It’s not often that one single piece of information can save your life. Most of the time, especially in the backcountry, it takes years of training and experience to evaluate conditions, your ability and the technique necessary to take on…
Monthly Archives: February 2011
SARDay 2010–2011 Wrap Up
I started tracking the time I spend doing SAR-related tasks a year ago today. I was prompted to do so partially because I was watching a friend of mine post every day that he went skiing or mountain biking. The…
SARDay 111: Rescue scenario @ Buntzen Lake
The very best way to train for SAR is to do SAR; in the absence of actual subjects getting lost, we are more than happy to pretend to be subjects ourselves. Designing a scenario is tricky. A real SAR task…
Avalanche Accidents and Hazard rating
Every week the Canadian Avalanche Centre produces multiple avalanche bulletins for many different regions of British Columbia. In those bulletins, they rate the avalanche danger, defined as the likelihood, size and distribution of avalanches. This weekend there were several avalanche…
SARDays 107-110
Since I started the SARDay project last year I’ve logged quite a few days! We’re coming close to the close of this year-long project. Now’s the time to pipe up if you think this is incredibly boring, or if it’s…
SARDay 104-106: Organized Avalanche Response
What a week of weather events; huge amounts of snow, wind and a buried icy crust layer. Several natural avalanche observed on Mount Seymour, and skier triggered and natural avalanches all over the place. What better time for an avalanche…
Counterfeit versions of Petzl Products
Petzl is warning that they have found counterfeit versions of several of their products. They are not manufactured to the safety standards that are printed on the products, and so are very dangerous for use as climbing equipment. In the…
Concern over current avalanche bulletin
Take a look at the current avalanche bulletin for the North Shore. Note: in these articles I usually link to a specific avalanche bulletin that I am writing comments on. For the most recent bulleting you can always go to…
SARDay 103: Lost hiker on Eagle Ridge
At around 22:00 on Monday night the team was paged by Coquitlam RCMP to search for a hiker reported overdue on Eagle Ridge. This was my first search as a SAR manager in training, so I was privy to the…
On Coordinates; part 2
In my previous post on coordinates, I stated that the best coordinate representation to use if you need to use geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) was decimal degrees (or DD). It’s preferable to use UTM, which is pretty much a…
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