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Avalanches are deadly. If you get caught in one, more often than not, rescuers have mere minutes to find you before the odds of survival plummet.
“If rescuers
can locate and uncover the buried person within 10 minutes, the person has an 80% chance of surviving. By 15 minutes, the survival rate drops to 40%, and after 35 minutes it’s less than 10%,” says Anne St. Clair, a public avalanche forecaster for Avalanche Canada and an instructor trainer with the American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education (
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I was 23 when I started backcountry skiing. I’d been recreating in the mountains my entire life, resort skiing, backpacking, and climbing volcanoes in the Cascades. I’d taken a National Outdoor Leadership School mountaineering course, and I was writing for a ski magazine. And yet I felt completely lost about where to start. So I borrowed some gear and took an American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education (AIARE) Level 1 course, which at the time seemed like the only way to begin.
AIARE’s three-day recreational Level 1 comprises 24 hours of education, usually about eight hours of classroom learning followed by two eight-hour field days, and offers a crash course in snow safety, avalanche terrain, and companion rescue. It has long been the standard entry point for backcountry beginners.
If you’ve spent $500 on the fanciest avalanche transceiver in existence but you don’t know how to use it, it’s not going to do you much good. In the event of a slide, that little beeping box is your lifeline the only form of communication between you and your potential rescuers when you’re separated by layers of snow. Also known as a beacon, a transceiver is just one part of a complete avalanche safety kit, which should also include, at the minimum, a probe and shovel.
Another essential component of avalanche safety is education, which we will discuss in more detail below. A course taught by a qualified instructor is the best preparation for trips into the backcountry’s variable snow conditions. This article is a basic primer on beacon use. It is not intended to replace formal avalanche training.
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