When you're touring, you don't really want to have your watch on for consequential descents or travel through consequential terrain, because there's potential for your watch to end up close to your beacon if you're buried. A GPS watch (or any electronic device, but especially those that use Bluetooth and GPS) can significantly impact the accuracy of both your beacon sending a signal and the beacons of your partners searching for you. Read up on the "20-50 rule" if you want a more in depth insight on this.
The obvious workaround is to just start the track then throw your watch in your pack and be ok without it giving you HR info. Unfortunately, you still have to manually change the mode from "ascent" to "descent" when you transition. This means you either have to take the watch out of your pack in a transition, or keep it on your wrist and be in a riskier situation if a slope slides. (or keep it on your wrist and only ski low angle terrain)
The Alpine ski mode allows the option to have auto detecting ascent and descent, and it switches the mode for you automatically. That isn't an option on my 955. It seems like such an easy fix to just add the additional toggle from a very similar sport to work in pretty much the same way, but it just isn't there.
IDK, I'd think it would be a pretty universal change that Garmin would make ASAP, since "skier fatality due to beacon signal interference with their Garmin, preventing rescuers from locating them after an avalanche" sounds like really bad PR to me.
