Safety on and off the piste

A snowHead

since the sad news about the snowboarder killed in Tignes by an avalanche I've been chatting to some of our local pisteurs. They were telling me some stories that would make your hair curl. Basically, most of the serious accidents they've been involved with have been due to someone either going into a closed area (ignoring the signs), or skiing/snowboarding in an unsafe place with no real knowledge of snow conditions. Our Australian pisteur who has also worked in Thredbo and Espace Killy (7 years) was re-iterating that if caught in an avalanche, after 15 minutes your chance of survival absolutely plummets. I won't go into any of the gory details that I got, but please, everyone, make sure you know what you're doing. If you're even slightly inexperienced ask the ski patrol for advice before going anywhere. It won't make you look stupid.A ski holiday is supposed to be fun - it's not worth dying for 10 turns in untracked snow.

A snowHead

easiski, too true...too right!

IME, the ski patrol will say "yes, it's safe enough, at your own risk", and any snow anywhere can be a risk - when it's genuinely the case. I'm not aware of any situations where they'll be kill-joys for the sake of it. They'd also much rather have the opportunity to let you down gently and have you live to try another day than carry you down in a body bag.

Don't anyone be afraid to ask. Even if pisteurs do generally ski like gods! (I guess they can be a little intimidating... wink

)

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

At the top of the hill in Verbier they have a "freeride hut" where you can chat to the ski patrol about the conditions, this is new and hopefully becoming more popular in all resorts.

Can someone be bothered to look up the chart that plots your chart of survival Vs time buried? If not I'll plot a version I have in a book, it's very grim.

[non-Daily Mail rant]This is why if you are skiing off piste (not just the little bits of ungroomed between runs) you need to be wearing a beeper, be with people that are also wearing beepers, all know how to use them and have at least a shovel each so that you can dig them out when you find them.[/non-Daily Mail rant]

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parlor,

The freeride hut sounds a very good idea and hopefully that can be adopted in other places...

But maybe there are some places that would want to keep areas entirely guided as it is their livelyhood and in their interests.

Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.

There is a freeride hut in Tignes.

You'll need to Register first of course.

Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...

There is also some sort of special avalanche awareness / training area in Tignes. Try the search engine - we've covered it before.

After all it is free

Not really a replacement for a proper course but here's a link to a useful online course from the Canadian Avalanche Association http://access.jibc.bc.ca/avalancheFirstResponse/index.htm

Another similar link here, including some nice pics of snow pits, shovel shear tests etc.

*Ski* the Net with snowHeads

I'd also say feel free to give a right ear bashing to anyone putting someone else's life at risk e.g. by traversing above a group of skiers who were there first.

Can't understand the mentality of people who'll happily spend £2000 more on upgrades for their car but whinge about the cost of transceivers. You don't exactly use your side airbags much either but you'll quite happily pay for them.

I'd highly recommend viewing 91 Words for Snow if you can (its a new Snowboarding DVD which has a whole section showing the repeated work the pros put in on Avy assessment for days on end before riding some of the amazing lines in Alaska) - first time I've seen it in any movie.

Imagine taking 3 or 4 days of heli drops just to fly back down before you can get your one run in!

snowHeads are a friendly bunch.

Long before the invention of the transceiver, the avalanche cord "saved hundreds of lives", according to Colin Fraser, the expert who wrote 'The Avalanche Enigma' in 1966.

Just tie a long (maybe 10m) bright cord to your ankle, if you feel uneasy about some terrain - and trail it behind you.

Better still, it should indicate the direction your ankle is in, so that anyone spotting a section of the cord can trace you quickly.

snow reports

I saw an article (can't recall where) which compared the time to locate and recover against the equipment carried. Probe transceiver and shovel as expected came out quickest but the time quoted of sixteen minutes was a bit of a shock when compared to the 15 minute limit in easiski's post. The group doing the exercise were relatively inexperienced, mountain professionals would be expected to be much faster.

If any one piece of kit was not present the rescue time grew massively.

I guess the moral is that its not enough just to carry the kit, you need to be familiar with its operation and well practiced in rescue procedures to stand any real chance of saving lives.

David Goldsmith, that's an interesting idea given the trickiness of transceivers in general and digital ones in particular!

You know it makes sense.

CP, it's actually a whole freeride area, and it's marked on the piste map. I can't remember the name of the chair unfortunately.

Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:

Wgat's interesting in the paper on "heuristic traps" in avalanche decision making (i.e. you are more likely to be caught in an avalanche by making a poor decision based on good available information than the information available being wrong) is that it doesn't give ideas on avoiding these problmes in decision making.

