Henry Schniewind is a snow and avalanche educator, off-piste guide
and founder of Henry’s Avalanche Talk (HAT), based in Val d’Isère in
the French Alps. Over almost four decades, his work has combined
avalanche science with the practical reality of making decisions in
the mountains. He has logged around 3,500 professional off-piste
guiding days and delivered close to 1,000 talks and training sessions,
from on-snow avalanche and rescue training to presentations and
courses for recreational skiers and professionals.
Henry studied geology at Boston University and snow and avalanche
forecasting at Montana State University. He qualified through France’s
ENSA as a French “Full Cert” ski instructor in 1993. He is a
Professional Member of the American Avalanche Association, and his
work has been personally endorsed by Dominique Létang, former director
of ANENA, the French avalanche association. He has spent more than 30
winters guiding off-piste in Val d’Isère.
His focus today is not simply on giving skiers more information.
Avalanche terrain is a high-consequence, low-feedback environment,
where poor decisions can repeatedly appear to work because most of the
time nothing happens. Henry developed the HAT “Safety is Freedom”
method to help bridge that gap between knowing and doing, reducing a
complex subject to practical actions people can remember and apply:
Where You Go, How You Go and What You Do — decision-making, risk
reduction and crisis management.
The aim is practical: to help skiers become more confident, more
autonomous and better able to manage risk while still getting the
adventure and enjoyment they went off-piste for. That same approach
sits at the heart of Backcountry Smarter, combining Henry’s mountain
risk-management work with Mark Jones’s practical approach to ski
technique and equipment.