Throughout year 1 and especially year 2 we have had a number of guest presenters giving talks and lectures from a variety of technical backgrounds. This has not only been educationally beneficial but given me a unique perspective of how avalanche professionals from different parts of the industry approach identifying and mitigating their avalanche problems.
Colin Mitchell gave two presentations spread apart on forecasting across operations and working as an avalanche forecaster for a mine in Chile. These were timely presentations that aligned with our Forecasting 2 class and gave us a professional perspective on the difference between forecasting for backcountry zones and transportation corridors in Colorado as well as forecasting for a large scale mine in the Andes. This was one of the factors that made me want to go work in South America as well, but of course, that is not going to happen this year with the Coronavirus pandemic.
Dave Richards gave us two presentations back to back over WebEx during one of our Leadville sessions. The first presentation he called "Ten things you should know..." and he discussed ten things he thought all avalanche professionals should know before entering the industry, more specifically ski patrollers. Second, he discussed his paper published for ISSW and in The Avalanche Review Confidence vs. Competence. One of the takeaways I had from Dave's presentations was the importance of having mentors in this industry but still questioning why they do everything they do and never blindly follow anyone regardless of their level of competence and experience.
Billy MacDougald gave a number of presentations on ski area avalanche mitigation and explosives. From boot packing programs to eliminate depth hoar and basal facets on the resort to passive mitigation techniques such as closures or wind fences and active mitigation techniques such as ski cuts and explosives, Billy covered a variety of methods that ski patrollers use to mitigate their avalanche hazard to an acceptable risk for guests.
Although Brian was also one of our full-time instructors I have included him on the guest lectures page as well for his two talks he gave on fracture mechanics. Discussing the physics of crack formation and propagation is a very complex topic that Brians' lectures gave me a great deal of clarification on, but is yet another topic where the more I learn the more I realize I don't know.