After Steffis injury, and the unstable situation in the mountains,with all the variables and unpredictabilities, we decided that it would be prudent to hone our avalanche safety skills. It was raining in Innsbruck and so Aljosa, Ziga and I drove up to Lizum, to bury our beacons and see how quickly we could find them. Unlike the valley it was dumping up here. 

Of course it wasn’t all serious all the time, so after we finished our little exercise, with some childish glee we construced a LVS snowman 😛  

Riders of the snowpocalypse. We set up traning camp next to a tyrolian church

As for the exercise, thankfully, our search times were quite acceptable. Ziga made it a little harder for us to find his beacon, and also practically showed how skewed research can become, when the terrain got steeper with rocks, trees and other obstacles.

Soking wet and its still dumping. I like my new Pieps showel

It was also good to comparatively see how the different beacons we were using work. We had a Pieps DSP Tour, a Orthovox F1 and a Arva. All of them seem to work reasonably well. Since my Orthovox was the only analog beacon in the mix it was interesting to compare its working to the others. Sure it might seem at first inferior to the new ones, that show range, and the first seems that you’re slower, but unlike the Pieps and certainly didn’t get fooled by the rocks to lead you into the opposite direction where one should be going. I still perfer the audio sonar like workings of an old beacon. It also seems easier for me to home in on more beacons since there interwalls do not match. An open question that remains is how much the intervals of the same types of becons overlap. In a bad situation, if they did that would be a big problem.

Almost there. Aljo joins me after going into the opposite direction for a while.

Once you come into close proximity search mode, all of the beacons seemed to work the same. What that means is that in training you should get a good feel for how to interpret the signals. In our example Ziga hid his beacon in close proximity to a old tree base, that probably cost us about a minute to look through and find the beacon below it.

Looking for the hidden becon… Time is ticking