THE TRAILHEAD CHECK: RADIOS, TRANSCEIVERS AND THE TWO MINUTES THAT MATTER
13 min · Free lesson · written from fifteen years in the terrain
After this lesson you can run the check that happens before every single day in the backcountry: radios on the agreed channel, every transceiver proven to both send and receive, and nobody left out of it, including the person doing the checking.
The Technique
- Start with why this is a lesson rather than a line on a list. **Experienced people have died in the Whistler backcountry because a check like this was skipped or done badly.** Not beginners who did not know, but capable riders in the middle of a good season who got caught up in the morning and rolled out with something switched off. The check is boring, it takes two minutes, and it is the highest return two minutes of the day.
- Radios first, because they shorten every decision that follows. A party with radios can regroup without riding back, can call a hazard before somebody rides into it, and can run a search without shouting into the wind. **Agree the channel at the trailhead, out loud, and have every rider confirm they are on it by transmitting once.** Assuming everyone is on channel is how you find out at the worst moment that one person has been listening to silence all day.
- Set the conventions with the channel: who talks, what the call signs are, and what constitutes a call worth making. Keep transmissions short, say who you are and who you want, and stop talking. **Listen before you transmit**, because doubling up on a busy channel means neither message lands. Agree the words that stop everything: our convention is that anybody can call a stop and nobody argues on the radio about it.
- **Use the phonetic alphabet when it matters, and it matters more than people expect.** Wind, engine noise, a full face helmet and a cheap speaker turn similar sounding letters into guesses. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, Xray, Yankee, Zulu. Numbers get said digit by digit. Use it for anything that must be right first time: a grid reference, a channel number, a licence plate, the spelling of a name for a rescue call.
- Now the transceiver check, and it has two halves that people routinely collapse into one. **The send check: every rider's transceiver is transmitting.** One person switches to search and walks past each rider in turn, confirming a signal from each one, calling the name out as they get it. That proves the unit is on, in send, and working.
- **The receive check: every rider's transceiver can search.** This is the half that gets skipped. One rider stays in send and walks away, and every other rider switches to search and confirms they pick that signal up at a sensible distance. A unit that transmits but cannot receive is useless the moment it is you doing the digging rather than being dug for.
- **Then the part that kills people: the checker gets checked too.** Whoever ran the send check has been in search mode the whole time. Their own transceiver has not transmitted once and nobody has proven it. **They switch back to send, and somebody else confirms them.** In the heat of a morning, with machines running and daylight burning, this is the single easiest step to forget, and forgetting it means the one person the group trusts to run the check is the one person who is invisible when it counts.
- Say the results out loud and by name, so it is a shared fact rather than a private one. "Everyone sending, everyone receiving, everyone confirmed." If a unit fails, it does not get talked into working. **Fresh batteries or that rider does not come.** A transceiver on low battery in the cold is a transceiver that will fail at range, and range is the whole point.
- Finish the check with the rest of the daily kit while everyone is standing there: probes and shovels present and assembled at least once so nobody discovers a seized joint in an emergency, satellite communicator on and carried on a body, phones charged and warm, fuel confirmed, and the plan said out loud including where you are going, what the turnaround time is and who is riding with whom. **Two minutes, every day, no exceptions, and no exceptions is the point.** The day you skip it will look exactly like the day you did not need it, right up until it does not.
Common Mistakes
Checking send and calling it done. Fix: send and receive are two different checks. A unit that cannot search is dead weight in a rescue.
- The person running the check never being checked themselves. Fix: they switch back to send and somebody else confirms them. This is the one that has killed experienced riders.
- Assuming everyone is on the right radio channel. Fix: each rider transmits once at the trailhead to prove it.
- Talking a marginal battery into being fine. Fix: fresh batteries or that rider stays behind. Cold flattens marginal cells at exactly the wrong moment.
The Drill
The two minute drill, timed. At the next trailhead run the full sequence: channel confirmed by every rider transmitting, send check by name, receive check by name, the checker checked, then probes, shovels, comms, fuel and the plan. Time it. It is around two minutes once the group knows the routine, and knowing the number kills the excuse that there is not time.
A check confirms equipment works, and nothing more. It does not make the day safe, it does not replace training, and it does not substitute for the terrain decisions that follow. Do a certified avalanche course, and do the companion rescue module in this library, because a working transceiver in untrained hands is just a working transceiver.
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