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 point last seen, and the point where they disappeared into moving snow. Mark both with anything you can spare, a pole, a glove, a pack. 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. Count heads out loud and know exactly how many people are missing, because a party that guesses this number searches the wrong debris field.
2. 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.
3. Everything that transmits gets shut down before anyone steps onto the debris. Transceivers to search, confirmed out loud, one by one, by name. Phones, radios, heated gear, action cameras, GPS units and satellite messengers away from the transceiver, in an outer pocket, not in the chest pocket beside it. A single unit still transmitting in the searching party will wreck the search and nobody will work out why for several long minutes. If someone cannot get their unit into search mode, they leave it in send and stay off the debris as your spare buried victim, not as a searcher.
4. The signal search is a sweep run by a team, not a lone hero. 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 last seen point. Every searcher walks a straight line and calls "signal" the instant they get one. The debris below the last seen point is where you spend your effort first, then the flanks, then the deposition zone where the snow piles deep. If the party is big enough, the calling and the coordination happen from the edge of the debris, not from the middle of it.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.

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.

• 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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