22 replies to this topic

[ippy]

on the 11th and 12th January. Probably see you there eh Ill be the one with the puffed out red face struggling at the back asking if we're there yet?

[Mick Rich]

Hey Ippy, have you got any more info on that as I might be interested in popping over from Furano for a few days. Cheers (& Happy New Year!)

[ippy]

run by hokkaido powder guides
23000 yen over two days.
Heres what they said:

Quote:

AST Course B will be held over 2 full days in the field and a classroom session on the first night. The first day we will utilize the lifts to access the back or side-country areas from the resort and the second day access a more remote area. This course is suited to those who intend to access the backcountry on skins or snow-shoes.

might have me a wee bit out of my depth in terms of riding skill, im definitely worried i have enough stamina for the trek, but treating it as a semi tour as well so should be fun. I guess the second you start ducking ropes its probably time to start doing avi safety just to be sure

More info:

Quote:

RECREATIONAL AVALANCHE COURSE OUTLINE

Classroom Session

• Formation and Nature of Avalanches
• Avalanche Terrain
• Factors Affecting Snow Stability
• Mountain Snow Pack
• Winter Backcountry Travel
• Assessing Avalanche Danger
• Safety Measures and Self Rescue

Field Session

• Terrain Recognition
• Route Finding
• Safe Travel
• Group Management
• Stability Evaluation
• Hazard Recognition
• Small Party Self Rescue

[ippy]

An underloved section of the forums...

So heres a brief post on why you should learn to use your beacon.

dear people ducking ropes.

Get your avi training done this year

Heres why:

Step 1: Beacon training.

Why its worth it though is because nothing will bamboozle you more than pulling out your beacon and expecting to follow a straight line to your subject...
=======================================================
Theory: I pick up a signal. I walk in the direction and watch the numbers go down. If they start going up, i back-track and go a different direction until they go down again. Voila! 3m, time for a fine search.
Repeat, only slower and more careful. Go forward when the number goes down. Voila! got the smallest reading possible. Time to probe! Follow nice ordered spirals around the strongest signal every 5cms or so. Then when you get a strike, start digging. Easy peasy! rescued friend.
=======================================================
Actual: SIgnal! Wade through thigh deep snow... hang on! did this just go from 9m to 31? wait? what?! now its back down to 4m? What the hell is going on? <spin around> now its 22m? this makes no god damned sense! It must be broken!
<3 minutes later>

Ah, finally! back on track... 3m out... Right time for the fine search.

Forward forward... hang on its gone back up, i must have passed it <turns around> wait, now its giving me a totally different reading?
<after another 5-7 minutes of spinning around you find the spot>

Right! probe time.

Probe, probe, probe, probe... thats odd, im getting nothing? It must be here though! Maybe its deep - ill try digging.

<rechecks beacon> Hang on, now the signals further away.

<Restarts the fine search>

SUCCESS!!!

<5 minutes later>

Probe strike!

<Starts digging>

Holy crap, this is exhausting. Hang on, ive got myself stuck from digging. Now im gonna have to clear a path around where i was digging so that i can actually reach this dude.

<spends another 3 minutes digging around for movement space so you can dig deeper>

Hooray! i found him! and... hang on... i think that might have taken too long?

==========================================================================================

Some problems to watch out for:

1. Flux lines. They loop around into a kind of semi circle so you have to learn to follow the flux line and not the number if that makes sense.
2. Twisting and turning your beacon in the fine search stage. It sends your markings wild.
3. Probing incorrectly and arbitrarily.
4. digging before you have a very good idea you haven't accidentally ballsed up the fine search. Here's the thing with this. You have really no time for a mistake. Even in soft snow we struggled when we had to restart a search. You wasted about 2 or 3 minutes in the fine search, another minute or two probing, and if you were daft enough to start digging, about another 5 minutes confirming you
screwed up. Id say at best you have one shot of screwing up and only if you realise evry early on you messed up the reading.
5. Digging. Start digging down or at a reasonable angle and see what happens. Youll trap yourself into a tiny hole and have no way of clearing any more debris. It happened to me. I had to find teh beacon that the other group put pretty deep in. It taught me a lesson on digging technique when you get about a meter down, are knackered and are kinda stuck.

6. oooh! i fogot this one. Other people with their beacons switched on or leaving beacons on in multiple burial searches

Anyways, thats why you not only have to own a beacon but also practice using it.
So thats the first thing i learned on my avi course

Edited by ippy, 20 September 2011 - 01:13 PM.

