Nick Dillsworth describes the avalanche near Telluride, Colorado in which he was buried with his Avalung, then rescued by his brother Joe, who was using an avalanche transceiver. Nick says he is now in the market for a Float avalanche airbag.
One of the greatest things about working at BCA is traveling to different regions and checking out the variances in North American ski culture. I can tell you that in Crested Butte it’s still popular to have a flavor savor (this was also true in 1988). In Nelson the “rage” is wearing your latest all-natural-wool toque made by your girlfriend or mom and it needs to sit on your head just right. In Jackson it’s all about keeping up with the locals on both the up and the down. At Alpental it’s about maintaining an urban feeding-frenzy mentality by snaking pow and the lift line whenever possible (this is a… Read more
Although there’s no shortage of backcountry terrain here in Colorado, it’s still nice to get out every once in a while to check out what the rest of the country has to offer. And so it was that some buddies and I decided to head to Washington state for a week of glacial camping and skiing. As fortune would have it, our weather window ended up being perfectly blue skies and tons of sun, just about opposite of what it looked like back home.
Jonny, Andrew and Daan, being unemployed and living the ski bum dream, were able to leave a week earlier and made an attempt on Rainier but… Read more
The pro patrol at Alpental has been very proactive this season in helping with continued testing of the BCA airbag program. April 15th was epic: mid-winter conditions, high avalanche hazard, and still snowing. Conditions were ripe for another Float 30 test! And so it went. Special thanks to Rob Gibson and the entire crew for helping pull this off:… Read more
At the Canadian Avalanche Association annual meeting last week, Canadian Mountain Holidays guide Rob Whelan explained the problems CMH and ACMG (Association of Canadian Mountain Guides) guides, and CAA level one avalanche students have been experiencing with their Barryvox Pulse beacons during periods of signal overlap while searching for multiple burials, particularly during beacon exams. He offered several backup techniques to help solve these multiple-burial challenges.
We were recently invited to help train members of the Crystal Mountain Freeride team. These kids ski hard, huck big, and compete on the Junior Freeskiing World Tour. The topic: companion rescue! Our main focus was getting these kids dialed on their Tracker2′s and comfortable using their BCA Quickie probes. I also let them try some new shovels from BCA, the Bomber B-1 EXT and Bomber B-2 EXT.
The other main focus was training them how to search as a group. This takes practice and the crux move is to always establish a group leader who can give orders. The video below will demonstrate how they went from “follow the leader”… Read more
In a recent CBS episode of The Amazing Race filmed in Zermatt, Switzerland, contestants were required to excavate an avalanche victim. This was more difficult than they thought and resulted in the dismemberment of an avalanche “victim” (dummy). They would have been much better off using the technique of strategic shoveling, following the “A,B,C’s and D of digging” as developed by Backcountry Access (BCA).
It’s that time of year in the Northwest when it can rain, dump snow, or get super sunny and turn to glop in a matter of minutes. The weekend of April 23 and 24 ended up being stellar bluebird powder skiing.
We went for an epic tour with Al Rosen, the Hibbert brothers, Frank Crippen of North by Northwest Surf, and some dude named Chris who was from Colorado.
The plan was to do laps in a north facing bowl up high and we accomplished that. The second idea that crazy Al had was to ski out down to the highway. What he said was “once we ski out it’s… Read more
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