I loved how practical and easy to read this book is. Hire on all essentials in gear, anyone predictions and planning and survival planning an avi 1 course and this was great to read prior to course!

Buy this book, read it and read it again each fall and winter

I've taken the AIARE 1 class and read both Snow Sense and this book. The books complement each other. Snow Sense has chapters to cover snow metamorphosis but the material I felt was a bit disorganized for the first time reader (reading it a couple times again helped). This 34;Avalanche Essentials34; book has most of the important topics cover (except in depth snow metamorphosis), but other than that the materials were well structure and organized. I found myself being able to read this much faster and absorbed the materials better. The fonts, pictures and illustrations in this book are clearer/cleaner than Snow Sense. Also, I took the class and read Snow Sense first so by the time I got to this book it the information is already fairly familiar. I suggest you get both books, they are fairly cheap and will give you a lot of good knowledge if you do any type of backcountry activities in the winter. And take the AIARE 1/2 class. On a couple of private splitboarding trips, all the guides told me that they did their a majority of their planning at home first, figuring out the slopes and aspects to avoid, this book gave the same recommendation and went over a couple examples.

Excellent supplement to an AVY 1 course.

Read this book before taking a level 1 class. A real eye-opener. Well worth the cost and reading time.

A more concise/condensed version of the previous book. Tremper has a true gift for explaining things in a way most folks can understand.