How Healthy Is Utah's Backcountry Culture?

What happens to a community when the mountains get more crowded but the snowpack gets thinner? Ski guide and avalanche educator Jenna Malone and IFMGA mountain guide Chris Brown join guest host Brooke Mauschund to dig into the state of Wasatch backcountry culture, how it's changed through the years, what's been lost, and how we can cultivate it going forward. It's about skin track etiquette, the gap between skiing ability and actual backcountry competence, and making sure scarcity and individualism don't erode the communal ties that keep people safe out there. What it really boils down to is the social contract of the mountains, an unspoken agreement that when things go sideways out there, we're each other's first line of help.

You can listen to How Healthy Is Utah's Backcountry Culture? online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

How Healthy Is Utah's Backcountry Culture? is an episode from Utah Avalanche Center Podcast by Utah Avalanche Center.

This episode is 44:07 long.

This episode was published on Apr 4, 2026.

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