Can we reach slip zero?
A few months ago I was hiking Mount Rose in Nevada with my sisters when my older sister slipped and broke her tibia and shattered her fibula. It was a lightning out of the blue moment - the trail is well-maintained, we were on a relatively gentle downslope, she was wearing new trail runners and using trekking poles, and it was a quick slip to the ground from walking pace - the kind of fall that you usually bounce right back up from.
It was a disconcerting accident - a low probability event in a low objective hazard situation that it felt like we had minimized the subjective hazard for. In the months since the accident, however, I've come to believe that we don't think enough about these types of events. I've probably seen half a dozen slips like my sister's since the accident (it's muddy season in Alaska) - and it's been fine! They happen so frequently that we get conditioned to accept little slips like that as a normal part of hiking. But what if we decided that any slip rate is unacceptable - how close can we get to eliminating them completely?
Aiming for "slip zero" has caused me to make some adjustments in my training and technique. On a macro level, it's made me start running again. I cross country ski in the winter, and have been relying on hiking as my primary source of exercise in the summer. Now I'm thinking about hikes as "events" with running as the training for those events. When I'm out hiking I want to be pushing myself less than when I'm running - fatigued muscles on uneven hiking terrain make stumbling more likely. Better to push myself on the gentle trails in town. As a side-effect I go hiking less often! But when I do I'm less weary at the end than I was before.
I've also made some micro-level changes. One category of changes I'll call "better safe than dignified". If I'm scrambling down a steep slope and it starts to feel too step, I'll crab walk down the part I don't like. If I fall, I'll fall 3 inches onto my butt. I also switch to side-stepping much more aggresively than I would before and on muddy / scree-y slopes "hunt-and-peck" my way down the slope looking for anchor rocks that I can get a firm footing on. All in all, I probably look like an idiot, and I definitely get down the mountain slower. But I'm safer!
A piece of wisdom I've heard several times from experienced mountaineers is that when the situation gets tricky, we can start speeding up when we should be slowing down. I've been seeing my own micro version of this - maybe there's a rock I need to step on and I'm not sure how stable it is. My initial reaction will be "well just step on it really quick and get past it" when really I should either be stopping to see if it's stable or stopping to find a route around it. I'm getting better at recognizing these little situations and countering my brain's urges to speed up and get through it, though there's still work to be done.
A final change I've made is doing the "weird shuffly walk thing using trekking poles". There's probably a real name for this, I see other people doing it, but I don't know what it is! The idea is this: on a downslope, your natural tendency is to lean back so that you don't fall forward. But leaning back pushes your weight onto your heels, so that very little of your boot's sole is in contact with the ground. This increases the chance that your heels will slip out from under you. If you use trekking poles, however, you can lean forward and let the poles prevent you from falling while getting full contact between your boot and the ground. This is paired with small shuffling steps so that your foot always has good contact (big steps mean big heel strike which means poor contact).
Now, I'm definitely not claiming any of this stuff would have prevented my sister's accident. Heck, she might have been doing all of it already; I haven't really talked about it with her. She's still recovering and doesn't want to think about this stuff right now. But making these adjustments has at least given me a little bit of agency back after witnessing such an unlucky accident.