The patroller wanted volunteers for a probe line. Unfortunately I didn’t know what a probe line was but I figured as long as it wasn’t rectal it beat washing the never-ending pots in the Albion Grill kitchen. In the back of my mind I worried it was yet another in a series of newbie practical jokes that were constantly pulled on me during my first season living in Alta. “You have to wear your beacon at all times on the hill”, “powder cords are a must”, etc. etc. ha, ohh stop, insert belly laugh here, you guys slay me.
I sprinted into my gear, grabbed my shiny, unused Ortovox F1 and beat feet to join the group of far more knowledgeable volunteers than I.
An avalanche had come across the road and one witness thought someone was in it. The powers that be decided it would be bad form to just run the massive snow blower through the slide without giving a quick check for something warm.
We formed up and were handed immense probes. “uhh, how do I know when I’ve found someone?” “What’s a body feel like?”…all these and more I asked. Sensible to me but great big badges of cluelessness to the hardened backcountry goats I was probing next to.
As we probed I could feel my beacon pressed against my chest—turns out when they say wear it close to the body they didn’t actually mean skin-level—and I knew with a hard certainty that the F1 was by far the coolest thing that I owned.
Later, in my two and a half room seven person stanky apartment, I sat cradling the F1 with the crappy ear plug that would never stay in my ear, and listened to the endless BEEP that signaled my roommates Pieps.** It was somewhere past the immense hooka-like bong but not as far as the original Winterstick Swallowtail. I felt confident that if the Pieps had been strapped to a person instead of shoved under a cushion, I would have rescued him quickly.
The drills on snow the next day quickly disabused me of my confidence. The additional dimension of depth really changed the game. That guy would have been stone cold and found sometime in the spring. But through all this the shininess was wearing off and I was learning the first rules of life in the mountains. I learned of the different beep tones of the Ortovox vs. the Pieps, and the importance of dual frequency so that the old timers who weren’t on the new 457 frequency could find you with their ancient SKADIs.*
Over time I learned that the shovel I bought wasn’t just to build kickers; it was also a sled, or part of a backcountry stretcher if you’re more of a MacGyver than I. But the shovel was small, light, and when wielded effectively could move tons of snow in a hurry to save your partners life. My shovel never saved anyone, thank God, but it did help me get my car out time and again. Well, it never lost anyone either…still virginal I guess. One of the earliest lessons I was taught was that if you make the right decisions you probably will never need to begin a search.
These pieces became part of my kit and I treasured them above everything else I owned. It was their quality, their deadly seriousness, their minimalist design that I loved. When I strapped them on I became something other than a college kid avoiding a career—instead I was a backcountry skier.
Over my first two winters I skied many of the classic lines in Little Cottonwood Canyon. I thank those first partners like Bjorn who took me under their arm and taught me what I needed to know. It wasn’t entirely charity, it was his ass on the line as well. And I would have hated to be below the snow with me running the search above.
Every one of us at some point is new to the backcountry. When we are new we rely on those with experience to share it, to help us to understand both the danger and the possibility. The sooner we pass on our knowledge the safer we all are. This isn’t like the line up at Waimea where locals rule. In the backcountry the life you save by sharing everything you know may well be your own.
Three beacons, two shovels later and they are still the best pieces of gear that I own.
–John Bresee
*SKADI’s were the original avalanche beacon developed in 1968. “The word Skadi comes from the old Norse word Skaði, variant Skade. This female is often referred to as the goddess of skis, she traveled on skis, carried a bow, and hunted. She was the daughter of the giant Thiazi, and married Ullr, the god of skis.” –Lou Dawson, WildSnow.com
**The greatest change to the beacon was not going digital but merely the addition of a speaker instead of those terrible ear plugs.
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