Food for thought...

Good paper though

A snowHead

A snowHead

fatbob, But as an extra safety device it can't hurt can it? Good idea - I'd forgotten about that - cost very little!! Very Happy

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

Agree that it wouldn't hurt as an extra precaution but I just think its a dangerous suggestion for people who might be inclined to the stupid.

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fatbob, if we're talking adults inclined to the stupid shoudln't we consider the gene pool as a whole?

Re earlier comment, yes, if you follow instructions and practice, digital transceivers are great, but a little counter intuitive when you see the search lines spiraling in, no?

Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.

You'll need to Register first of course.

The curving is due to the shape of the field from the transmitting antenna (think back to your bar magnet with iron filings school days), it makes no difference whether you have a digital or analog tranceiver. The digital one adds antennas and processing electronics to the receiver so it can determine distance and direction and display it in a digital format rather than twiddling with volume knobs. Personally I don't think that digital tranceivers are anywhere near advanced enough, they are based on very primitive technology - especially in the area of multiple burials (I found a DCS tracker was really tricky for multiple deep burials - I found Pieps dsp and even analogue tranceivers much better). It would be relatively simple to make transmitters have an encoded unique ID which would save confusion because the receiver could then truly differentiate between transmitters because it is encoded on the standard carrier frequency older tranceivers would still work fine with it (they are not quite the same anyway despite the standard - our mountain guide who I did the recreational avy course with could tell which make you had just by the way it beeped! Shocked

),

Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...

stuarth, if they are going digital then I guess quite a lot 'could' be done in this area. Why not have an embedded GPS which actually transmits your location (or last known location) down to a few meters. That coupled with a GPS on the searcher's side would do a lot to assist in searching. The only question would be to what depth can a GPS receiver receive from satellites under the snow? Since a lot of the survivable burials are in fact shallow ones, maybe this would be something worth investigating? Anyone fancy having a go? Anyone know where the standards for this equipment are defined?

After all it is free

snowball, pedant! wink

Himachal Heliskiing make some rather radical claims about their trannys

"In addition to the avalanche bag, we have developed a new transmitter system for avalanche rescue. This device, made specially to the design of HHS, is used in conjunction with the standard avalanche beacons. It has a number of major advantages. Each guest has a separate frequency which we can search for individually. The searching range of the device is much better than any other beacon. Instead of the standard sixty metres, our new device can be directionally detected at fifteen kilometres. The device is completely waterproof with a magnetic switch that cannot be accidentally turned off in the field. During tests, we were able to locate five units over an area of twenty square kilometres in sixteen minutes STARTING FROM OUR BASE! This is an immense improvement in searching systems.

This system has a new innovation- a motion detector- which guides carry. If the motion detector is still for twenty seconds (as in the case of a completely buried person), an alarm will sound in the helicopter. This means that even if an entire group is buried without making any alarm calls by radio, the helicopter will begin a "roll-call" of the guides within thirty seconds of the avalanche stopping."

"No other Heli-skiing operation has any of these devices. They were designed and made by HHS and no other operation is likely to get them in the near future."

Which seems rather selfish...one would have thought commercialising such a system would be more lucrative than heliskiing? The developer, one Roddy Mackenzie, seems quite well known for inventing avvy safety kit.

A friend of mine is going with them in Feb.

David Murdoch, interesting stuff. I wonder if this is the sort of thing which is OK in the isolation of Himalayan heli-skiing, but which would be completely impossible to track if a lot of people were wearing them in a resort context.

I've always thought that one of the benefits of transceivers is their simplicity. I have an Ortovox F1 Focus which is pretty near the bottom of the sophistication scale for bleepers you can still buy. I like it like that. There's not much that can go wrong. It does mean that you have to practice to get good at using it. Again, this is no bad thing. It's easier and easier for people to venture off-piste so something which makes people stop and think and realise that it can be quite a serious undertaking isn't such a bad thing.

Regarding those avalanche cords, it's an interesting one. I can't imagine putting one on at the start of the day and skiing with it all day - it would get tangled on things and generally be a pain in the bum (unlike a transceiver and other safety kit). I always think that you shouldn't ski something you wouldn't be happy to ski without safety kit - ie your kit shouldn't make you take chances you wouldn't do otherwise. So if I was standing at the top of a slope I thought might go, I think I'd be inclined to ski elsewhere, rather than attach a cord to myself and take a chance. After all, lots of people get killed by the trauma of being avalanched - it's not just being buried then running out of oxygen

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Arno, a good point, that might be why they're not "sharing" it.

