A veteran SAR volunteer's experiences in British Columbia
This previous week has seen warmer than usual weather with a lot of rain and fluctuating freeing temperatures bringing rain to the tops of the local mountains, and saturating the snow. Yesterday and today dawned cold and clear. Overnight sea-level …
An update to my previous post on this issue: Backcountry Access has published instructions on how to do the RA (return authorization) on the Tracker 2, get the software update, and a minor hardware upgrade. Really awesome: they’re paying for …
What, do you think, is the primary difference between a SAR member on a task, and a person undertaking a hiking, backcountry skiing or mountaineering trip? On the surface they look to be the same thing. We use the same …
I found an interesting site the other day: Leave No Trace (there is a Canadian offshoot as well). It’s a site that promotes outdoor ethics and offers guidance on the best practises to preserve wilderness values, and reduce the impact …
A description of my backcountry ski rig for SAR and reasons why I chose it.
I’m moving up. I’m going to be a manager. Being in BC, we get more SAR tasks than the rest of Canada combined. Being in the southwest part of BC, we get 36% of all the tasks in BC. This …
Phil Tomlinson, the current president of the VOC, composed a detailed and thoughtful response to my previous post. He had some trouble getting it into the comments, so I thought I would reproduce it here. Hi Michael, As the current …
This post is a bit of a rant, so please skip it if you’re not in the mood. A few years ago a friend and I travelled into the Cerise Creek area for some mountaineering. We were surprised to see …
Some versions of the Backcountry Access Tracker 2 have a firmware bug that causes them to go into a programming mode in certain circumstances. http://backcountryaccess.com/blog/?p=2718 Being a software engineer, I understand all to well problems with writing software and getting it …
