A couple of winters ago, I was almost caught in an avalanche. It was one of the stupidest things I've ever done, but it was also one of the best lessons I've ever learned.

That season, the snow was plentiful and unusually stable. By mid-December, we were skiing steep pitches we usually avoid until spring, and when my friend Joel called to see whether I wanted to sneak in some midweek turns, I leaped at the opportunity to ski some new and more aggressive terrain.

The plan was to climb from the top of Loveland Pass, pick our way through a couple of above- treeline chutes and then ski down to a pitch called "Hippie Trees."

The local avalanche report had reported fairly stable conditions that morning, but when we got out of our car at the top of the pass, the wind was howling, and the temperatures had warmed dramatically.

The changed conditions made us nervous, and we contemplated calling it a day before we even started, but we had driven all the way from the Front Range to ski this pitch, so we pushed on. We climbed up a ridge and peered over into two chutes we needed to negotiate to get to the safer terrain in the trees. The first had recently slid; the second was still loaded with snow.

We hemmed and hawed about whether to ski the snow-laden slope, and finally decided to make one turn in the chute that already had slid, then pass under a protective rock outcropping and traverse the second run as quickly as we could.

Joel crossed first. I lined up next, waiting for him to get to the other side of the chute before starting in. Just as I pushed off, however, I felt the snow collapse under me and watched the smooth surface splinter into thousands of dense pieces.

Joel quickly high-tailed it out of the slide zone, but my skis were buried and wouldn't budge. Just a foot in front of me, the fractured slab was roiling and roaring with alarming speed. I had seen avalanches from afar, but I hadn't known that they moved with such violence.

Finally, I scissored my feet out of the heavy snow and skied out. We watched as the car-size chunks piled up in a depression a few hundred feet below.

Chastened, and not a little bit terrified, we clambered up the rock outcropping above us and headed straight for the nearest bar.

Over our first before-lunch beers since college, we discussed the mistakes we had made that morning. The conditions had changed, while our plan had not.

Joel had skied this same terrain a few days before and assumed it would still be safe, even though there was obvious evidence of new avalanche activity; we had qualms but didn't speak up.

We also did some things right, however. Instead of skiing the chute from the top, we traversed it at a safer spot.

We also decided to cross the suspect chute one person at a time. Had I dropped in before Joel had made it across, he would have been caught in the middle. Instead, he skied out the far side while I (barely) stayed out of the debris on my end.

A couple of months later, I sheepishly told this story to a friend who works as a professional mountain guide.

He didn't need to tell me I was stupid; I already knew that. Instead, he offered a fitting moral to my avalanche tale.

"You have to trust your gut," he said.

You can read the avalanche reports, you can dig a pit, you can follow a more knowledgeable leader, but if it still doesn't feel right, your safest bet is not to do it.

Hannah Nordhaus covers the outdoors and the environment from her home in Boulder.