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The article argues that the debate is framed the wrong way
Liam McGee’s “Online or In-Person?” starts with a question that sounds simple and familiar in modern outdoor education: if backcountry skiers can learn from videos, Zoom courses and polished online modules, how much does old-fashioned in-person instruction still matter? McGee answers by putting himself in the middle of both systems. Before joining an introductory ski-mountaineering course in Idaho’s Sawtooths, he studies online material from mountain guide Mark Smiley, practices knots at home and shows up with a decent store of concepts already in his head. On the bootpack, though, he quickly discovers that knowing the words is not the same thing as understanding how they live in terrain. Niels Meyer, the Sawtooth Mountain Guides co-owner leading the group, keeps answering McGee’s questions with some version of “it depends,” because every answer changes with angle, snow texture, partner position and immediate hazard.
That early contrast gives the article its center of gravity. McGee is not writing a nostalgic defense of classroom authority or a marketing pitch for digital convenience. He is showing why the apparent either-or choice is misleading. Online instruction can transfer terminology, models and repeatable technical skills quite efficiently. But mountain travel is full of partial information, changing conditions and small judgments that only become legible when a person is physically present in the environment. McGee’s point is not that screens are useless. It is that they are good at one part of the job and incomplete for the rest.
Why online education has become indispensable
The article is strongest when it explains why online learning is not just a pandemic workaround but a durable improvement in backcountry education. Meyer recalls how avalanche educators had to adapt quickly when COVID pushed classes out of traditional indoor settings. The hybrid model that followed, with students learning foundational material online before meeting in the field, ended up solving an older problem too: avalanche and ski-travel courses had always required instructors to cram a huge amount of information into a very short time. Pre-course online learning lets students arrive with the vocabulary already loaded, which frees in-person days for observation, application and discussion rather than nonstop lecture.
McGee broadens that argument by showing how online formats reduce some of the structural barriers that keep people from getting into the sport in the first place. Traditional mentorship demands time, money, proximity to mountains and access to knowledgeable partners, all of which are unevenly distributed. A recorded course, by contrast, can be paused, replayed and absorbed at a student’s own pace. Smiley points out that learning on a screen strips away distracting variables such as cold feet, social pressure and the cognitive overload that can come with trying to absorb a new concept while shivering in a parking lot at dawn. Dave Searle makes a related point in more practical terms: many technical skills, like knot tying or pulley setup, do not require a glacier or avalanche path for the first round of learning. They can be practiced repeatedly at home until the motions become familiar enough to be useful later.
McGee treats that accessibility as a serious advantage, not a consolation prize. The online ecosystem now includes structured courses from established guides, expanding digital instruction from YouTube explainers into something closer to a distributed apprenticeship. For beginners and intermediate skiers alike, that means the threshold for entering the conversation is lower. A person can arrive in the field already knowing the language of terrain traps, snowpack layers and rescue systems instead of hearing those ideas for the first time in a compressed weekend.
What only field experience can add
The article’s real conclusion, though, is that access to information should not be confused with experience. McGee keeps returning to the difference between possessing a skill and recognizing when and how to use it. A video can demonstrate bootpacking technique, but Meyer can stop midslope and explain why smaller steps matter for the partners behind, why keeping the head up helps with routefinding and how to read a change in snow texture while moving. Those are not abstract lessons. They emerge from a specific slope, on a specific day, with immediate consequences. That is why McGee describes a “missing link” between skills and experience: the mountains force a person to connect theory to consequence.
He makes that argument concrete by describing the rhythm of in-person learning rather than just praising it in the abstract. On the next day out, questions arise naturally from movement: the team changes aspects, steps onto crampons, follows rock to a ridge and keeps talking as the terrain changes around them. McGee can ask clumsy or half-formed questions and still get useful answers because instructor and student are looking at the same snow, the same exposure and the same route options. That feedback loop is dynamic in a way a pre-recorded lesson cannot be. The mountain keeps presenting live case studies, and a guide can seize them as they appear.
The closing scene in a Wasatch couloir shows what integration looks like. McGee is no longer merely replaying online advice in his head. He is making his own decisions about where to climb, how to use shade and sun, and when rockfall becomes the dominant problem. He notices the split between supportable corn and icy wind-affected snow, recognizes the danger posed by warming walls and leads a safer line because his head is up and his observations have started to organize themselves. That moment matters because the article does not pretend he has become expert overnight. It simply shows that the combination of online groundwork and in-person instruction has changed how he perceives the mountain.
By the end, McGee lands on a more convincing answer than the title’s binary suggests. Online education is excellent at opening the door. It can teach vocabulary, introduce systems, reduce cost and give motivated skiers a way to rehearse the building blocks before they ever click into bindings. But the field remains the place where those abstractions are tested, corrected and turned into judgment. “Online or In-Person?” works because it refuses to flatter either camp. The mountains are messy, inconvenient and irreplaceable, while the internet is efficient, repeatable and democratizing. Backcountry education is best when it uses both on purpose, letting one provide the foundation and the other provide the friction that makes real learning stick.