Avalanche education probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of video games, but a Colorado-developed app is trying to bring the two together.
SoGnar Snow turns avalanche rescue, snow science and backcountry trip planning into a collection of playable games designed to reinforce skills between formal avalanche courses and days in the mountains. The app was created by Austin Dyer, director of outdoor recreation at the Colorado School of Mines, with Mines students helping develop the underlying technology.
The basic idea is pretty simple. Instead of taking an avalanche course, putting the material away and hoping you remember everything months later, SoGnar gives skiers and snowboarders a way to repeatedly practice some of those concepts on their phones.
Avalanche Rescue Becomes An Arcade Game
The SoGnar Snow app includes several games built around concepts familiar to anyone who has taken avalanche education.
One, called “AVALANCHE!!!” puts players through a timed avalanche rescue scenario. “The Pits” has users dig and interpret a virtual snowpit, while “Pro Practice” focuses on snow science. Another game, “Map Dancin'” introduces route planning with topographic maps.
There is also a fictional guide named Uncle Al who helps walk players through the games.
Dyer is not approaching avalanche education purely from a software-development perspective. He is an AIARE avalanche instructor in addition to his position at Colorado School of Mines and his role as founder of SoGnar Technologies.
His goal is not to replace traditional avalanche courses. Instead, the games are intended to give backcountry users another way to keep practicing concepts they have already learned.
Colorado School Of Mines Students Helped Build It
SoGnar began as a broader outdoor recreation technology project rather than an avalanche-specific product.
Dyer brought the concept into the Colorado School of Mines computer science Field Session program, where students worked on GPS tracking, mapping, game development, user interfaces and other parts of the application.
The project continued growing through additional student teams. Mines’ 2026 software engineering project listings include teams specifically assigned to SoGnar mini-games, audio development and other expansion work.
SoGnar Technologies eventually expanded the idea into three separate apps covering cycling, running and hiking, and snow sports. SoGnar Snow became the skiing and snowboarding version, with avalanche education becoming a major part of the experience.
Rather than ranking users by who skis fastest or logs the most vertical feet, the system awards points for participating and playing its games.
It’s More Than Just Games
The avalanche games are the unusual part, but SoGnar Snow also includes more conventional backcountry tools.
The app provides avalanche information pulled from official forecast centers, allows users to create or import GPX routes and includes offline tracks and waypoints. Skiers can also keep a digital field journal for snow observations and trip notes.
That puts several parts of the backcountry planning process into the same app where users can practice avalanche concepts.
The Colorado Avalanche Information Center remains the authoritative source for Colorado avalanche forecasts and mountain weather information. CAIC also offers its own free avalanche education resources, including interactive tutorials, rescue-practice videos and Avalanche Aware, a free introductory eLearning program developed with AIARE and the Northwest Avalanche Center.
CAIC explicitly notes that online avalanche tutorials are not replacements for comprehensive in-person training. The same distinction applies to SoGnar Snow. Playing through a virtual rescue cannot reproduce digging through avalanche debris with a beacon, probe and shovel, nor can a simulated snowpit replace experience evaluating an actual snowpack.
What it can potentially do is make people practice more often.
Keeping Avalanche Skills Fresh
That may be the most interesting part of the idea.
Avalanche education involves skills and decision-making processes that can fade if they aren’t regularly practiced. Beacon rescue, terrain identification, route planning and recognizing snowpack problems aren’t things backcountry users want to relearn during an emergency.
SoGnar’s approach is to make some of that repetition entertaining enough that people voluntarily come back to it.
The app is currently available for iPhone and requires a subscription after its free trial. The standard pricing listed by Apple is $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year.
No phone game is going to make avalanche terrain safe, and SoGnar isn’t presenting itself as a substitute for professional instruction or current avalanche forecasts. But turning safety refreshers into something skiers might actually want to play is an interesting approach to one of backcountry education’s perennial challenges: remembering what you learned long after the class ends.
