What if Your Avalanche Beacon Prayed?

Post by WildSnow.com blogger Lou Dawson | August 9, 2013

I've been working up a review. One day, I was thinking about what a prayer for a good winter would look like on a beacon display.

I've been working up an Arva beacon review. One day, I was thinking about what a prayer for a good winter would look like on a beacon display. Click to enlarge.

In all seriousness, while looking at a nice weekend coming up, and working on a review of these Arva beacons, I got to thinking about what would be a simple request for an excellent winter of backcountry skiing. A basic prayer that would fit in a beacon display? Wasn’t too hard to come up with something, since working with beacons brings up some memories. Yeah, it’s not too poetic, just what first came to my mind…

Indeed, let’s all have a good (safe) one!

Posted by Lou Dawson on August 9, 2013 | Filed Under Avalanche Beacon Review, Mountain Culture

Comments

3 Responses to “What if Your Avalanche Beacon Prayed?”

Zoran August 10th, 2013 2:24 pm

Your prayer was answered! How you did it I don’t really know. You have a good connections?

See here:
http://unofficialnetworks.com/happen-las-leas-24-hours-124225/

Can you pray for British Columbia, Canada please?

Zoran
jim August 11th, 2013 2:39 pm

I was really surprised how short a distance the beacons effectively can find a signal. Figure 40 yards is good, but its not that far when you are on a big slope, not far at all. Its scary how short a distance they receive.
Paul Lietzan August 14th, 2013 6:33 pm

Alright. This may be a bit far-fetched, so bear with me.

Praying avalanche beacons would be cool. Other features like flagging are cool also. But what about the interfaces? Can they be tied in with other systems? I think there’s a lot of room for growth in this aspect of beacons.

I fly jets for the navy. One of our tools is the heads-up-display, which Smith Optics and I believe at least one other company have emulated with their goggles– Providing information such as speed, elevation, etc… right in your field of view. While it’s relatively old technology, the situational awareness it provides in the aircraft is incredible.

Another of the cooler tools we have is a helmet mounted cueing system, which allows us to do all kinds of stuff. It essentially projects information onto our visor, allowing us to pick out locations of what we want to see rather easily, like far off aircraft, among other things.

What about a similar attribute for snow goggles? If we could somehow tie in a beacon’s signal to a display on your goggles, which then projects a box around the area where your buddy went down, the size of which would be directly related to the location error.

Incredibly complicated, probably ridiculously expensive, but not outside the realm of possibility.

While we’re at it, why not tie in an infrared camera display? It could make at least shallow burials very easy to find.

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