A veteran SAR volunteer's experiences in British Columbia
Regular blog posts
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
