Disclaimer: I am not an avalanche expert. My personal protocol to approaching the backcountry is something I am always trying to evolve and improve. I have made many mistakes in the mountains. I take these mistakes seriously and I try to learn from them.
As I come over the roll my stomach drops. I am in the wrong spot. I’m five feet left of where I need to be and as much as I fight to correct my mistake I can not. I am going too fast to stop and am now descending an unrideable rock strewn face. I skip down some rocks, take some unwanted air, land on some rocks and start rolling in a place I should not be rolling.
My mistake was that I misread one of two identical shadows as the entrance to my line. Tactically a true statement but my mistake that day was more mental then tactical. Why did I blow that call? When it comes to analyzing mistakes made by ourselves or other people we tend to focus too much on “what” the mistake was and not enough on “why” the mistake was made.
You see it on the internet forums and hear it in the bar room every time there is a fatality in the mountains. “How could they have missed the signs?! I would have never done that, etc.”
Some accidents are extremely reckless and do not keep me up at night. It’s when I see experienced backcountry experts dying in the mountains that I lose sleep thinking about their mistakes. What led them to make that mistake that day? If they missed the call then who am I to say I would never do the same thing?
The day of my fall down the rock face I was over confident, in a rush and not present. I made several mental mistakes that nearly cost me my life. Looking back at this accident and other mistakes I have made over the years, I realized there were a few common lessons to be learned from all these experiences. I turned these "mental keys" into a checklist that I go over in my head every time I step into the mountains. Here’s the list: