COMPANION RESCUE: THE WHOLE GROUP SEQUENCE

The Technique

1. The first seconds are eyes, not hands. Anyone who saw the rider go watches them the whole way down and holds two marks in their head. The first is where they were caught. The second is the point last seen, which means the point at which they disappeared into the moving snow. Mark both with anything you can spare, a pole, a glove, a pack. Hold a third thing in your head as well, and it is the one people forget: the direction of travel, both theirs and the snow's. A rider does not travel down the fall line politely, they travel where the moving snow carries them, and that direction is your best line of search.
2. Then look up before you look down. Hangfire above the debris, a second start zone across the gully, a cornice still sitting over the top: these are what turn one casualty into three.
3. Count heads out loud and know exactly how many people are missing. Be blunt about why this matters: a party that guesses this number leaves someone for dead. It is not that you search the wrong debris field. It is that you find one person, everybody exhales, and nobody is looking for the second rider still under the snow. Names, out loud, counted against who started the run.
4. Someone takes command by name, and it is whoever is closest and thinking clearly, not whoever is most senior. Say it out loud: "I am running this." Then hand out jobs by name, because "someone call it in" gets done by nobody. You are searching from the mark. You are searching the left flank. You are watching the slope above and you will yell if anything moves. You are on comms once we have a signal. One voice giving direction beats five people improvising, and the party will follow anyone who sounds like they have a plan.
5. Now the sequencing that gets taught wrongly, and it matters. The instinct under stress is to switch your transceiver to search the moment you see someone go. Do not switch while you are still standing in a place that can slide. Panicked riders flip to search in the safe zone and then cross avalanche terrain to reach the debris, sometimes a continuation of the same path, sometimes the identical aspect that just released, with their own transceiver no longer transmitting. If that second slope goes, nobody can find them. Move first, switch second.
6. So: travel to ground the snow has already slid from, with no hangfire above you, and only then switch to search. That is the order. Get onto the debris safely as a transmitting rider, then convert to a searching party once you are standing somewhere that has already failed.
7. But the search does not start until the whole party is converted. Every transceiver in the searching group to search, confirmed out loud, one by one, by name. The consequence of one person not switching is specific and it is stupid: the search party spends its minutes hunting a signal from somebody standing on the surface next to them.
8. Every other electronic thing goes off the debris field, not merely into an outer pocket. Phones, radios, heated gear, action cameras, GPS units and satellite messengers. Moving a phone from your chest pocket to your hip is the old advice and it is not good enough when a minute of interference costs a life. Get them off the snow entirely. It is not worth the risk to save a photograph.
9. Shut the machines down. Snowmobiles and motorbikes get switched off, not left idling. This is not about the noise and the exhaust, though those matter for hearing a shout. A running machine is charging and running its own electronics, and that can disrupt the signals you are hunting. An idling sled parked at the edge of a debris field is an interference source nobody thinks to blame while the clock runs.
10. Anyone who cannot get their transceiver into search mode stages a long way off, at a safe zone, not at the edge of the debris. A transmitting unit on the surface will show up in the search, and once you are into multiple burial technique it is genuinely damaging: it costs time you do not have, and in the heat of it somebody forgets to flag which signal is the bloke standing up. The scenario that should decide this for you is the worst one. That rider stands near, or over, a real casualty. The searcher gets a signal, attributes it to the person standing there, and moves on. A buried rider gets written off because someone on the surface was too close. Send them well clear and account for them by name.
11. The signal search now forks, and which branch you take depends on how many people are still standing. Decide this in the first seconds rather than defaulting to the version you were taught.
12. Branch one, the group sweep, when you have a party. Spread across the width of the debris with spacing set by the confident range of your weakest transceiver, and work down the fall line from the point last seen. Every searcher walks a straight line and calls "signal" the instant they get one. If the party is big enough, the calling and the coordination happen from the edge of the debris rather than from the middle of it.
13. Branch two, the single searcher, because sometimes you are the only one left. This is the confronting version and it gets skipped in training: a backcountry party can go wrong such that you are standing and everyone else is under the snow. There is a method for it. Start just above the point last seen and traverse the full width of the debris or the avalanche path, side to side. At the far side, drop down the slope and traverse back the other way. Keep dropping and reversing until you get a signal.
14. Work out the drop properly, because guessing it either wastes minutes or misses people. Your transceiver detects out to some distance either side of you, so each pass sweeps a band twice that wide. The drop between passes is that band width minus a deliberate overlap. So with a tested range of twenty five metres either side, each pass covers fifty metres, and you drop forty metres, which leaves ten metres of overlap between passes.
15. Sit with why the overlap is exactly that and not more. Too little and you leave an unsearched strip through the debris, which is somebody dying inside a gap in your own pattern. Too much and you are re-searching ground you have already cleared, and when you are one person on a big path, or there are multiple people buried, those wasted minutes come directly out of somebody's survival. Ten metres of margin on a twenty five metre range is the balance: enough that a marginal signal is not missed, tight enough that you keep moving.
16. Which means you must know your own transceiver's real range, and that is a job for a car park, not for an avalanche. Go and test it. Have someone walk away with a unit in send while you search, and find the distance at which you reliably acquire the signal, not the distance printed on the box. Test both directions: what it will search to, and what it will send to. Identical models have been found unreliable at their marketed ranges, so the only number worth building a search pattern on is the one you measured yourself. Write it on the unit if you have to.
17. Once you have a signal, everything from there is identical to the group method: coarse, fine, pinpoint, probe, dig.
18. Branch three, the hybrid, for a debris field bigger than your party. When the debris is very large, or you have too few responders to cover its width, or you have several people buried, run the single searcher pattern with multiple people spread across it. It covers dramatically more ground quickly. It also demands stringent coordination, so it needs one person running it who is not searching. That coordinator generally leaves their own transceiver out of the picture, stands where they can see the whole debris field, and stays close enough to be heard. Without that discipline a hybrid search becomes several people wandering in overlapping circles.
19. One correction to the standard teaching about where to spend your effort. For a transceiver search you go where the signal takes you, and that is that. The "below the last seen point first, then the flanks, then the deposition zone" priority belongs to a different and much worse problem: searching for someone who is not transmitting. That should not describe our own riders, but it may describe a civilian we come across, and it can describe one of ours if a transceiver was switched off, damaged or knocked in the violence of the slide, which has happened.
20. So if there is genuinely no signal anywhere on the debris, the search becomes eyes, probes and reasoning about where a body goes. Work straight down the fall line from the point last seen, a metre or two either side of it, and carry that line into the deposition zone where the snow piles deepest. Then, and only then, work the flanks. The logic is simple: somebody swept off their feet travels with the moving snow, so they are either caught and left behind higher up, or they finish in the deposition. Reaching the sides of a running avalanche is the uncommon outcome, so the flanks are where you look last rather than second.
21. What you actually saw changes the pattern, and it beats any standard sequence. If you watched a rider the whole way, saw the debris set up and know the direction of travel, then that observation is better information than a systematic search and you commit to it: the fall line from the point last seen, into the deposition. If you did not see them go, or several people are buried across a spread of ground, you are back to covering the area methodically, and as a lone searcher that is the zigzag pattern from the point last seen.
22. With enough people on the surface you can run a probe line, and it looks like the group sweep with probes instead of transceivers: shoulder to shoulder across the path, spaced so that no ground goes unprobed, working systematically down. It is slow and it is exhausting. Whether it is the right call has to be assessed at the time against how deep the deposition is, the size of the runout, how many searchers you have, how well trained they are, and what the slope above is doing while you all stand in it.
23. Two honesty notes on this whole section. First, it is a horrifying thing to be doing and the outcomes are usually not good ones. Second, the exact ordering here is worth confirming with your own avalanche instructor, because different schools teach it slightly differently and this is not a place for anybody's best guess, including ours. It is also the reason the transceiver rides on your body, gets checked at the trailhead every single day, and never travels in a pack.
24. One signal, one owner. The person who picks up the first signal owns that search through coarse and fine and pinpoint, and everyone else stays out of their way. Crowding a signal is how three people end up bracketing three slightly different spots. Follow the flux line rather than fighting it, get down to the snow surface for the fine search, and bracket in a cross at ground level until the numbers stop dropping. If you have multiple burials, the second searcher takes the next signal and works it independently, and the party uses whatever multiple burial method it has actually practised, not one it read about.
25. Keep talking to them the whole time, out loud, from the moment you have a signal and right through probing. A buried person can hear voices on the surface from a surprising depth. Understand what that is like: pitch black, unable to move, not knowing whether anyone saw them go, and the fear is burning their air. Hearing their own name shouted, hearing that people are close and digging, is the one thing that slows their heart rate and slows their breathing, and slower breathing is literally more time alive under the snow. So shout. Say who you are, say you have a signal, say you are coming. It costs nothing and it buys them minutes.
26. Probing confirms, and probing is fast if you commit to it. Perpendicular to the snow surface, not vertical to the horizon, in a tight spiral out from the lowest reading, spaced roughly a hand span apart in the first ring and widening as you go. You are feeling for something that is soft, then firm, then gives slightly, which is nothing like ground and nothing like rock once you have felt it. When you strike, leave the probe in the snow and do not pull it out to check. That probe is now your only reliable mark of where the casualty is and how deep they are, and the depth reading tells the shovellers where to start.
27. Shovelling is the slow part of every rescue and it is where parties lose people. Do not dig straight down onto the probe. Step downhill of it by roughly one and a half times the burial depth on any slope, and start a hole you can work inside, cutting into the slope toward the probe rather than mining a shaft on top of the casualty. Snow moves down and sideways, never up over your shoulder. Work in a wedge with the strongest digger at the front, the next two clearing the sides, and rotate the lead every couple of minutes, because the front position burns out fast and a tired lead digs slowly without noticing. Digging down from above compacts snow onto the airway and builds a pit with no room to extract anyone.
28. When you reach the casualty, the head is the target. If you find a hand or a boot first, note the body line and keep cutting toward where the head must be. Clear the face, clear the mouth of packed snow, and get an airway before you get a body. Protect the neck as best the situation allows, but nothing delays the airway. From that moment you are in remote first aid: breathing, bleeding, warmth, insulation under them before anything else, gentle handling because a deeply cold casualty does not tolerate rough movement, and comms confirmed. The group's job changes too, and the leader reassigns it out loud, because the people who were digging will keep digging unless somebody tells them the task has changed.
29. Everything above is what you do for somebody else. This last part is the one thing you can do for yourself, and it has to be learned now because there is no time to learn it later. If you are the one caught, fight to stay on the surface for as long as the snow is moving, and then, in the final moment as it slows, get an arm across your face and fight to hold a space in front of your mouth and nose. Debris sets like concrete the instant it stops. The space you have when it stops is the space you keep.
30. That pocket of air is the difference between the two halves of the survival curve. The people who make it past the asphyxia window and into the plateau are, overwhelmingly, the ones who had an air space, and the measured burial depths back that up: median depth for those without a pocket is around a metre, against about sixty centimetres for those with one. You cannot control how deep you end up. You can sometimes control whether you have a space to breathe into, and if you do, you have bought your crew the minutes they need to do everything in this lesson.

