ADVANCED RESCUE: WHERE THE MINUTES REALLY GO, AND HOW TO TAKE THEM BACK

The Technique

1. **Start with the number that should reorganise your training, because almost nobody trains as though they believe it. Digging dominates everything.** In work by Genswein and Eide presented at ISSW, a coordinated team freeing a fully buried body took around **six and a half minutes at one metre, roughly fourteen and a half minutes at two metres, and about seventeen minutes at three metres.** Compare that with the entire search phase: an advanced companion rescue simulation published in 2022 measured **search through to the first probe strike at an average of three minutes forty three.**
2. So the shape of a real rescue is not what most riders picture. **The searching is a few minutes. The digging is two to four times that at a metre, and the gap widens fast with depth.** Every minute you shave off walking is worth a fraction of a minute you shave off shovelling, and yet transceiver drills are what everyone practises and shovelling is what everyone treats as the boring bit at the end.
3. **And the technique gap in digging is enormous, which is the good news.** In the same work, uncoordinated shovelling took around **nine minutes at one metre against six and a half for a coordinated team, twenty nine minutes against fourteen and a half at two metres, and around thirty seven minutes against seventeen at three.** That is **forty two per cent slower at one metre and more than double at two and three.** There is no other intervention in avalanche rescue that returns that kind of time for that little equipment.
4. **So learn the V-shaped conveyor and drill it like it matters, because it does.** Work out where to start from the probe depth rather than digging at the probe: **step downhill from the strike by roughly the burial depth**, and start there. Cut blocks and move them rather than scooping loose snow, because snow that has set up in avalanche debris behaves like polystyrene rather than powder. Rescuers work in a V pointing uphill, spaced about a shovel length apart, the lead person cutting into the face and the others clearing spoil down and away rather than piling it where the next person has to move it twice. **Rotate the lead roughly every four minutes**, because the person at the front burns out fast and a tired leader is what turns a good technique into a bad one.
5. **Now the marking button, and this is where your instincts about your own equipment are probably wrong.** You have been taught that when you find the first victim you press mark and move on. **The mark fails often enough that you must plan for it, and the reason is not that you pressed it wrong.**
6. **The mechanism is signal overlap.** Edgerly, writing in The Avalanche Review, sets it out plainly: when two buried transceivers happen to transmit pulses that coincide, your unit no longer reliably knows how many signals exist. One press can suppress both signals whether or not you found both. And a signal that has been marked **can spontaneously become unmarked.** He opens by quoting the question instructors hear constantly, which is riders asking why they keep coming back to a victim they already marked.
7. **That means the cycling-back that frustrates people is real, but the cause sits in the device rather than in the operator.** It is worth knowing your own unit's specific behaviour, because they differ in ways that matter. **On the Tracker family, signal suppression expires after sixty seconds by design and holds only one mark at a time**, so returning to a marked victim after a minute is not a fault, it is the documented behaviour. And a 2014 safety advisory from the German alpine club found that some Pieps and Arva models of that era, after the first mark, silently suppressed distant signals that were not overlapping at all, with nothing on the display to tell the searcher it had happened.
8. **Put honest numbers on how often this bites.** Large scale field testing at Davos had novice searchers fail to find the third buried transceiver in **about a third of all attempts across the five devices tested**. On the four worst performers it was around forty per cent, and individual devices ranged from thirty to nearly sixty. **A tool that fails a third of the time is not a tool you build a plan around without a backup.**
9. **So carry a backup method and make it a reflex, because that is precisely what separates the people who find the third victim from the people who do not.** In the Davos data the failure rate fell from roughly a third to **under six per cent** among advanced users, and the reason was not steadier thumbs. It was that experienced searchers had a **device-independent fallback** they could switch to the moment marking misbehaved. **Micro search strips are that fallback**: once a victim is located, you search the surrounding area on a tight grid roughly three metres apart, using the transceiver's fine search behaviour and ignoring the marking function entirely. Practise it until you do not have to think about it.
10. **The third thing worth drilling is the least mechanical and the most important, and the evidence on it is blunt.** Genswein and Eide found that when multiple burial searches failed, **the cause was, without a single exception, that the rescuers did not properly recognise the situation they were in.** Not poor technique. Not slow legs. They did not work out what was actually in front of them before choosing what to do about it.
11. **So build the recognition habit deliberately.** Before you commit to a strategy, spend the few seconds it takes to establish how many people are missing, where each was last seen and moving, and what the debris is telling you. **Use the analog tone rather than the display to count signals**, because overlap ruins the display first and the ear is the honest instrument. And learn what marking failure sounds and looks like so you recognise it in seconds rather than in minutes: the distance that will not fall, the direction that swings, the victim you have already found appearing again.
12. **Here is how to spend your training time if you take nothing else from this lesson.** **Drill the V conveyor**, because it is the only thing on this list with a measured forty two to over one hundred per cent time saving. **Drill situational recognition**, because it is the one failure that appeared in every failed multiple burial search. **Drill micro strips**, because they are the reason the expert failure rate is a sixth of the novice one. Transceiver walking drills are worth doing and everyone already does them. These three are what actually move the clock.

Common Mistakes

Training the search and treating the dig as the boring bit at the end. Fix: digging is two to four times the search at a metre and the gap widens with depth. It deserves most of your practice time.

• Digging straight down at the probe. Fix: step downhill from the strike by about the burial depth and work in toward the casualty, cutting blocks rather than scooping.
• Everyone shovelling wherever there is room. Fix: a V pointing uphill, spaced about a shovel length apart, spoil cleared down and away, lead rotated roughly every four minutes.
• Assuming a failed mark means you pressed it wrong. Fix: the cause is signal overlap in the device. Know your own unit's documented behaviour, including that some units drop the mark after sixty seconds by design.
• Having no plan for when marking fails. Fix: micro search strips as a practised reflex. That fallback is most of the difference between expert and novice success rates.
• Choosing a strategy before understanding the scene. Fix: count the missing, fix last seen points, listen to the analog tone. Every failed multiple burial search in the research failed here first.

The Drill

The two-part advanced session. Part one is dig only: bury a weighted pack at one metre and again at two, and time a coordinated V conveyor against everyone digging as they see fit. Rotate leads every four minutes and note where people tire. The gap you measure will be larger than anyone in the group expects, and that measurement is what changes behaviour. Part two is marking failure: bury three transmitters close enough that signals overlap, run the search normally, and the moment marking misbehaves switch to micro strips without stopping to discuss it. Time to third victim is the number to improve.

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