Why Practice Rescue?
Every year, the start of winter brings with it a whole array of emotions and anticipations.
Some winters, the snow flies before there is even time to wax your skis or pull your gear out of storage –and so you scramble, setting aside all those plans of practicing rescue; saving them for a less desirable ski day.
Other years, your skis are tuned up and waiting patiently for that first powder day of the season. You replace those beacon batteries, practice deploying your probe in the living room, and rally your friends to go out and do beacon practice in preparation for the season ahead.
And while the second scenario definitely makes rescue practice sound more appealing, there is perhaps more of a reason to practice if the scenario is such that you are skiing in and around avalanche terrain sooner than anticipated.
Rescue Practice:
It’s like warming up to climb, doing some rock rescue rehearsal, making sure your rope doesn’t have any core shots, making sure your drysuit doesn’t have any major holes, remembering the ABC’s of being a first responder
–it’s a step you can take every season to make sure you and your touring partners are prepared and know what to do in the case of a true emergency.
The Course
This season, Grounding Truth offered two Rescue Refresher courses for alumni, current mentees, and their touring partners. The minimum requirement for attendance was an AIARE 1 or equivalent, and everyone proved to be proficient at performing a single burial rescue of <1m in under 10 minutes upon arrival to the program.
With this high-baseline, we were able to dive deeper into the nuances of beacon use, the strategy of group rescue scenarios, and work out some of the quirkiness associated with multiple burials and close proximity beacon searches.
Each student got the opportunity to run through three single-burial/single-rescuer scenarios, three multi-burial/multi-rescuer scenarios, and practiced a successful sled-rescue evacuation.
Reflections
The value of practice cannot be understated when it comes to a perishable skill like avalanche rescue.
There are elements of gear familiarity, management, and knowing when it’s time to upgrade.
There are things you can only learn through practice and knowing your own strengths and weaknesses.
There are also elements of knowing how to regulate your nervous system while performing the sequence of a rescue that depend on your familiarity with the tasks at hand.
It’s important to consider that although we often imagine ourselves
rising to the challenge,
the reality is that we will
fall back on our training.
While rescue practice is the way to keep these skills fresh…
Taking a rescue course every few seasons can be the difference between practicing effective and efficient techniques or further entrenching yourself in bad habits.
Some key takeaways from students this year:
“Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,” take a breath
Keep the big picture in mind, “head on a swivel”
Be methodical in your approach
Trust the process
Practice is KEY!
Stay curious in practice. Play around with different systems until you find what works for you and with your gear.