We got Mammut/Arvas because although they are a little more complex than the "tracker" the Swiss did a survey that recommended them And they're red. (no. no, stop. Mustn't be frivolous about essential kit!)

Oddly, simply possessing beeper, shovel, probe has made me more conscious of what I'm doing. Chain of thought runs - "if I wasn't tooled up would I do this?" and it the answers "no" I don't. Although I really, really need to get more training in.

David Goldsmith, going back to your Colin Fraser point. I had a number of conversations with a guide in Canada who'd been heli guiding since about 1970; amazing guy, amazing guide. He reckoned that while there was some science to it now, back then the whole thing was pure art, skill and luck. Even when we were skiing with him a couple of years ago he very nearly got it badly wrong; would have been no-one's fault as there had been much joint guide consideration of what routes we should be taking - and these guys definitely seemed to err on the ultra-cautious side.

snowHeads are a friendly bunch.

Anyone get anything back from Ortovox about their lid upgrade for M1, M2 bleeps..?
I'm still waiting and will use the large batteries in the interim...

snow reports

Arno, "I always think that you shouldn't ski something you wouldn't be happy to ski without safety kit - ie your kit shouldn't make you take chances you wouldn't do otherwise. So if I was standing at the top of a slope I thought might go, I think I'd be inclined to ski elsewhere, rather than attach a cord to myself and take a chance. After all, lots of people get killed by the trauma of being avalanched - it's not just being buried then running out of oxygen

Isn't this the whole crux of the problem? Many people do ski off piste without having a clue as to whether the slope might go, or if it's relatively safe. they just go there without a second thought. there are now tracks appearing here in the most inappropriate places (mostly snowboard tracks), and there have been a lot of slides in the last week. I'm not sure if they've been provoked, but I haven't heard the bangs in the morning.

easiski, I think it's ONE of the problems. Probably the biggest one. However, you do have the "heuristic traps" David Murdoch mentioned above. My one avalanche incident wasn't so much about being clueless, as looking at the clues and making the wrong decision (maybe that is clueless - but we weren't niave about the dangers). We dug a pit, did various tests and finally concluded that it looked OK. We still got caught in a slide. Happy to report that the only "damage" was a lost ski pole but it's something I would be very keen not to repeat.

You know it makes sense.

Arno and David. Thanks for your interesting points. Actually, Colin Fraser's book on avalanches was written over 30 years (I think) after the avalanche research institute was founded in Davos, so a great deal was already known about the science of the danger at this point.

Some 15 years before the book was published (1951, I think) the Alps had suffered one of its most appalling and destructive winters for avalanches, so there was much impetus to understand the threat.

The most important thing about Colin Fraser's quote is the "hundreds of lives" saved. I suspect, though I have no evidence, that the avalanche cord is the most immediate, effective and obvious way to find someone within the crucial minutes that follow an avalanche - amidst all the debris, confusion and shock - and well before the rescue services have any chance of being alerted (let alone commencing a search).

Transceivers will probably always be laborious devices for searching, requiring expertise. A small section of visible avalanche cord on the surface of an avalanche site could be just feet from a buried human being, and a very rapid indicator of where that person is (if the cord has arrows and 'distance from end' markings.

Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:

Anyone had any experience with the avalanche baloon systems that are supposed to keep you on the surface of a slide? A few years ago they were all raving about them, and the DAV Summit Club laid down that you had to have one of them if you wanted to do their Ski-Plus program. Now things seem to have gone quiet on that front. Have they fallen out of favour again?
On that point: If you are going to carry a bottle of gas on your back for inflating a ballon then why not also use that gas to fire a cord out at the time you decide to pull the ripcord? Just another idea Puzzled

A snowHead

JT, yup I got my lid a few weeks after filling in the webform for the new lid.

I wear one of these, as well as carrying peeps, shovel & probe. Seen tests where they buried someone for an hour, and they could breath with this. Only problem is making sure its in your mouth if/when the ava hits

Review here:

http://www.wildsnow.com/articles/avalung/avalung_review.html

regards

Greg

A snowHead

gregh,

Good news about the lid...you are the first I've heard that has got the replacement..
Interesting piece about the lung..

Where are you skiing..?

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

Hi jt,

I ski Europe mostly, I got the avalung from the US, bought 5 for our group.

regards,

Greg

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Safety on and off the piste

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