PRACTISE LIKE
SOMEONE IS WATCHING
Safety drills feel like homework, so people do them once and never again. Then they need them and they are slow. This is the same drills with a clock on them, because a number you can beat is worth more than a certificate you cannot.
The research in our training library is blunt about where a rescue is won and lost. The search is a few minutes. The digging is two to four times that, and it gets worse with depth. Trained people beat untrained people by minutes, and a crew improves measurably between their first attempt and their third in the same afternoon.
So the useful thing is not doing a course once. It is running the drill often enough that it is boring, and the honest way to make people do that is to let them compete.
A transceiver search on sand, in Australia, in the middle of summer. No snow required.
How to run it
- Two transceivers. Bag one so sand cannot get into it.
- Have somebody else bury it 30 to 50 cm down while you look away, anywhere in a marked area roughly 50 by 50 metres.
- Every electronic device you are not searching with goes right away from the area. Phones, watches, cameras, the lot.
- Start on the edge of the area, switch to search, and go.
- Stop the clock when the probe hits it. Not when the display says a small number.
Why this one. You cannot practise this at home in Australia, which is exactly why almost nobody does, and then people arrive on a trip having not touched a transceiver since last season. Sand behaves close enough to snow for the search itself, and the search is the part you forget.
Something to chase. Advanced companion rescue simulation put search through to first probe strike at an average of three minutes forty three. That is a number from a study, not a bar you have to clear.
- Mark the area and keep it clear of the public. A probe in the sand is a spike in the sand.
- Bag the transceiver properly. Sand in a beacon ends it.
- Do not do this near a road, a car park or anywhere a kid can wander into.
The board
Nobody has posted a time for this one yet. Somebody has to be first, and first is its own kind of bragging rights.
A time here is a personal result on a practice field. It is not a qualification, and it does not mean anyone is ready for terrain - conditions in a real burial are nothing like a drill.
Why there is no badge
Badges certify that you turned up, and nobody has ever been proud of turning up. A time is different: it is yours, it is repeatable, and it is beatable. You can go out tomorrow and take thirty seconds off it, which is the entire point, because the thirty seconds is real.
It also means nothing here is a qualification. Being fast on a practice field says you have practised. It does not say you are ready for terrain, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. The call on whether somebody rides with us is made by a person, on the day, on the ground, and it can always be no.