Among ski professionals, “ski cutting” can be a taboo subject. Talking about it can feel like navigating a conversation with a teenager about safe sex.
“We all know it’s happening,” said Brenden Cronin, borrowing the analogy from a recent article in The Avalanche Review. “Why aren’t we potentially teaching people to do it safely?”
That’s the question a panel of ski and snowmobile professionals tackled during the Wyoming Snow and Avalanche Workshop in Jackson this past weekend. Some 500 people — both professionals and recreationalists — attended the two-day workshop, featuring experts from across the nation and Canada who spoke about snow and avalanche safety and how human behavior factors into the equation.
Professionals use ski cutting to test snow stability and remove unstable snow before avalanches get bigger or less experienced skiers venture onto the slope.
A skier traverses the top of a slope, often making an aggressive turn, hoping to release loose snow below, but it requires special considerations and expertise. It’s only appropriate for certain kinds of snowpack and when no one is at risk of being buried lower on the slope. It requires properly identifying and using safe zones since practitioners who ski cut slopes are in danger of becoming entrained in avalanches they provoke. As more and more recreationists are using the technique, professionals are considering whether to discourage the practice or teach its proper use.
Professionals use ski cutting to lessen avalanche hazards at ski resorts, above highways, at industrial sites and for backcountry skiing clients. Panelist Mark Stanley now mitigates avalanche risks for a remote gold mine in northern British Columbia, where more than a hundred avalanche paths cross the access road. But before moving to the industrial sector, Stanley worked as a Canadian ski guide and routinely ski cut slopes, sometimes with big results.
“For me, ski cutting is a passion,” Stanley said, causing the crowd to burst into laughter. “I’m not joking guys. It’s been an invaluable part of my progression in the world of being an avalanche professional. Without ski cutting, I don’t think I would be here. I’ve saved my own life doing it, and I’ve saved other people’s lives.”
“I do think it is one of the more dangerous ways that we mitigate avalanche hazard because you’re using your body to start an avalanche.”
Chrissie Oken, Ski Patroller
Ski cutting came with the job of guiding clients exploring terrain from helicopters, snowcats and backcountry lodges.
“I did it to protect the people that were paying me to take them skiing. I was there to deliver a product, and I took people skiing down things where there was no other option,” Stanley said. “I had to ski cut a slope to get out of there.”
Times have changed, he said, and he doesn’t think it’s “necessarily the cowboy show” today that he once experienced. Still, ski cutting remains a valuable tool, but deciding when to use it can be tricky.
“I think there’s so much that goes into deciding, when is too much,” he said. “Personal risk tolerances, company risk tolerances and so much about the actual feature and the snowpack… goes into it.”
Chrissie Oken has worked as a ski patroller at Vail, Colorado, since 2015. She also worked for the Lander-based National Outdoor Leadership School for a decade as a mountaineering, backcountry skiing and avalanche instructor in Alaska, the Tetons, New Zealand and the Himalaya. When working as a ski patroller, she ski cuts in a “conscientious manner,” she said, because “I do think it is one of the more dangerous ways that we mitigate avalanche hazard because you’re using your body to start an avalanche.”
Oken urged caution in teaching the technique to recreationalists. She worried about “risk creep” and people getting a false sense of control.
But panelist Lisa Van Sciver, who has worked as a ski patroller, avalanche forecaster and ski guide in the Tetons, pushed for showing more people how to ski cut properly because they’re choosing to ski risky slopes regardless and having one more tool might help reduce harm.
Whether or not recreational skiers plan to ski cut a slope, they need to know about it, Cronin told WyoFile after the panel discussion.
“I think that’s one of the underlying concerns for everybody that was up there on that stage. It is out there. You can see YouTube videos about it,” Cronin said, adding that a local guide service is now marketing it as a technique being taught to clients in the mountains.
Cronin has worked as a highway avalanche forecaster, ski patroller, avalanche educator, heli and snowcat ski guide, snowmaker and contract avalanche forecaster. He recently started his own business selling and servicing Remote Avalanche Control Systems. How does he define ski cutting?
“You start from a safe zone, usually a pile of rocks or tucked in the trees, and you generate speed as you go out and across the starting zone of the avalanche path and you make a really, really hard aggressive turn,” Cronin said. “You’re really trying to put all of your weight into it with the complete intention of triggering an avalanche.”
While the panel coalesced in favor of at least broaching what can be a taboo topic outside of professional circles, Cronin cautioned that more discussion is needed around setting parameters for when it’s appropriate before recreationalists start doing it.
Some parameters did surface during the panel. For one, never ski cut a “hard slab.”
“That’s a big one,” Cronin said. How do you know it’s a hard slab? There’s a snowpit test that involves pressing a fist, then four fingers, one finger, a pencil and a knife into the wall of the pit to assess the hardness of layers in the snowpack. When skiing, Cronin said, hard slab feels “like trying to edge across styrofoam.”
