Description

Come hang out and practice your avalanche beacon searches! 

With winter around the corner, it’s a great opportunity to brush up on your beacon search skills and refresh your process before the snow starts falling. This evening will be held on the beach, beacons can be buried in the sand. Please dress accordingly.

Participant size is limited as we can only run scenarios for 2-3 beacons at a time maintaining signal separation of 160m+ and scenario runners.

NOTE: This is NOT a replacement for a professional AST 1 course and is NOT a course night. Please take professional instruction with an AST 1 course to learn avalanche rescue techniques.

Location:
Kitsilano Beach @ 6:30pm – 9:00pm.
Meet by the public washrooms under the Boathouse Restaurant.

This evening will be run unless there is heavy rain or high winds. Practice in the bad weather!

Pre Requisites:

• 3 Channel Digital Avalanche Beacon
  • Fresh batteries with minimum 80%
  • General understanding of how your beacon works
• Probe
• Headlamp
• Ski gloves/mits
• Warm clothing including proper footwear, gloves & hat. 

You do not need to bring a shovel. Practice beacons will be provided.

Evening Expectations: 

We will practice single burial searches from the moment of avalanche trigger to probe strike. Search outline will reference those such as in Mammut Barryvox S2 Manual here on page 25. Fine search will be with a traditional grid search pending devices present.

Scenario outline:

• Witnessing the avalanche
• Assign roles
  • Searcher
  • Probe / Shoveler (Follows searcher)
  • Emergency Coordinator (Calls 911)
• Organizing the search
• Beacon Search (Single searcher)
  • Signal Search
  • Course Search
  • Fine Search
  • Probing (25cm box pattern)
• Marking probe strike
• Preparing to shovel
• End

The aim is for all participants to practice all roles, time permitting.