Risk management for fringe-season backpacking

Interesting.

While not fringe weather, I pictured walking up a canyon where the terrain gets steeper as I go, the walls coming in at various angles and trying to judge the next climb.

Got to make it real compared to what.

I can relate to the canyon analogy after finding myself dead-ended after walking up so many canyons. Now, I think about contingency planning “if I get dead-ended” and have to go back out, and how that impacts the rest of my itinerary.

the goal of decision-making [shifts] from optimization (summer) to resilience (fringe season).

Yep. I think you also said that “issues stack” in varied conditions, which is a good point.

We need to think about safety margins for each risk, and a little extra for complete system failure. The time for that thinking is before we get into trouble, when possible, but we also need to be able to adapt to unexpected circumstances.

Perhaps the common UL advice, “don’t pack your fears”, needs a bit of safety margin as well?

I love trips in the late fall with the promise of winter right around the corner. Sometimes I catch the forecast right and head in on dry ground and exit the next day in 6″ of snow – like here on Oct 28 last year. First pic is eve, then next morning. Lots of opportunities to learn when deliberately seeking weather events:

hmmm, luckily, I rarely backpack in peak season.  I tend to go in the shoulder seasons to avoid crowds, traffic and such.  But planning for contigencies is alway a valid point.  Consider looking up a rick evuation process called FMECA (Failure Modes, Effects and Critical Analysis).  It is a way to evaluate product safety but is a reasonably way to assess risk and implment mitigation strategies.  The key is to really be able to identify the Probability of an event happening and the Severity.  My 2 cents.

In my engineering 9-5 I’ve done a number of FMECAs and if the product uses new technology or processes I’ll get my vendors to contractually sign up to doing one as well.  They’re great if you have solid data to feed into it.  One of the oft used mitigations is having redundant systems (dual boot ROM etc), which is literally as Bill said “packing your fears”.  The whole UL ethos pushes back against this but other methods can be considered and are available.

When I used to run programs, I would  apply project management risk mitigation practices.  Similar to FMECA it attempts to quantify probability and severity but would also add expected monetary impact which is a way of quantifying severity with its actual effect.  For backpacking we could do this by assessing severity against injury, hunger, hypothermia etc

What I do when venturing somewhere new in shoulder season is pull as many years of weather data off the gov’t data bases.  Ideally day by day granularity.  In Canada I can pull this down as a .csv.

I then run some stats against it to determine the average and sigma of the temp swings, plus the records.    Once you have the sigma, you can decide how much risk you want to take by following the 68–95–99.7 rule and assessing the severity of getting it wrong.  Will I get hypothermia?  A bad night’s sleep?

A few years ago I awoke to a record low and just barely had enough insulation to get some sleep but I was being extra cautious, not having been to that area before.

Last 4 days I did some long miles so needed good rest and recovery.  The first night was close to freezing and yesterday was quite hot.   I had just enough cold weather gear to get decent sleep the first night and my planned water stops let me pull in on my last quarter liter in the heat.

This takes a lot of planning and I think 99% thinks its overkill and won’t bother.  The benefits extend well beyond safety though, as it makes for a more enjoyable trip by opening up new possibilities for example by not overpacking or over-stopping.

I do pack warmer for fringe season trips, heavier tent and bag, more clothes, but I also choose different itineraries–shorter, and closer to trailheads.  Even though I’m not as deep in the Backcountry, I still see far fewer people than in the summer months

Resilience.

Trekker uses cooking pots to dig her way out of freak blizzard on Everest