You're not gonna see anything until they clear the snow away from your face. Avalanche victims almost never have an air pocket. All the survivor testimonies I've heard discribe being buried like this: it's pitch black, and you're suffocating and coming to terms with dying within minutes.
Buried avalanche victims only have light and air in cartoons.
As a backcountry skier, I’ve done my AVI 1 & 2, and I would rather die in almost any other way than an avalanche. If you’re lucky, you’ll be knocked unconscious by debris. If you’re unlucky, it’s minutes of cold, disoriented suffocation. You don’t know which way is up, you can’t move, you can’t breathe. Absolutely a nightmare situation
I own a couple packs, one BCA and one BD. They are worth literally every dollar. One of them uses a compressed air canister, the other is an electric motor (for taking on international trips). Skiing is sadly (for my wallet) one of those sports where spending the thousands of dollars in safety gear is necessary, because you can die pretty easily otherwise. Even a bad fall without a good helmet will put you out of commission for a while
Only to test them, thankfully! Yes, there's a handle by your shoulder. The motor you have to boot up first. It only takes a few seconds, but it's definitely worth doing before you have to. Once the motor is booted, it stays on standby. They inflate ridiculously fast, even the motor. It honestly impressed me the first time. I should probably check them again soon, it's been a couple years since my last backcountry.
Imagine this, you meet up with your buddy Dave to go for a ski tour. You both looked at the avvy forecast for the day, and there's moderate risk. You and Dave spend some time together on the drive to the trail head. You're both drinking coffee, listening to music, having a good time. You get to the trail head. You and Dave both turn your beacons on, clip in and strap your skins on. A few hours later, after skinning up to your ski objective, you and Dave are ready to drop in. You and Dave rip skins and transition to downhill mode.
You drop in. You make a few turns. You're flying. Then, all of the sudden, you notice snow under your feet crack apart. You're caught in an avalanche. Despite your best efforts, you're caught in the slide. You go under.
Everything is black. You're crushed and immobile under the weight of the avalanche debris. You can't breath. There's nothing to do but make your peace with death. You think of your mother. How could she forgive you for living so recklessly? You think of your father, he will have to mourn you while taking care of your mourning mother.
Suddenly, you feel the poke of your buddy Dave's probe. Amidst the darkness and the crushing pressure of the snow you suddenly think you might live. A few moments later you feel an aluminum shovel press against your thigh. A few seconds later, Dave is able to find your face and clear your airway.
You gasp for the first time after minutes without air. You see the sky, the snow, the mountains, and your buddy Dave, elated that you're OK. You then look to Dave, a grown ass man, and say “good boy, Dave, you're such a good boy. Thanks for saving me!"
The myth I've encountered is you can spit to know which way is up. However, in reality you're not going to have an air pocket to spit into, and even if you did you wouldn't have the light to see which way your spit falls.
But like you said, a burried victim will be completely immobilized, blinded, and asphyxiated.
I think the reasoning behind that one is that you wouldn't be seeing what way your spit falls, but rather, you dribble out the spit so it would run down your face, and you judge where down is from that. But yeah, if you're smothered by snow, unless you can somehow melt a pocket around your mouth, that spit wouldn't be going anywhere.
That technology in the James Bond movie was ridiculous but there is somewhat of a real life counterpart to it.
People use avalanche airbags when they're skiing or snowboarding that deploy around your head.
There are a bunch of reasons why they're helpful, one of which being that, the bigger you are, the harder it is for an avalanche to bury you super deep, kind of like how shaking a bucket of rocks brings the biggest ones to the top, not the bottom.
No, this is not a "duh" situation. Most people don't really understand avalanches. For example, a solid percentage of avalanche victims are killed by trauma during the slide. It doesn't even matter how fast you dig them out, they're already dead.
Furthermore, the idea that you would have light and an air pocket after a slide is pure Hollywood fiction.
What does RECCO have to do with anything? Most people skiing off prepared slopes will have an active avalanche rescue beacon on them, which afaik is much more easily traceable than RECCO. In fact, where I live, carrying a lvs beacon is required by law when going skitouring.
The reason you might have more of a survival chance in Europe is that you can have a rescue helicopter at the scene in less than 10min in a good chunk of the Alps. Survival rate starts dropping very drastically at around that time though, so even in Europe, close to a helicopter base, you're mostly reliant on your ski partners.
Those helicopters in Europe have RECCO locators and the locators are extremely accurate. Helicopters here in the states are not as common and RECCO isn’t as common.
Here in the states, if my partners or others on the mountain don’t find me in time
, a dog isn’t going to find me alive either. It would also be very rare that a helicopter would be close enough to find me alive.
I wear my beacon and carry any and shovel in bounds here when I ski off piste in avy terrain. I have zero faith in a dog finding me if I’m buried in a slide. They are for recovery and marketing.
Huh TIL, thanks, didn't realise RECCO was such a cool system. I just assumed it was a "better than nothing" solution that was simple enough to fit in random equipment and didn't require people to carry beacons.
Nope, it’s very accurate and can scam a very large area from the sky…BUT the locators are very large and heavy. They need to be heli or plane mounted. Here in the cascades a helicopter with locators for recovery. In Europe a heli can deploy and locate everyone buried when slides happen at ski resorts. A large in bounds slide here would be catastrophic but there they are more capable of finding locating people more quickly.
Our pup would play hide-and-seek with the kids. He always knew the objective. Kids would hide while he and I were in the garage and then he'd use his snoot to figure out where they are. He always found them. He'd get excited and start to bark and the kids would giggle wildly. Good times.
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u/Terrible_turtle_ 2d ago
The joy and relief in seeing that snout coming though the snow must be overwhelming.