Avalanche Safety Gear: Probes, Avalanche Beacons and Shovels

Jonathan Rosenthal

15 years ago

I’ve written quite a bit in the past about advanced avalanche safety gear that is meant to help you survive an avalanche. These are bits of safety equipment such as the Snowpulse, ABS (Avalanche Airbag System) and Black Diamond Avalung that are all meant to help you once you have actually been buried by a snow slide. These are great and seem to be getting good results in the field with some remarkable stories of avalanche survival by skiers and snowboarders But they are also really expensive items, so most people will choose to do without them. Yet you should never venture off-piste without the basic safety equipment of Avalanche beacons (also known as avalanche transceivers), now probes and snow shovels. These really are the minimum pieces of safety equipment that you should take when skiing or snowboarding (or, I guess, snowmobiling) off-piste.

Below I give a bit more information on the main sorts of avalanche beacons and how to choose one from some of the big names such as Barryvox, DTS Tracker, Pieps and Ortovox. I also offer some important considerations on choosing snow shovel.

If you choose not to carry the more expensive and advanced gear such as the Avalung, Snowpulse or Avalanche Airbag System I think that’s a fair decision to make. The choice to wear a piece of individual safety equipment is really a personal choice and one that will always be a balance between risk, reward and cost. But there are some bits of avalanche rescue gear that everyone should be carrying, because these are not just about self protection but about being able to rescue one’s companions. So that is why I think it is irresponsible not to carry avalanche beacons and avalanche probes why every group should have at least a couple of avalanche snow shovels.

In Italy they’ve already passed laws making this mandatory in some regions and, while I hate anything that curtails freedom in the wild, I do have to say that what they are doing makes sense. When people take their own lives into their hands they should be free to do as they please. But increasingly people want to have freedom but without responsibility and think they can enjoy the wild but then get someone else to risk their life to bail them out when the chips fall the wrong way. In the past coupe of weeks in Switzerland and Italy a number of avalanche victims included rescuers who went out in dangerous conditions to try to save others.

Now if you don’t want to take responsibility for your own safety by ensuring that within your party you have the skills and equipment to rescue one another and improve your own chances of survival, be my guest but please notify your local Search and Rescue Agency before you head out telling them you couldn’t be bothered so neither should they.

Excuse me if this offends you but I get a bit tired of people thinking this is all a game until it gets serious and then suddenly they want the grown-ups to come.

End of rant.

Avalanche beacons for beginners

Avalanche transceivers (which are also often know as PIEPS because of the popular brand) are small radio beacons that operate in two modes; transmit or receive. They are normally attached to you and set to a default “send” mode where they periodically send out little radio beeps that can be tracked. The idea is that you keep yours on transmit so that it is already signalling should you be caught in a snow slide and buried out of site. Your companions, who should also have avalanche transceivers and should ideally also not have been caught in the same slide (remember to cross dangerous ground in separate groups) then switch theirs from transmit to receive and start homing on your signal.

An active transceiver shouldn’t be confused with some of the passive systems out there such as RECCO reflectors. The big difference is that passive systems don’t send out a signal, they just bounce back one when it hits them. These have their uses and are great because of their small size and the fact that they can be sewn into clothes or stuck to boots and then forgotten. But they don’t work with normal transceivers and need a special radar signal which they bounce back. In general the only people likely to be carrying that sort of specialised avalanche rescue gear are professional search and rescue teams. I’m not saying don’t use RECCO, but I wouldn’t rely on it. The reason for this is because your first 15 minutes under the snow are the most crucial. If you can be dug out in that time you have a pretty good chance of surviving. So you really want to have gear that allows for an immediate search to begin without waiting for someone else to helicopter in with special equipment. For more on why an immediate rescue is important please read my post that deals with survival times in Avalanche burials.

Digital avalanche beacons vs analogue avalanche beacons

A couple of years ago analogue transceivers were standard. These put out an audible beep (or peep, if you prefer) that get louder as the signal gets stronger. The better ones were pretty much bombproof and in the hands of a skilled operator could deliver good results. But to be really good one would have to train and practise quite a bit. You can read a great history of beacons that included using magnetic devices that attach to shoes. Unfortunately the range was a disappointing 2.5 meters.

Digital beacons have now become the standard because they go some fancy processing and can figure out not just the direction of the target but also its distance. The smartest ones do even more amazing things. The latest Mammut Barryvox Beacon can figure out if you’re moving and breathing and send that information to rescuers. I’m not completely convinced this is in your interests as a victim. If it figures you are alive they will focus on getting you out first but if it makes a mistake and says you’re not breathing, bang buddy you just went to the bottom of the triage list. At least if they had no idea they might keep trying to dig you up.

How do the different avalanche beacons stack up?

A lot of work on avalanche safety gets done in Switzerland, so the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Rescue in Davos is a good starting point for data. In one set of tests in 2001 they looked at the state of the art beacons on the market at the time, A Tracker DTS, Barryvox and Ortovox M2. They also used an older beacon, a Barryvox VS2000 as a sort of control for the experiment. In the tests they found that novices with minimal training could quickly find buried transceivers. They also didn’t find a huge difference in the time taken by searches using different beacons.

What are some popular avalanche beacons?

Two beacons that are generally widely recommended for ease of use and reliability are the Tracker DTS and Mammut Barryvox. The Tracker is renowned for being easy to use with good blinking lights that help point you in the right direction when searching. The Tracker DTS 2 adds another antenna (for three in total) as well as some new controls that makes it even easier to use. The Mammut Pulse Barryvox also gets top marks for ease of use as does the PIEPS DSP, a very small beacon but one that comes up well in range tests. The Ortovox S1 stands out for having a great intuitive interface that really helps guide novices in starting a search. The graphical interface also changes automatically when it starts receiving a signal and when you come close to the victim. All this should help novices work quickly and efficiently at a time when stress and adrenalin can make it hard to think clearly and remember some half-forgotten training manual or lessons learned on a safety course.

All of these are also good at managing multiple burials as they processes the signals and can sort out which comes from which transmitter.

Avalanche Snow Probes

You may wonder why carry a snow probe if you already have a beacon. The reason is that once you have an approximate location of a victim using a transceiver you can narrow it down really quickly, confirm the exact location and figure out the depth of the person using a probe. These are lightweight, relatively cheap and quick to assemble so there really isn’t any reason not to have one. Some ski poles also fit together to form probes. Although it saves carrying another piece of rescue gear there have been some reports of these poles being too short.

Avalanche Snow Shovel

For many people the choice of a shovel is an afterthought. How exciting is a shovel, after all. So people agonize over the choice of a beacon, grab the first light, plastic collapsible avalanche shovel they see and head out of the store. Not so fast. If you speak to people in the know or read accounts of avalanche rescues it turns out that the choice of shovel may actually be a critical factor in determining whether you pull someone out quickly enough to save a life. Mitch Weber at Telemark news has a great article that I recommend to anyone considering a plastic shovel as to why you shouldn’t get one. He lists one tragedy after another where people trying to dig through thick and compacted snow and ice struggled with plastic shovels that just couldn’t bit. He urges people to rely only a proper metal shovel that can really dig into compacted snow when digging up an avalanche victim.

Anyhow, that covers the three basic items of avalanche safety gear that you should be carrying on your off-piste skiing and snowboarding adventures. Once you have those, then you can consider whether you also need an airbag or Avalang.