Season Diary - Day 6
Updated: Dec 19, 2024
Sunday December 8, 2024
Ask yourself this: how often have you practiced putting your avalanche probe together? Digging with your avalanche shovel? Know how far the actual range on your transceiver was?
Well, that was what today was all about. As we watched our fellow aspirant Reps get their stuff together and head out for a day in the powder, we quietly sat there, green with envy, to learn about the unthinkable – how to use your avalanche safety gear when it matters most.
After a quick chat indoors, we headed out, almost skiing but not quite. Instead we worked through a series of manoeuvres designed to help familiarise ourselves with what happens in an avalanche incident.
We began with a transceiver group check. This is one of the most basic fundamental things you can do with your group of mates before you head out for your day. By testing each other’s send and receive functions, and making sure your transceivers are turned on, you can ensure that you will be able to find each to other in an incident. We cycled through the whole group, really rehearsing and working to nail the procedure.
Your transceiver’s range won’t be what’s stated on the box. So we used our guide as a pinpoint and began working towards him, waiting to see the limit at which our units picked up his transceiver signal with absolute certainty. The result for most of us was about 20-30m. What does this mean? When searching as a group for a burial victim, we need to be about 25m apart to ensure that there is overlap between transceiver fields not to miss the buried victim’s signal.
One thing to note here is that radio signals do weird things. Almost everyone went towards the target not in a straight line, but in a perfect rugby-ball shape ovular curve. Similarly, the arrow occasionally told me to turn around, trying to follow the signal all the way around the other side of the rugby ball. Instead, I was told to ignore it and keep going – if the distance numbers kept dropping, I was heading in the right direction.
Then it came time to practice with our other avalanche safety gear. Fishing probes and shovels out of our backpacks, piecing them together as quickly and calmly as possible. Probes can be a particular beast to deal with; remember, you don’t piece them together like tent poles, instead just cast it out in front of you like a fishing line, grab the cord, and pull until all the pieces snap together under the tension of the cord.
Bringing everything together, in pairs we took turns burying a transceiver in a backpack or glove. On “go” the other then had to use their transceiver to track it down, probe to locate its depth in the snow, and dig it up.
That stage of the day complete, we headed out and finally got our bounty, scoring some exhilarating powder turns under the chairs at Grattalu and Tichot. As we came over a crest on our second run, we encountered out guide again. With some shock he informed us that he has just had to friends caught in an avalanche! He didn’t have the gear or was too much in shock to help, so it was up to us to located them and dig them out.
We got going immediately, ensuring that everyone – even our guide in shock – had switch their transceivers to search to stop interference from other signals. Our units seemed to naturally split the group of six of us into two groups of three, and we quickly caught the signal of the burial victims and tracked them into a coarse search, out beepers pressed to the snow to get the shortest distance reading.
From there we probed and dug, re-probed and kept digging, before we found the victims; his backpack and one of his spare gloves! Total time from encountering the guide to extraction? 12 minutes, definitely on the right side of the survivability curve.
This was one of the best days of the course so far. Not only did we score some epic powder turns, but we were able to test and discover what goes into an avalanche rescue without having to experience the real thing.
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