Lawinensicherheit

The Austrian Alpine Association is once again offering evening lectures to get in the mood for the ski season, where winter sports enthusiasts can update their avalanche knowledge.

From October 7 to 12, Innsbruck became the center of the world. The world of snow and avalanches. The International Snow Science Workshop was held for the first time in the "Capital of the Alps". A review of a successful week and a look ahead to interesting developments in avalanche prevention and accident management for winter sports enthusiasts:

Online registration for the free SnowHow Camps opened yesterday. The camps provide avalanche knowledge for beginners and slightly advanced freeriders and ski tourers in a practical day and evening lectures.

When it comes to snow, there are and have been various trends. All of them have brought progress and have given way to new trends. Meanwhile, one of them has been stuck in its own gears for years. A plea to finally take a common path out of this one.

PowderGuide was born out of the desire to combine the fun of off-piste skiing with informed and professional risk management in order to ideally be able to spend a lifetime "off-piste". A few years ago, Jeremy Jones summed up this principle in the catchy phrase "live to ride another day".

The renaissance of the "snow profile for everyone" has long since begun. Anyone who wants to record or pass on their profiles can now purchase an elegant recording tool.

The Barryvox S follows on from Mammut's popular and widely used Barryvox Pulse. The device has been newly developed and is not only very easy and intuitive to use, but also offers an improved range and is also very compact. As befits a professional device, the Barryvox S is highly configurable and has numerous special functions.

Since the 2017/2018 season, LWD Tirol has been offering the option of automatically receiving the daily avalanche situation report and new blog entries in the form of a Whats App subscription. This service has proven to be very useful in practice and is therefore our Gear of the Week.

For safety reasons, Mammut asks all customers who own a Generation 3.0 avalanche airbag to check the route of the deployment cable. The proper functioning of the avalanche airbag can only be guaranteed if the cable is properly installed.

In contrast to many large manufacturers of skis, ski boots and bindings, the avalanche transceiver and airbag manufacturers were all represented at ISPO. When it comes to avalanche transceivers, there are small to medium improvements rather than huge innovations, and with the exception of Scott/Alpride, hardly anything significant has changed in terms of airbags.

One man's sorrow is another man's joy, as the saying goes. This was also the case with the last PowderAlert, or rather the heavy snowfalls, which not only kept the avalanche warnings busy, but also the civil protection. The Davos department of the PowderGuide editorial team was evacuated due to the avalanche danger and had to leave their home. How do you feel when something like that happens? Steffen reports:

For me, an avalanche shovel must fulfill two essential criteria. Firstly, I want a large and torsion-resistant shovel blade made of metal and secondly, an extendable style with a D-handle. Especially nowadays, when people like to save weight even on safety equipment, such models are no longer so easy to find, which is why I used the same shovel for about 10 years up to and including last season.