[Jynxx]

Wouldn´t it be good if ski resorts have an area where you can go treasure hunting. Kids will love it , too.
Avi beacon manufactures can set it up. Sale/service/instruction. Good for business.

[MitchPee]

Jynxx, on 22 September 2011 - 06:07 PM, said:

Wouldn´t it be good if ski resorts have an area where you can go treasure hunting. Kids will love it , too.
Avi beacon manufactures can set it up. Sale/service/instruction. Good for business.

A lot of places do this. Snowbird has a hunting ground where they bury boxes that you can dig to and probe into. It's a great idea to get some practice. Other than that burying some with your friends is very easy in a backpack as well!

I can imagine Japan is very boring to dig a snow pit and it must be hard to learn about true snowpacks there. We always dig a pit here in UT if there is any terrain in question. With the sun/snow cycles always changing, the layers are easier to read and less consistent.

If anyone ever had any avy questions I would be happy to answer them to the best of my ability. I have a bit of avy certification, but am not qualified to teach by any means. Just figured I'd offer since it is an important part of the sport!

[sand]

Jynxx, on 22 September 2011 - 06:07 PM, said:

Wouldn´t it be good if ski resorts have an area where you can go treasure hunting. Kids will love it , too.
Avi beacon manufactures can set it up. Sale/service/instruction. Good for business.

Hirafu do, or at least did last year, have an area exactly for this. Last season it was at the top of the center 4.

[ippy]

MitchPee, on 23 September 2011 - 12:56 PM, said:

I can imagine Japan is very boring to dig a snow pit and it must be hard to learn about true snowpacks there. We always dig a pit here in UT if there is any terrain in question. With the sun/snow cycles always changing, the layers are easier to read and less consistent.

If anyone ever had any avy questions I would be happy to answer them to the best of my ability. I have a bit of avy certification, but am not qualified to teach by any means. Just figured I'd offer since it is an important part of the sport!

Ha! you aint kidding! All i remember from the few snowpits we dug was just how consistent the snowpack was in moiwa and that place near it we hiked - notonopuri?

[leegil]

I've done a tonne of reading on backcountry and avalanche safety...but this is just theory. Doing the AST1 with Hokkaido Powder Guides in their 7-8 Feb course. Need to do the 'practical' otherwise you are not really as prepared as one may think. Also planning on doing the Mizuno no Sawa to get easy access to some interesting stuff.

[Mick Rich]

Let us know how you get on!

[ippy]

Heres the one main thing i took from my avi training:

Theres a LOT involved in planning even a relatively safe trip.
You cant wing this shit. You cant just get a splitboard and some skins and start shuffling up a trail with your mates.

It really suggested that even when you get your safety training this is year dot. This pretty much lets you LOOK at backcountry to start taking in what it is youre seeing. You aint anywhere near ready to plan a trip. It brings you to the level that if you were on an organised tour with something like evergreen or the aforemention HPG, youd be prepared to handle something bad happening and know what to do (badly). But as for being the decision maker on where to go... nope. This scratches the surface. Its only a 2 day course after all. Without a few years out in the back country (actively studying it and not just riding it), theres no way in hell id consider myself even remotely safe to take my mates hiking. So job done in many ways

[surfarthur]

Thats a good attitude to take from it ippy, I love seeing peoples tracks heading out of the resort boundaries, would love to do some b/c sometime, but just really try to stay aware that I know only what I have read, have never done any training, no practical experience or the appropriate safety equipment, and that keeps me from temptation of crossing that boundary rope. Would love to do an extended trip, including getting the probe, beacon and shovel, doing an avvy course, and taking some guided back country tours. I think that would be the most dangerous point though, a little bit of experience, a bit of confidence, it would then get hard for me to not want to keep going into the back country. I guess if I ever got to this point, I would need to be getting involved with a group of people that have the appropriate experience to plan safe trips into the back country.

[Mick Rich]

+1

[leegil]

My training course has been cancelled. Apparently due to lack of interest. Well, that's life. Time to plan to fill those days with possibel day trips to other mountains.

[surfarthur]

leegil, on 31 January 2012 - 11:47 AM, said:

My training course has been cancelled. Apparently due to lack of interest. Well, that's life. Time to plan to fill those days with possibel day trips to other mountains.

Thats a shame. I am sure you will have a great time riding anyway, but sux that you can't do the avi course. I do find it strange that there isn't more interest in these courses, I suppose it is at least in part because people on shorter holidays don't want to "waste" time they could be skiing or riding on a course.

