Fall: Pre-Course Reading and Review Quiz

The following required texts are available from the NSP accessories catalog, Amazon or other on-line book sellers, outdoor gear shops, and even some regular “brick-and-mortar” book stores:

• Snow Sense, by Jill Fredston and Doug Fesler (fifth edition: the top of the cover reads “new edition of a bestselling classic” and the bottom credits include “Edited by Karl Birkeland and Doug Chabot”) – Must read all chapters, and thoroughly understand them too. This small book is a very quick and easy read, so this is probably the easier prerequisite. (NSP members might want to order from the Accessories Catalog if combining shipping cost with other items.)
• Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain, by Bruce Tremper (second edition: cover photo shows a skier on a slope just starting to fracture, not tracks leading into a fractured slope) – Must read all chapters except for the snow pack evaluation tests in Chapter 6, which are more appropriate for a Level 2 course.
• Backcountry Skiing: Skills for Ski Touring and Ski Mountaineering, by Martin Volken, Scott Schell, and Margaret Wheeler – Must read the one chapter that deals exclusively with avalanche safety, but the other chapters (all of which are outstanding) in this highly comprehensive book will help to prepare you for backcountry travel during our field sessions, although feel free to skip over the more technical mountaineering portions, which include: climbing gear portions of Chapter 1, glacier travel sections of Chapter 5, all of Chapter 6, crevasse rescue sections of Chapter 10.

Based on this reading, complete the review quiz, which you can download here, and send in the completed form (preferably in the format of a single pdf file) by the deadline noted at the student checklist. The quiz will not be graded (especially since some of the questions are designed more to elicit thinking rather than any particular well-defined answer), but it will be reviewed for completeness.

You can also preview some of the instructor presentations -- feel free to print them out in "handout" format if that will facilitate your note taking.

And if all of this isn't enough, we have even more . . .