How to Mitigate Risk in the Backcountry

There are inherent risks in backcountry travel. These will be different based on the activity, the time of year, the terrain and ecosystem, but the process to think through how to deal with these risks is the same. The process can be broken down into two parts, analyzing the risk and then creating a mitigation strategy. 

To analyze risk, start by listing out all potential hazards for your trip. Then assign each hazard a likelihood and severity, (low, medium or high), likelihood is how likely is this hazard to happen, and severity is how bad would it be if this hazard happened. These two things together give us a sense of the overall risk a hazard poses. 

Now we have to come up with a plan to mitigate them and we have to do this efficiently. Efficiency is key here. We can’t bring the kitchen sink with us if we need more water, we use a small water filter. And if our filter is lost or damaged we can either bring chemical tablets or a steel water bottle to boil our water in. As we add layers of redundancy, we are decreasing the likelihood of a hazard, in this case running out of water. We can also take steps in the planning phase of our trip to reduce the likelihood by noting available water sources on the map and ensuring that we bring enough water storage to get us between them. 

A final note on efficiency. As you increase the weight of your pack, you are increasing the risk of injury or slowing down your expected pace, so it is important to carefully plan your mitigation strategies without just adding more stuff in your pack. 

We will be diving into more topics related to this in the coming weeks, stay tuned. And if you want to learn more check out our course The Prepared Hiker System if you have not already, we go through this process in more detail.