by Alicia MacLeay
A lot of people come to Trailspace to learn from and share advice with fellow outdoorsy people, one might call them experienced people.
Well, as Oscar Wilde put it: “Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.”
And sometimes it seems like there's no better personal teacher. Here are a few examples of what I've learned through experience, or to be quite honest, mistakes. Feel free to share your lessons learned below.
1. Trust your gut.
Hey, why not ski out on that pond over there and see if we can cause some whumpfing and ice fracturing?
For example, if you think a snow slope is too steep to safely glissade down, you're probably right, despite what others say.
Lessons learned: While it's okay to push yourself in some outdoor contexts, if it doesn't feel safe figure out why before proceeding. From this experience, I also learned that the leash on my ice axe could break off, leaving the axe far above as I slid down the rest of the mountain "ass over teakettle" as one observer put it. Make sure your gear is in proper condition at all times.
2. Big mistakes with potentially big consequences, are often the result of lots of little mistakes that brought you to this moment.
In this case, I decided to do a quick lunchtime paddle with my spouse and my former boss, an expert paddler. We were in-town, so my guard was down. We changed the plan of who paddled with whom at the last minute, leaving we two less experienced paddlers together in our canoe. We unnecessarily followed the expert paddler in his kayak up below a small dam, got pulled into a current that took us into white water, paddled like mad, and ended up in the water. The canoe was sucked completely underwater, wrapped around a rock with a standing wave, and got ripped in half.
Lessons learned: All decisions matter. Don't follow someone just because he or she is an expert. Trust your gut (remember lesson #1 above?). PFD's work, but make good decisions as if they didn't. I don't panic in an emergency (useful self knowledge). Having a genuine half-canoe bookshelf is an excellent conversation piece.
3. Hearing ice whumpf then crack underfoot across a pond is remarkably loud.
I discovered this one on Saturday. I was skiing across a small beaver pond with my son well behind me and my husband on shore. Now, if I'm skiing alone or solo with a child I will not ski on any pond or lake, regardless of how thick the ice is. You could show me how many feet thick it is, but I will wonder about weak spots and moving water and the like. But this morning the ice was quite thick by the shore, the pond is not very deep, and we had backup. I was halfway across when that whumpf underfoot stopped me cold.
Lessons learned: Stay alert to changes in conditions. Ice and snow on a pond can whumpf very loudly. As I slowly skied backwards to shore, I got to observe three textbook examples of how ice and snow will fracture from trigger (or weak) points, like trees. It was classic whumpfing and fracturing I eagerly told my husband, once back on shore. I was never in real danger, but seeing firsthand how ice and snow behave underfoot (or ski) can be enlightening. I just wouldn't want to see it firsthand in an avalanche.
I'm still working on some of these lessons (like listening to my gut), but try to learn from my mistakes and not repeat the exact same ones.
Now, one shouldn't throw caution to the wind in a misguided attempt to gain "experience," but, mistakes are part of life, so when they happen, make them count.
As Albert Einstein said, “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
