ISSW 2023, Bend Oregon
Every two years the world’s top snow and avalanche researchers and practitioners gather to exchange ideas and experiences at the International Snow Science Workshop (ISSW). This biennial conference started in 1976 in Banff, Alberta and now rotates between locations in the United States, Canada, and Europe. This year over 1,100 attendees from all over the world met in Bend, Oregon.
The 2023 conference took place from October 8-13, Sunday through Friday, with a field day on Wednesday. This year’s ISSW consisted of 80 oral and 195 poster presentations, representing 275 contributions from 16 different countries. These presentations are all represented with publicly available papers in the conference archives, hosted by Montana State University. This searchable archive is available online.
The thematic focus of ISSW 2023 was on current advances in snow and avalanche science, case studies and innovative technologies on an international level, merging theory and practice. Unlike any other symposium, the ISSW promotes an international and interdisciplinary exchange between experts in the snow and avalanche community. This means that attendees and presenters all share an interest in snow and avalanches but may come from very different professional backgrounds. Ski guides and ski patrollers interact with avalanche forecasters from transportation safety programs and industrial avalanche programs. These operational groups also learn from and engage with avalanche researchers from universities around the world and engineers that are developing products to address the avalanche problem. The challenge of the snowpack may be the same but the scale of operations is often very different.
I attended ISSW for the first time in Breckenridge, Colorado in 2016 and again, online, in 2021. This year, like previous years, I found that the networking and industry connections that take place at ISSW are among the most valuable aspects of the conference. Different presentation formats like oral and poster presentations, panel discussions, as well as the integration of an international exhibition, allow direct interaction among the broad target audience.
Next year the conference will return to its regular, pre-pandemic schedule. ISSW 2024 will be hosted in Tromsø, Norway, followed by ISSW 2026 in Whistler, B.C.
Jerry Isaak is an Associate Teaching Professor and the program lead for ski touring in the Adventure Studies Department at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. He is an AMGA certified Ski Guide and has guided backcountry ski adventures in Iceland, Kyrgyzstan, Japan, and throughout the United States and western Canada.