’t be prepared for absolutely everything, because our packs would weigh 50kg, and equally we can’t wait for perfect conditions because we’d never leave the sofa.
I’ve noticed that there is definitely a safety-scold element on social media. Last week, after a big dump of snow on Mont Blanc, a well-known IMFGA guide publicly shamed people for skiing off the Skyway despite the avalanche danger. By all means go out of your way to educate newcomers to the sport, but shaming after the fact just looks like a public boast of your perceived superiority. A lot of the safety shaming looks a lot like gatekeeping. All of us have made formative mistakes that we’ve been lucky to live through, and I’m sure the people caught in avalanches last week will be much more aware in the future. I feel there is an emphasis on people in content creation to prove their safety bona fides, and really hammer a message home that they are black belt level risk assessors, which is why I much prefer Colin Haley’s rambling videos to The Fifty. I guess I’m looking for The Joy rather than The Decision as the crux of a climbing or skiing video.
From interviews with Gadd and his posts I can’t help making the (potentially uncharitable) conclusion that he’s trying to justify why he no longer does any alpinism. Ultimately we have to make decisions to mitigate uncertainty, and that is a combination of information and experience and tolerance for danger.
From a fellow hyphenator and happy subscriber.