Messages posted by : ise
Profile for ise > Messages posted by ise [1815]
Quite so, just not 26 years after we started to use them )
Of course thousands of skiers have been doing just this for years without adverse outcomes by and large. But, it doesn't always work out, two teenage lads were buried here last year and one died, this was on a slope no more than 5 meters from the lift. It's a slope I've never skied, I know from a glance it's not a good place to be but they didn't have that skill and they didn't have any equipment, it needed several dog teams to find them. One of the results of being here a few years now is that I can see an evolution in the slopes people are skiing and it's not a reassuring trend. People ski a few metres from the marked runs, then a few metres more and a bit more again and you start to see people in really dangerous places. On of the best illustrations I can give was some people here once who I know vaguely, Mrs Ise happened to see them and they just skied a closed run. She was pretty amazed given the conditions and asked if it was safe, the reply was it was closed as it hadn't been pisted. In fact, a large cornice hadn't been cleared as they couldn't fly a helicopter that day to bomb it. Fatter skis, the internet raising expectations about off-piste skiing, a false sense of security from transceivers or RECCO's even all contribute to that. As for RECCO's near the piste, imagine the detector is in the lift station at the bottom, how long do you think it's going to take for someone to notice, then get it, then take it where it's needed? Do you really fancy those chances? The incident in Valmorel tells you it took them 20 minutes, it's a long time to be buried, any longer and your chances of survival are no better than a coin toss. |
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There's not much achieved by trying to slice a particular risk level into sub-levels, it's sending entirely the wrong message. There were different national systems for categorizing risk levels and these were simplified to the five levels we've got today. The whole point of that was to give people in the mountains a simple way of assessing the dangers when leaving secured areas. There was, and still is, a body of thought that wanted to make this three levels like traffic lights. Inviting people to believe there's days with a "high 3", a "low 3" or a "medium 3" or an arbitrary number of sub-levels invites people to try and game the system.
For the record, 3 means
in turn a light load is defined as :
That's no more and no less than HAT described :
Which is just how level three is defined, the weight of one person can cause a failure. There is a poor layer in the pack but that's obvious, it wouldn't be risk three if the pack was consolidated. The significance of the layer arguably isn't anything to do with day to day risk, it's highly questionable how long it's going to take clear which is the concern. Most high risk levels are associated with recent snowfalls and clear as the top layer consolidated with an already consolidated base, that's not happening and that's a concern. So, right now the snow's unstable and poorly consolidated but not incredibly dangerous in the scale of these things, it's just holiday time and you tend to see these incidents a lot. ie, these incidents are a lot more to do with human factors than they are some quality of the current snowpack |
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The headline is misleading, it's most certainly the first live recovery this winter but it's also to my knowledge the first ever live recovery of a skier, a pedestrian was recovered some years back but after a similarly long burial time. It's questionable the RECCO altered the outcome in either case. It's not very impressive after 26 years of use. It's a neat example of the problem with RECCO's, 20 minutes is a long burial time and your survival chances have dropped from 93% at under 15 minutes to around 70% and falling very, very quickly so by 25 minutes you'd be at 50%. RECCO started out with all the best of intentions with the inventor having been involved in a personal loss, unfortunately it's never proved effective and has been used as a marketing tool by equipment manufacturers who sew the reflectors into jackets to identify them as being more technical than another similar products. I would suggest apart from this marketing use it would have died the death a long time back. Right now the snow's unstable and poorly consolidated but not incredibly dangerous in the scale of these things, it's just holiday time and you tend to see these incidents a lot. |
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That's no different in any country including America or Canada, instructors do other jobs in the summer. In most European countries, unlike America, it's actually the law that ski instructors (along with mountain guides and mountain leaders) are qualified. |
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My father and niece are on that flight :lol: |
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No it's not, that's just silly. I get all my expenses paid when I'm working, all the accommodation, transport, food, insurance, medical expenses and a certain amount of kit, not a single bit of that pays the mortgage, or the costs of owning a house, or a pension. Not that I assume the costs of owning a house are much of an issue for anyone earning £11k a year. |
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That's true but it rather depends what you're doing. Recently I prefer my contacts resorting to reading glasses but I found doing a nav' assessment a week or two back that keeping a running track on a map was impossible that way, only varifocals let me micro nav' to the degree I wanted. The real problem will be that as your eyesight is deteriorating you'll find varifocals with enough tint to be safe skiing will be allowing so little light in that you'll have problems seeing sometimes which sucks. I tested some varifocal contact lenses which were hopeless in the mountains, you need so much light to hit them for them to work that it's impossible to wear decent sunglasses. it's a pain, prolonged use of the wrong sort of optics will irreparably damage your eyes so it's important get something decent, i.e. the right UV protection, the right tint and the right prescription if you need that. |
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That's reassuring, it's exactly what I'd have said :) If you're up on a glacier at 3000m you need pretty strong glasses blocking at 90% or over as I mentioned earlier. If you're skiing in the trees in Austria at 1000m then you're getting about 25% less UV anyway and there's less snow in the background to reflect, snow reflects about 80% of light that falls on it so it's a significant difference. Whether what you have works is obviously not quite the same question as what you'd buy for the average European conditions.
My eyes have altered a bit recently so I now use contacts which give me good distance vision and I can wear standard glasses and googles then I use reading glasses to look at maps if I need to, real maps I mean, I don't bother with piste maps :) That's handy because the contacts block UV to a degree anyway. |
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Profile for ise > Messages posted by ise [1815]