Self-Arrest & Avalanche Rescue Training

Finally got out snowshoeing. We went to Seymour Mountain to practice some axe techniques and some avalanche rescue. The self-arrests were quite challenging as the snow was soft and the axe hardly ever caught enough to arrest the fall. The face down and up, head up slides were easy enough to arrest but the head down ones took too long and by the time I did them I had too much speed to stop myself. But the glissading was fun anyways.

We also spent quite a bit of time playing around with the avalanche beacons. A bunch of us buried 3 beacons in the snow and simulated distressed survivors. We searched for the beacons and found them quite quickly on the first run. The beacons were surprisingly accurate, although they worked at a very short range. On the second run it took us a bit longer to find them but still within about 15 minutes. The third run wasn't as successful. The beacons were spread very far apart. The first was in a tree, the second buried in an area where we struggled for too long to find it and the third was so far away. None of our beacons could find a signal except for Alan's analog one.

All of us used the digital ones with the exception of Alan who had an analogue one. We discovered that the analog one could detect other beacons at twice the distance our digital ones did, although not as accurately (100m vs. 50m). We found that the combination of analog and digital ones worked best. The analog beacon pointed us in the right direction when we had no clue where to search and then as we got closer, the digital ones would point the way accurately.

A fun way to spend a hot and sunny day.