J2Ski Forum Posts and Replies by SwingBeep

It costs about CHF 10,000 an hour to search an avalanche manually using probes and dogs. For which the family involved will be billed, if they have insurance fine if not cash will do nicely. Their nationality hasn't been published; the papers just reported that they were French speaking.

I think this is the forth Swiss off-piste avalanche incident to be reported so far this season. Two of the others were fatal, in the third one the victim was taken to hospital suffering from injuries caused by avalanche probes.

The weather forecast for Sunday and beyond doesn't look too bad at the moment http://meteo.search.ch/villars-gryon-snow-region

If you wait for the weather you'll wait forever!

Rossignol/Look has issued a safety notice regarding some of their 2011-12 binding toe pieces. So if Santa brought you some new Rossignol skis and bindings check to see if the bindings are on the list.

http://www.rossignol.com/GB/GB/bindings-safety-notice.html
http://www.look-bindings.com/US/US/bindings-safety-notice.html

Under Italian law No. 363 (December 24, 2003) http://www.camera.it/parlam/leggi/03363l.htm all children under 14 are obliged to wear a helmet when skiing or snowboarding, failure to do so can result in their parents, trainers or instructors being fined 30 to 50 Euros. There are a host of other regulations that vary from province to province, i.e. in Piemonte you can be fined up to 250 Euros for going off-piste without avi gear. There is a 'sticky' about them on this Italian forum http://www.skiforum.it/forum/discussioni-generali/

Iceman wrote: Beep, how do you find these facts??

I've lived in the Alps for over 20 years, in which time I've managed to collect fair bit of skiing related information. The info about the SNOWsat System came from an article in the local paper.

This is where snow depth is measured on my local hill, a nice shady spot in a bit of a hollow sheltered by two containers and the PistenBully garage.

Some places can't measure much more than 200cm



These days the measured snow depth doesn't really have much relevance to the state of the pistes, as it doesn't take into account the depth of artificial snow. It should be easily possible to give the depth of snow on the pistes as modern piste machines can measure it to an accuracy of 1cm using GPS systems such as PistenBully's SNOWsat System http://www.pistenbully.com/en/download/brochures/attachments.html

The ski lift manufacturers have developed restraining systems to prevent people falling from chair lifts, Doppelmayr has developed the Skippy system



and Leitner the Kidstop

http://en.leitner-lifts.com/Products/Detachable-chairlifts

It's a bit of a long shot Billip1, but on the Zipfit website http://www.zipfit.com/linertech.html Sven Coomer states "Zipfit owner and designer, Sven Coomer, made this first ever plastic reinforced and asymmetrical tongue-shell in 1972. This tongue-shell remains the best. Before the tongues were made with thick leather, foam padding and neoprene lining.
Today it's the same tongue-mold and neoprene lining. Only the (thick) foams have been replaced with the new and malleable OMfit cork and ceramic moulding composite which is proven to be the most effective and durable shin and instep protection; anatomically adaptable, while allowing the use of very thin and most sensitive tongue profiles."