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F ortunately, most people will never have to experience getting swept away and buried within tons of snow by an avalanche. Rich Burkley is happy to count himself among that group, but in his job as the general manager of mountain operations at the Aspen Snowmass ski resort in Aspen, Colorado, he has had to deal with avalanches and their aftereffects. The picture he paints is not pretty.
“Things have gone horribly wrong,” Burkley explains. “It’s a disaster and there’s utter chaos. A snow slide has come down a mountain, involved you, and you’re under snow. You have about four minutes to get back to air before you pass out, and 12 to 15 minutes before you die from suffocation.”
Magnus Granhed is another who has witnessed this scenario firsthand. On December 30, 1973, Granhed was on a lift in the mountains of Sweden when he heard a tremendous roar; an avalanche had come to rest in a nearby ravine. Granhed joined those who began searching for anyone caught up in the slide, but it was three hours before two skiers were located and dug out. Both were dead, and as it happened, one was a friend of Granhed’s.
The helplessness he felt while searching that day set Granhed to thinking about alternative methods for locating avalanche victims. Armed with his Master of Science degree, Granherd joined Professor Bengt Enander’s research team in the Department of Electromagnetic Theory at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. It took almost a decade, but in 1983 the first equipment for commercial use of the RECCO Avalanche Rescue System was introduced.
The RECCO System works with what is known as harmonic radar. A directional signal is sent out into an avalanche site, and a double-strength harmonic of that signal is returned when an avalanche victim has been located. The harmonic is created by a small electronic transponder that is encased in weatherproof plastic and worn somewhere on the body. On RLX gear it’s a silicon patch that’s similar in size to a stick of gum and is permanently affixed to the sleeves and lower pant legs.
Currently the RECCO System is used by more than 500 rescue organizations worldwide. It is also employed by an ever-growing number of ski resorts in North America, Europe, and Japan, and since the late 1980s, NATO has been using it for winter training exercises.
Aspen Snowmass has it on three of its four mountains, and, according to Burkley, an important feature is its ease of use. “No training is needed for a person wearing the chip,” he says. “It is a passive reflective device without a power source of its own.”
He contrasts this with transceivers, which are difficult to operate. All members of a group must wear a unit, which are set to transmit at the outset. If somebody gets caught in a slide, everyone else switches to receive and starts working a grid pattern, following the signal as it strengthens until the victim is discovered. But under the intense pressure these kinds of situations create, that can be easier said than done.
That’s why the idea is to cover all of the bases, including the use of manual probes and avalanche dogs along with transceivers and the RECCO System. Although avalanches are rare, they are also unpredictable. Burkley draws an analogy to shark attacks on surfers.
“Surfers are playing odds that are infinitesimal,” he says. “There are fewer than 100 unprovoked shark attacks worldwide each year. But they take precautions to reduce the odds even more—don’t surf at dawn or at dusk, don’t splash, and leave the water if you’re bleeding.”
Still, attacks do happen, and so do avalanches. The RECCO Avalanche Rescue System helps reduce the odds of losing your life in one. As Burkley puts it, “It’s another level of rescue for a situation in which you hope you’re never involved. The unpredictability cannot be underestimated, and all the preparation in the world may not save you. That’s why you want everything you can get to help you survive.”
RLX is the official outfitter of Aspen/Snowmass, and the Aspen Highlands Ski Patrol proudly wear RLX.
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