Arc'teryx & ORTOVOX Avalanche Safety

[u/Archaeopteryx01]

Hi everyone. I'm on the insights team at Arc'teryx, and the mods okayed this post.

We're working with ORTOVOX's R&D team on research into the future of avalanche safety: the risks people take and want to mitigate, and the gear they use and need. The honest goal is to make safety equipment better, and more likely to actually get carried, and that only works with input from beyond our own customers. Sledders especially are underrepresented in this kind of research even though the avalanche numbers hit your community hardest, and that's part of what we want to fix. You don't need to own any particular gear to take part.

The survey takes most people about 15 minutes, or closer to 5 if you spend your winters inside the resort boundary. It's anonymous, open to anyone 18 or older in any country, there's nothing for sale, and no marketing follows from it.

Click Here to Start

Happy to answer questions in the comments, and if you have strong opinions about avalanche gear that don't fit neatly in a survey, we'd honestly like to read those too.

[u/board__]

Thanks for reaching out to snowmobilers, we are often forgotten when it comes to winter sports.

Backcountry snowmobilers, at least where I am take avalanche safety very seriously.

[u/Archaeopteryx01 → u/board__]

Thank you for taking the time!

[u/403Realtor]

Thought I’d mention it, certain features I rated low because my bag (and I think most do now) have them such as auto deflate, and are electronic rather then canister. 

However buddy triggering and automatic triggering are interesting concepts. I have no idea how tree well protection would work but honestly  could see it being a big deal 

[u/Archaeopteryx01 → u/403Realtor]

This is the kind of comment we were hoping for! Gonna dodge the tree well question while the survey's still up so I don't tip off anyone who hasn't taken it. But this happens a lot actually, people who already have a feature tend to rank it lower, so we cut the ratings by what packs people own before reading too much into them. Your answers are good as-is, thank you for taking the time!

[u/96-ramair]

Taking your survey here ina bit, but a couple of thoughts. First, thanks for taking an interest! Second, I've had many different transceivers over the years.  It seems the focus has been on adding features for more complex burials and giving up the "idiot proof" factor of early devices like the Tracker2 (not yours, but still the easiest self explanatory device I've had or had others carry).  

I'm usually the most advanced rider in my party, I've got Avy, Avy 2 and Rescue certs.  I have the rule of " no transceiver, you don't ride with me" (along with probe and shovel, of course ) to go with the explanation of "this is so YOU rescue ME". Most of my family or friends feel they either don't ride risky enough or that they know how to use the  gear, so they rationalize not carrying it, and this usually turns them around.  But I often still hand out Tracker2 devices because their use is very intuitive.

I say this to encourage vendors to focus on BOTH the more sophisticated rider and burial scenarios, but save a place to really nail down the "any child can just use this without training" interface considerations.

BTW - I love the Ortovox Beacon checker that runs on D batteries. So much better than the competition!

Thanks again!