>>1468585>Beat me to it. My compass has a slope angle meter, and it's an essential tool for terrain choices.Guess and check as you ride. A season of doing that and you won't need any tools to evaluate terrain. I'm usually ±2°.
For slope angle, I prefer a clinometer on the phone. The one I have overlays lat/long/date/time, aspect, and angle on the display, and gives me a quick button to take a photo with that overlay. Makes reporting real easy, and with the two axes (tilt and rotation) I can sight along a slope or shoot alpha angle with it. The dedicated ones are dead weight imo.
>>1468619>Any particular reason you dug it up?Did that with Level 1 students in a class.
Pits are kind of an academic exercise for rec riders... showing them the "long division" so they know what's going on and have a better understanding of the snowpack and what a profile actually looks like, but in day-to-day rides they're just going to use a calculator... do informal tests or poke around in their trench if they get stuck.
>>1468656Those are nice for shooting azimuth/elevation aligning satellite or PTP dishes... a little better resolution. Never use it (or even carry it) on a sled. I carry a cheapie little baseplate compass instead, along with the clinometer on my phone.
Satellite internet needs ±0.5° alignment to the bird in the sky. It needs to be real close to work. Get it "good enough" with a prismatic compass, then lock it in with a signal meter.
Avalanche forecasters may say "avoid slopes greater than 30° today", and that's not a magical number where a 29° slope is safe and a 31° slope isn't. "Is that slope more than 30-ish, or less than 30-ish?" Develop an "avalanche eye" so you can make terrain decisions as you go, recognizing and managing that consequential terrain, instead of shooting measurements all day.
