Public Beacon Training Parks Are Available for Everyone
Avalanche rescue gear is useless without understanding how to use it. A real avalanche rescue is terrifying, stressful, and chaotic. To save your partner's life when you only have a few minutes requires beacon, probing, and digging practice. Regularly practicing complete rescue scenarios, i.e., locating, probing, and digging up a buried beacon is critical. Using a beacon, probe, and shovel to perform an avalanche rescue is a perishable skill. When we spend the warmer months biking, fishing, swimming, or camping in the desert, we lose some of that crucial muscle memory. Everyone should brush off the summer rust throught the ski season, whether you are brand new to using these tools or an experienced backcountry rider. Practicing is also the best way to find weaknesses in your equipment or technique, like a probe that won't stay locked together or the frustration of digging straight down and finding yourself standing on your partner's head in a hole too small to work in.
Beacon parks provide an easy, convenient way to practice your skills. The parks are free, open to the public, simple, and always on and available. Each park may be a bit different but all are easy to use and have instructions. They have switches to turn on one or more buried transceivers. Once the unit is on and you've switched on the desired number of transceivers, you'll go through the rescue process step by step: use your beacon (in search mode) to pinpoint the buried unit, then pull your probe out, assemble it, and probe for the target. Most units will beep when struck to indicate that you are on target.
Please do not dig up the buried transceivers. To practice digging techniques, have you or your partner bury a pack with a beacon stuffed in it. This can be done anywhere. And the deeper the practice burial the better - you'll gain greater confidence in your skills with harder problems.
Please remember to fully close the control box when you are finished practicing. These beacon parks are built for winter environments, but if the lid is left open during a heavy snow storm it is possible for water damage to occur making the whole park unusable.
Let us know if the beacon park is not working properly. If something is missing or not working as it should, please reach out to [email protected]. Don't be afraid to send pictures of you and your partners practicing or leave a review as well!