Common Mistakes

Sending someone off the debris to make the emergency call before the search is running. Fix: the party is the rescue. Outside help almost never arrives inside the window where a live recovery is realistic. If you have people spare, one of them calls while the rest search. If you do not, you search, and you call once the casualty is uncovered.

• Only ever practising the group sweep. Fix: rehearse the single searcher pattern as well. If the day goes badly enough that you are the only one standing, that is the method you will need, and it is not the one anybody drills.
• Guessing the drop between passes on a solo sweep. Fix: drop the full band width your transceiver sweeps, less a deliberate overlap. Twenty five metres either side means a fifty metre band and a forty metre drop.
• Building a search pattern on the range printed on the box. Fix: test your own unit for both send and search range in a car park. Marketed range and reliable range are not the same number, and the pattern depends on the real one.
• Over-overlapping to feel safe. Fix: re-searching cleared ground costs minutes that belong to the person under the snow, and on a big path with one searcher those minutes are the whole margin.
• Switching to search while still standing somewhere that can slide. Fix: move to ground that has already gone, with nothing hanging above you, then switch. A searcher who is no longer transmitting and gets caught by the second slide is unfindable.
• Leaving a sled or a bike idling at the edge of the debris. Fix: shut the machines down. A running machine is charging and running electronics, and it interferes with the exact signals you are hunting.
• Parking the rider who cannot switch to search at the edge of the debris. Fix: send them well clear and account for them by name, because a surface signal sitting near a buried casualty can get that casualty written off as already found.
• Digging a vertical shaft directly on the probe. Fix: start downhill at about one and a half times the burial depth and cut in, so you arrive at the head with room to work and without pressing snow into the face.

The Drill

The four person burial. Bury two transceivers in packs on a safe slope at about a metre of depth, brief the party for thirty seconds, then go. Standard: roles assigned and every transceiver confirmed in search inside one minute, first probe strike inside five minutes, and the casualty's face exposed inside ten. Rotate the leader every run so every member of the party has run it, including the quiet one. If you cannot hit the standard, the fix is repetitions, not new gear.

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