• Route Planning & Tour Preparation: Learn the essentials of backcountry route planning, including reading topographic maps, selecting safe routes, and preparing for potential hazards. You’ll also dive into weather and snowpack analysis to make informed decisions on your tours.
  • For this portion of the course, you’ll have a remote evening session with an instructor.
• Terrain Assessment & Travel Techniques: Develop your ability to assess and navigate various types of terrain. Understand how to identify avalanche-prone areas, avoid terrain traps, and use efficient travel techniques to move safely through the backcountry.
• Snowpack Assessment: Gain practical knowledge in evaluating snow stability through field tests such as hand pits and compression tests. Learn to interpret snowpack data to make informed decisions about terrain choice and travel.
• Ski Mountaineering Techniques: Gain hands-on experience with the technical skills required for ski mountaineering. This includes using crampons and ice axes for ascents, mastering steep skiing and riding techniques, and practicing essential rope skills for safe travel in exposed areas.
• Avalanche Companion Rescue: Sharpen your avalanche safety skills with practical training in companion rescue techniques. Learn how to effectively use a beacon, probe, and shovel, and participate in scenario-based training to simulate real-life rescue situations.
• Full-Day Tours: Put your skills to the test on full-day tours designed to challenge your navigation, decision-making, and group management abilities. These tours provide a real-world application of all the skills you’ve learned throughout the course.
• Capstone Experience: The course culminates in a final student-led (instructor supervised) tour where you take the lead, applying your new skills in a more advanced setting. This experience is designed to solidify your knowledge and prepare you for future ski and splitboard mountaineering adventures.

Who Should Join: This course is ideal for intermediate to advanced skiers and splitboarders who have some backcountry experience and are looking to expand their skillset. Participants should be comfortable with full-day tours and have a solid foundation in skiing or riding in varied snow conditions.

What You’ll Gain: By the end of the course, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of the key aspects of ski and splitboard mountaineering. You’ll leave with the confidence to plan and execute your own tours, navigate complex terrain, and respond effectively in avalanche situations.

• Duration: 6 Days + 1 remote evening session
  • Dates will be coordinated with the group after booking, adhering as best as possible to your availability.
• Location: Wasatch Mountains, Utah (specific locations vary based on conditions)
• Group Size: a maximum of 4 students of comparable level and fitness
• Instructors: Certified and experienced ski mountaineering guides

Equipment: Participants will need a full backcountry ski or splitboard setup, including skis or splitboard with skins, avalanche safety gear (beacon, probe, shovel), and mountaineering equipment (crampons, ice axe, harness). A detailed gear list will be provided upon registration.

Uphill travel and efficiency

• Set a skin track at a sustainable angle and hold it across changing terrain and snow
• Execute a kick turn on a steep skin track without stepping out of your bindings or blowing up the track
• Complete a full transition — ski to skin, skin to ski — in under three minutes, in weather, without losing gear to the wind
• Manage layers and pace so you reach the top neither soaked nor shivering

Tour planning

• Read the Utah Avalanche Center forecast and translate the day’s avalanche problem into specific aspects and elevations you’ll avoid
• Build a tour plan in CalTopo or Gaia using slope-angle shading, marking safe zones, terrain traps, and escape routes before you leave the house
• Write a Plan B and a Plan C you’d genuinely be happy skiing, so pivoting doesn’t feel like losing

Terrain and snowpack

• Estimate slope angle by eye and verify with an inclinometer
• Identify avalanche terrain, terrain traps, and slope connectivity from the valley floor, before you’re standing on it
• Dig and interpret a hasty pit — and, more importantly, know when a test result should change your plan and when it shouldn’t
• Track how one season’s snowpack evolves across six tours instead of forming an opinion from a single day

Group dynamics and decision-making

• Run a trailhead check and a pre-drop briefing for a group that isn’t yours
• Name the human factors operating on your group out loud, in the moment, while there’s still time to act on them
• Make a turnaround call and defend it to partners who want to keep going

Companion rescue

• Locate and excavate a single burial to a repeatable time standard, not just “eventually”
• Take a defined role in a team rescue and run strategic shoveling as part of a group

By the end of the season you should be able to plan, lead, and debrief a full backcountry day for yourself and a partner — and have a clear, honest sense of which terrain is still above your experience level. That second part is the one that keeps people alive.

No — and be wary of any program that says otherwise. There is no recognized certification for recreational backcountry skiing. What is certified is avalanche education: Avalanche Level 1, Avalanche Rescue, and Avalanche Level 2 all carry credentials recognized by the American Avalanche Association. Professional guiding credentials come from the AMGA. This mentorship builds the judgment and travel skills that certifications assume you already have but don’t actually teach — and most people want both.

A Level 1 gives you a framework across two field days. A mentorship gives you a season to apply it. Level 1 teaches you what a persistent weak layer is; six tours from January to March let you watch one develop, sit, and eventually heal in the same terrain. Most of our mentorship students have already taken Level 1, and the two complement each other rather than overlapping.

A private guide day is built around skiing well. A mentorship is built around you becoming the person who plans the day. On a guided day the guide makes the calls; here, you increasingly make them, with a professional watching and correcting.

Comfortable skiing or riding varied snow — powder, crust, and hardpack — on full-day tours, with your own touring setup and some backcountry days under your belt. Groups are capped at four students of comparable ability and fitness, so we’ll talk with you before booking to make sure the group works.

Wasatch Mountains, Utah — the specific zone is chosen the morning of, based on the avalanche forecast, overnight loading, and what the group needs to see. Over six days you’ll cover a range of terrain and aspects, which is the point.

The curriculum is the same; the Women’s Backcountry Ski Mentorship runs as its own cohort with women guides. Pick whichever you’d rather learn in.