[ippy]

On our course there were six of us. I (at the ripe old age of 35 at the time) was far and away the youngest. It was kinda fun being the mascot. The dudes were so nice as well, they were genuinely quite successful and earning their little treat, most in their 40s i think. Also they had been riding for a fair while (again, i think i was the novice barely starting into my 4th season). Just from a sample of 1 group consisting of six people im going to hypothesis the following: Unless its a job requirement, avi training is a luxury Its almost like doing a guided tour or a spot of heli skiing. None of the dudes seemed to have a really strong reason to do it, they all wanted to play out of the gates for sure, but theyd been doing it for years anyway. There wasnt a huge impulse to suddenly start plotting their own lines or nail yotei or anything like that. I think if i remember right that a couple of them popped back in a group to notonopuri but it wasnt like there was a big urge to ride back country. There was an urge to kinda get a deeper understanding of what they were looking at maybe but it didnt feel like we were all seriously going to start applying that info.

Of course, i bet theyre all now snow professors and telling terje that hes doing it wrong since ive said that.

Naturally they want to be safer and better riders, and they want to above all make sure that if they do plan a trip they follow all the STEPS, pay attention to the STOPS, know their alp truth, and have their little avulator telling them when to not go. They probably also dig pits and understand that the pit isnt for clearance because they know what a false positive is, and that you KEEP ON digging them. And even if you have no red flags and it all seems clear, you consider it generally still very hazardous and take it easy.

They can probably tell you which way the winds been blowing, which face is loaded, where (some of) the terrain traps are, where their anchor points might be and if you are even in avalanche terrain. They probably also have an exit route in their heads. They also maybe realise that cut lines mean shit and you can trigger an avi on the 1st person riding it or the 100th. They can spot flags and reasons to abort a run probably a little better than most dudes.

Most importantly though, they probably carry a beacon, a shovel and a probe at the minimum when they pop through the gates... They also probably dont huck off cornices or drop in on top of someone elses line which puts them that tiny step above half the people in niseko Theyre going to be a little bit safety aware, not just for themselves, but for other people... and maybe not everyone thinks about that so much. Maybe it takes a bit of a scare or something for them to feel an urge to sign up to a course like this.

So yeah, what im saying is that there maybe isnt popularity for these courses because they appeal to the more cautious and careful by their nature, and if they dont, most people dont have a stack of mates ready to go riding with you in the backcountry, and the people that do, probably think theyve got enough real world experience anyway. Its kind of a weird one.

I actually did mine precisely because someone on a different forum mentioned the "****ing idiots hucking cornices and dropping on top of you" (which just means riding the line higher up yours on the same face and if they cause a slide while youre on it, they might be fine, but youre probably ****ed - it doesnt mean landing on your head ).

When i thought back to my own time in season 3 in niseko i remember finding little cornices (very unserious) out of gate 4 (if you ride along the ridge before popping back down into the baby pipe). I recall thinking that my year 4 progress was going to be all about having the confidence to drop off those. I realise they arent the same caliber as what he was referring too (bus sized cornice bombs that can wipe a face), but it made me think "damn! im getting into some stupid and dangerous habits... the '****ing idiot' to which he is referring is apparently me! I think i need to stop trying to kill other people." (:

So er, thats MAYBE (remember, sample size of 6 people who i dont exactly know outside of that course and the one or two times i bumped into them on the mountain afterwards, though they were always LOVELY and i wish we got to do a run together somewhere), part of the reason for the low demand. Its maybe not though and just maybe ive possibly fabricated it all based on massive assumptions about 5 other people i barely know. As ever, im just telling a shaggy dog story (:

http://www.liveleak....=189_1300622174

[quattro]

ippy

Kind of curious how long of a hike into the BC when you guys went out to dig your pits?

TIA

[Jynxx]

Does anyone dig a pit in Japan?
Don´t see people digging one in Europe. Usually we rely on Avi reports and their pit analysis.
Keeping a track on weather everyday (temp, wind, etc) is necessary to arrive at an educated guess.
But more importantly, I need to know what is under the snow. Grass hill? tree stumps? terrain ... When I know what it´s like before it get´s covered by snow ...

[ippy]

it was about half way up notonopuri if i remember right. We were still in the trees and had been hiking about three hours or so. The ride down was less than 5 minutes and that includes spotting time, so it wasnt exactly epic or anything like that. Nice for a first trip, and glad i wasnt breaking the trail in my little snowshoes though

[TubbyBeaverinho]

whats it like hiking in snowshoes? Easy? OK? Like lugging 20 full ASDA bags up the stairs of 20 floor Multi? Hard going?

A mate of mines up in Hokkaido just bought a pair, he's in a group that regularly takes hikes out to enjoy untracked runs......got me thinking