How To Use Your Transceiver — How To: XV Part 8

Getting the gear is one thing, knowing how to use it is another. Refresh your avalanche rescue skills with tips from Xavier De Le Rue.

Hopefully, you never have to experience getting caught in an avalanche but, in reality, there’s always a chance you will. As you increase your exposure — both in terms of increasingly complex terrain and time spent in the backcountry — you increase the likelihood of it happening. That’s why knowing how to use your avalanche safety equipment is important.

Like most learned skills, our effectiveness fades over time and we develop bad habits. Just think about the times you learned to drive, you are capable of performing those tasks now but there are shortcuts you take as you develop. In an avalanche situation, you have no time to compensate for missed steps or bad habits. Natural panic reactions and stress will send you into automatic and instinctual reactions.

The only defence you have against human nature is practice. No matter how experienced you are, keeping your rescue skills fresh is a critical part of staying safe and being a responsible user of backcountry terrain — and whilst there are excellent Search & Rescue teams in parts of the world, you can never put your safety in their hands. They should always be called but are essentially a last resort for serious situations.

“You can only count on your friends, and they all count on you.”
- Xavier De Le Rue

In part 8 of How To: XV, Xavier shares his methods for practising using his transceiver, how often to practice and where.

Watch it now 👀

Explore Xavier’s Home Mountains

If you’d like to explore Verbier, you can use the new global FATMAP and start planning your next tour. Just use this link on your desktop (mobile app coming soon) >> http://bit.ly/2Iq9wrD 🌏 👀

We’d Love To Hear Your Questions…

If you have any questions for Xavier about exploring and riding the backcountry, you can leave them in the comments below and we’ll get back to as many of you as we can.