Blog | Photo Projects | Alpine Panoramics | Code | Tags | About
Snowsports and the Normalisation of Deviance
May 04, 2025 ( Prev / Next )

Les Dents du Midi, March 2025

There’s a mountain range visible from the office here that i’ve looked at almost everyday for the last 12 years, when weather conditions allow of course. Les Dents du Midi. Often i’ve thought “I wonder if anyone has ever skied or snowboarded down one of its peaks?”

That’s patently absurd when you get a closer look at it, through photos and maps, and learn of its topography. Seven 3000m peaks with shear cliff faces, steep tight couloirs, and almost nothing but exposed rocky no fall zones. Nobody is skiing or snowboarding down any of that, right?

Wrong - in the winter of 1980, three months before I was born, two skiers climbed for almost thirteen hours to create the first tracks and ski down one of the couloirs. A challenging descent, that took two hours. This is all before the days of lightweight camera, smartphones, GoPros, and documenting everything to run with on the content treadmill. So the history is limited to a newspaper article, a photo, and memories of those who did it or assisted.

The Algoprorithm

What really got me thinking about this was the algorithm throwing a couple of videos in my feed the last few months, videos of a couple of skiers that search out challenging terrain. And, yes, they recently uploaded videos of ascents and descents on peaks of Les Dents du Midi.

Starting with a video from four years ago, “After a first failed attempt and a very long-lasting avalanche danger, the mission was a bigger challenge than expected”. The second, a few months later, shows not one but two routes down another part of the mountain. Then finally two years ago, the piste de résistance - attempting a couloir down La Forteresse. Just looking at the image used for the video preview/thumbnail is stomach churning.

This is high altitude, high skill, highly technical, even higher risk skiing. Well, it’s not really skiing it’s ski mountaineering. With ropes, ice axes, climbing equipment, and a bunch of other stuff you wouldn’t normally associate with skiing.

And it’s all there for the world to see in glorious 4k. It joins the mass of other videos from recent years showcasing this type of ski mountaineering, and with each one that gets uploaded anew they continue to normalise that deviant behaviour little by little.

It is absolutely fucking bonkers.

Dents du Midi / Villars Golf (cropped), Feb 2025

Deviance

What even is deviant behaviour when it comes to snowsports? I can probably list a few that come to mind:

Many of these have been normalised over the last decade or more. It’s easier than ever to document yourself and others doing these things, as more and more people do it the survivorship bias creeps in as well. And if it’s not self documentation then it’s the likes of the “Extreme” sports channels, competitions, best trick shows, and so on. Every couple of years another 180 degrees is added to the maximum possible rotation that was thought possible. That requires more speed, bigger kickers, higher amplitude.

Companies release binding technology to shave off a few seconds from each run, but if you’re not paying attention and don’t click in properly they will release your foot while riding. Defenders of the tech will claim this doesn’t happen if you click in properly.

It should not be possible to not “click in properly” unless you’re doing that deliberately.

Normal operation is now with reduced safeguards compared to before.

This is classic normalisation of deviance.

All to save a few seconds per run.

Chamonix, Grand Montets Secret Bowl Tracks, Feb 2025

The avalanche risk grading can sound like a low number: 3 (out of 5)? Three is a low number but obfuscates that it means “Critical avalanche situation” and this corresponds to 50% of avalanche fatalities. The risk grading should be more like 60% (70%?) as that feels much higher, or they should just say “Critical”.

Content creators are aware of the risks, for the most part, and there are some content creators covering this issue. A recent video by one of those I follow was a talk asking is snowboarding dangerous. Somewhat a rhetorical question, surely? The video has some good points, but shows two bizarre moments - the first when he helps a fallen old guy up, and makes no mention that the guy wasn’t wearing a helmet. Sometime later he gets on a lift to continue making points about how you can reduce the danger by working on your body position, but he hasn’t put the lift safety bar down. Something the North American resorts don’t call you out on. Normalisation of deviance.

