Avalanche Courses

Ready to begin your avalanche education journey? This three-day course is the gold standard for anyone who wants to travel in or near avalanche terrain, and there’s no better place to learn than Bluebird Backcountry. You’ll learn to identify avalanche terrain, develop a plan for traveling in avalanche terrain, effectively use a risk-management framework to make decisions in the field, and learn and practice rescue techniques. For the 21/22 season, we’re offering both traditional in-person and hybrid course formats.

Avalanche rescue gear and the knowledge to use it properly are key components of your backcountry quiver. In this one-day course, you’ll learn what to do if you or a member of your party is caught in an avalanche, understand your gear and how to use it efficiently, practice in realistic scenarios, and develop a plan for continuing practice. This course is also meant to be retaken regularly to keep skills sharp, so it’s a great refresher for folks who are experienced backcountry travelers but haven’t had formal avalanche education recently.

For those who are ready to expand their avalanche and risk management knowledge to take on bigger challenges in the backcountry, this three-day course is the next step. Prerequisites for this course are AIARE 1 and Avalanche Rescue, and it’s strongly recommended that students have practiced the skills they learned in those courses for at least one season. This course introduces more complex situations, including being the leader of a small travel group in the backcountry, traveling in complicated terrain, and developing a travel plan that incorporates a discussion of weather, terrain, and snowpack conditions where resources are scarce.

You tune and wax your skis or board at the beginning of every season. Why should your avalanche knowledge be any different? Refreshing your backcountry awareness is a key skill in your repertoire, and a yearly refresher will help you practice the skills you hope you’ll never need in real life.