VOC trips are organized by members like yourself, not professional guides. The trips go into wilderness areas where assistance is unavailable and unexpected events can occur. You could be seriously injured or die. You are responsible for your own actions. Please use caution.
Avalanche Companion Rescue Drills (and skiing) · Saturday, December 8th, 2018
Warning: This is an old trip - it already happened
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Start: Saturday, Dec. 8th
Pre-trip meeting: Thursday, Dec. 6th, 7:15 pm
Pre-trip meeting location: in front of clubroom
Description:
Disclaimer: this trip does in no way replace a professional companion rescue course. It's just a practise session.
It's drills, drills, drills. It's practise, practise, practise. Especially now that our brains have been filled with climbing, surfing, kayaking, and other summer thoughts, we ALL could use a refresher in avalanche companion rescue skills.
And that's what we're gonna do all day (besides a little skiing). We're gonna practise the full companion rescue algorithm in a realistic setting: evaluating the situation, signal search, coarse search, fine search, probing, shoveling, over and over again. The scenarios will vary. Perhaps we'll have one where we'll see how fast the whole group can dig out a backpack if we all work together. Or we'll do the other extreme -- what are your chances if all your buddies got buried and you have to rescue them alone? We'll definitely do some multiple burials, side-by-side burials and whatever other scenarios we can think of.
This trip is all about practise (drills), not instruction. If you want to come along, you should already know very well how the companion rescue algorithm is executed. The best way to know that, is having done AST 1 or Companion Rescue Course.
Location:
TBD. Some place we can quickly get to. Probably Paul Ridge.
Preparation and Pre-Reqs:
This trip is all about practise (drills), not instruction. If you want to come along, you should already know very well how the companion rescue algorithm is executed. The best way to know that is having done AST 1 or Companion Rescue Course. That said, I will allow a limited number of keeners without these credentials join, under the condition that they spend a lot of time familiarizing themselves with the companion rescue process and their equipment before the trip.
In any case, every participant should review the companion rescue system. An awesome resource for that is the BCA website. The parts most important for us are: the first four videos under the Avalanche Rescue tile and all the handouts. Reviewing this will take you half an hour, if you're really fast.
The trip is open to AT skiers, telemark skiers, splitboarders and snowshoers. The number of snowshoers should not be one.
What this trip is not:
On this trip we'll only practice companion rescue. Although you don't need AST for this trip, it's definitely not an excuse to push off doing your AST 1. After all, we'll only practice rescue, which is the thing you have to do after all other risk mitigation techniques have failed (i. e. y'all probably screwed up or had a lot of bad luck). In contrast, AST 1 and 2 will teach you the skills that will help you avoid ever having to do a companion rescue in real life (and how to do a companion rescue). Second, this trip doesn't replace an official Companion Rescue course either. Those are a great resource for anyone, even those who already have their AST 2. Last, to pull off a successful companion rescue, you should get your Wilderness First Aid course. We will barely talk about wilderness first aid on this trip.
Here's some great videos about how to do a rescue:
Posted: 2018-11-21 18:32:37
Last modified: 2018-11-30 00:39:01