GoAmateur

This season I upgraded my GoPro and ended up taking it out every time [but one] I went on the mountain. I rarely took my old one out as the battery wouldn’t last more than a few runs, but the new models have improved on that considerably and I can get a full day of riding with just one spare battery.

I didn’t plan to take it out every time, but the first few were powder days so then I just kept going. I figured it would be a good way to learn a little about video editing and video content creation. I ended up recording every run of every day (again, but one) - a total of 24 days this season. About two thirds of what I used to do when I first arrived here, but still considerably more than most people get to spend on (or off) the pistes each winter season.

Below is a list of all the videos, in chronological order, with observations from myself about what I would consider the deviant behaviour in them, or the opposite. That is to say - what might be influential in a negative way to someone who is a less experienced rider or someone who assumes that the behaviour is “normal” or, if they read the descriptions, what might be good advice.

Chamonix, Mont Blanc et Les Aiguilles, Feb 2025
Verbier the day after after record snowfall, Apr 2025

What you might notice from the above is I spend most of my time off piste these days as I find the pistes boring. Unless it’s first thing with perfectly groomed runs, which is rare as I don’t get up on the mountain before 10am most days. Even on a powder day as I know where to go in my home resort to find the untracked stuff.

The most watched video I uploaded, at time of writing with a whopping 140 views, was the one I put the most effort into - a decent thumbnail, good snow conditions, interesting off piste places in a popular resort, edited together to keep it relatively interesting, and titled such that more people were likely to find it.

This one shows quite a high level of deviant behaviour in the riding - but I was explicit in the description that I had a guide, and we both had avalanche rescue equipment; which I didn’t mention, but I always ride with avalanche rescue equipment to some degree. In fact, I paid quite a lot of money to have that guide as I didn’t want to be riding off piste, in fresh snow, in a resort I didn’t know.

The most challenging thing is to keep the content fresh - I mostly snowboard in the same resort. I mostly go to the same places in that resort. The conditions are usually the same as I’ve become a blue-sky snowboarder (except when it’s a real powder day). I sort of managed to keep it varied enough, but if I were to keep doing this (which I’m not planning to) then I would have to start doing more to keep it interesting… if I were trying to grow an audience - which i’m not.

The Content Treadmill

Many content creators are trying to grow an audience, so need to keep their uploads fresh to keep their existing followers interested, but also fresh to attract new followers. And that’s where the deviance can creep in ever more.

The thing about snowsports videos is that the deviant behaviour can be seen to have potentially fatal consequences. Quite explicitly so in some cases. In other content the deviant behaviour might not be so clear. A content creator giving bad or misleading advice can be insidious, whereas watching a skier tumble in a no-fall zone shows clear consequences immediately.

Some of the other content that the algorithm has been throwing at me recently is software engineering related stuff. Live coding, reaction videos, how to guides, recordings of presentations. Most of this is creeping deviant junk. There’s value in the recordings of conference/workshop presentations (mostly) but the rest falls into the categories that you might see from uploaders in the space of developer influencers. Devfluencers? Influvelopers?

How do you even do live coding if you’re trying to also interact with the people watching the stream? Context switching is an absolute killer of productivity. Reaction videos are the laziest form of content, and a lot of the videos in this space are reactions to clickbait blog content - literally reading out the blog post to the viewers and then saying why the thing they are reading is correct or incorrect. Write a clickbait blog post reaction instead, and put some thought into it.

How to guides can be useful, but that stuff should probably be documentation - submit some patches or write a text version of it. It’s easier to find and reference in that form.

The problem with all this is that “Influencers in these areas need to have a constant stream of fresh material to stay relevant, so they’re always driving toward something new that they can produce content about.”1 Treadmills beget more treadmills. It’s a never ending treadmill on which everyone is racing to get the most views, be first to the next new thing, to have an exclusive, to come out on top of the algorithm, to make the first tracks.

First Tracks, Jan 2025

The photos shown in this post were all shot this winter season. Some are available for purchase in my online print shop. The one place I am perhaps trying to grow an audience…

  1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43425120, from The Frontend Treadmill ↩

snowboarding, software