With a hard slab, the avalanche can break above the skier or snowmobiler, and it tends to break in large, dense blocks that can step down to deeper layers, he said. “It’s not forgiving.”
He also sees some consensus around not ski cutting when more than 30 centimeters of new snow has fallen and not ski cutting above a persistent weak layer. But there are gray zones. Still, he’d like to see the ski community work on defining best practices.
“Just like sex education, right, like it’s evolved over time,” Cronin said. “Maybe we’re going to have some things that we teach that aren’t the best way to present it. But we have to keep trying and eventually, maybe we’ll find a good formula.”
During the panel, one audience member asked about ski cutting while on belay, which means the skier is attached to a rope.
“I have never, never used protection,” Stanley said, getting a chuckle from the crowd, given some of the afternoon’s innuendos. Seriously, though, he said, if “in order to trigger it, the potential of you getting swept down the slope is so high you need a rope then, to me, you should not be there. That’s just not something you should be playing with.”
Triggering unstable snow is not just a consideration for skiers. Now in its eleventh year, WYSAW also put extra emphasis this year on including education tailored for snowmobiles and motorized snow bikes. A professional backcountry athlete for FXR Racing, Duncan Lee talked about his experience as both a snowboarder and a sledder and how he applies avalanche education differently depending on whether his trip is human-powered or motorized. Lee also participated in the ski cutting panel.
“On a machine, if you get into avalanche terrain, so we’re talking steeper slopes, it’s much harder to actually turn a sled on edge and get over to an island of safety or out of the start zone,” Lee said. “So actually, fundamentally in my eyes, a ski cut is generally not used on a snowmobile.”
Alternatively, Lee said he does test the snowpack’s reactivity by playing on small, inconsequential features with his sled. Panelists encouraged skiers to follow that playful approach to learn more about how snow reacts by hopping on small features like a wind lip, where there’s no risk of being buried, to see what happens.
Panelists also talked about being aware of people possibly traversing below and getting visual confirmation that the coast is clear before ski cutting a slope. Whether motorized or human-powered, backcountry enthusiasts should avoid stopping and congregating beneath avalanche paths, where human triggers or natural conditions could set off a slide, speakers stressed.
People share avalanche observations on the Briger-Teton Avalanche Center website, and Cronin sees reports showing people either don’t understand ski cutting or were caught in a slide while skiing and use the term “ski cutting” to cover their tracks.
If nothing else, Cronin wants backcountry enthusiasts to drop the shaming and be more open about their mistakes so the community can learn from those experiences. He praised Jackson filmmaker Chris Kitchen for sharing his story about being in a group of seven people caught in a large avalanche in the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort backcountry in February 2025. Kitchen described for the audience how his group fell into traps identified by experts at WYSAW.
They had let their guard down after skiing all day and not seeing signs of instability. They put away their radios. They deviated from their original plan of what to ski. As communication broke down, Kitchen ended up clustered with other skiers on a small rock that wasn’t a safe zone.
Luckily, no one was hurt. A key takeaway for Kitchen was to always follow the protocol of one person on the slope at a time.
“It doesn’t matter if there’s a hundred tracks in Rock Springs or if there’s one,” he said, “but I certainly won’t be on that traverse or any traverse with a bunch of people ever again.”
The annual educational workshop, modeled after other SAW’s held around the Western U.S., aims to make backcountry safety a top community priority to eliminate fatalities as part of Teton County’s Backcountry Zero initiative.
“The wheels were really set in motion in 2015, and then picked up steam after the accident that spring on Mount Moran that took the lives of Luke Lynch and Stephen Adamson Jr.,” said Matt Hansen, communications director for the Teton County Search and Rescue Foundation. At the time, Adamson was on the foundation’s board and an early champion of Backcountry Zero.
“We’ve seen how tragedy can devastate a community,” Hansen said. “We understand how accidents happen, but it’s up to all of us to make sure we do everything possible to prevent such tragedies from occurring.”
Rebecca Huntington co-created and is a former host of The Fine Line podcast, which was developed as part of the Teton County Search and Rescue Foundation’s Backcountry Zero initiative. —Eds.
kids today, go to aspen highlands learn the names of the guys on the steeplechase shoots A-D. they were cross cutting the wall (circa ’84) for reference to real not hyperbole.
statistics such as angle and width between cuts, with all do respects you had all the covid pokes. Get insurance because, we hold you liable. Better you talk about sking a skee field post pow.
Ski retired now, yet 59 seasons in and out of bounds. You should comment with the thoughts of those forever young. Alpine many years, finished with Tele. Had some Jones friends in Loveland back.
If at first you don’t succeed, show cutting is not your sport.