Advertisement
Published: February 26th 2009
Transceiver Search
They found it in the end!Over the last weekend I (iain) and one of the lads I've met out here (Lez) did a 2.5 day Avalanche Awareness Course and am now qualified by the Canadian Avalanche Centre - Avalanche Skills Training Level 1.
The course started on Friday night with 3 hours in the classroom (quite a while since I'd done anything like that) learning all about what causes avalanches and what to look for to avoid getting caught in one, what to do if you get caught in one and finally how to rescue people who manage to get caught in one.
Saturday we went out on the hill and did some transceiver searches - these are the beacons you wear incase you get buried - they are pretty simple to use and our snow shovelling techniques were refined - it transpires that takes far more time and effort in a rescue than the pin point process of locating people.
We then went for a 30 minute hike (uphill) to find a spot to dig a snow pit. The snow pit allows you to view a cross section of the snow to look for any weak layers and also to test how
strong it is. This seasons snow pack is only about 1.7m deep so this only took us about 15 minutes, thank goodness it wasn't last season when they had about 4m by now!
On Sunday we met up early and headed out into the backcountry to safely get some fresh turns and do some practice rescues. The first thing we had was a 45 minute hike to the top of Flute mountain followed by a short run down the backside of it, we came to an abrupt halt after only 1 minutes riding for the guide to mutter 'oh s**t! we've gone the wrong way' so we had to unclip and hike for another 20 minutes to get back to the top.
Eventually we got going the right way and got some nice powder turns in, followed by a break for lunch and then our rescue scenario to deal with. We managed it OK but not great but did learn that finding a rucksack with a beacon in it takes next to no time whereas finding one without a beacon in it takes about 20 minutes, too long if it was for real.
We rode down to
the bottom of Flute which was great but then had a further hike to get back up to the top! 1 hour 20 minutes later we finally made it back and could re-enter the ski area, which by now was closed and empty, and ride back to the village for a de-brief.
The course was really good and focussed very much on the first safety line of not getting caught out rather than too much on the rescuing which makes sense really. All of this was very timely as winter has finally arrived and we've had about 1m of snow in the last 3 days, more of which in our next entry....
Advertisement
Tot: 0.063s; Tpl: 0.009s; cc: 6; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0379s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
