Beacons Add To Avalanche Survival Odds Skier Rescue Proves Again That Radio Signal Is Better Than Luck

Colby Vandenburg was suffocating and had only a few minutes to live after an avalanche buried him on the slopes of Big Baldy peak outside Logan, Utah.

But an electronic signal guided his buddy, Steve Klassen, to the rescue.

The avalanche transceiver that saved Vandenburg last month was hanging around his neck, perilously close to being ripped off in 2,400-foot ride.

Vandenburg owes his life to his hand-sized beacon, a critical backcountry safety device that transmits and receives an electronic signal. Equally important was his companions’ ability to use their beacons - and a little luck.

Safety-conscious backcountry travelers strap to their chest beacons emitting a radio signal. If caught in a slide, similarly equipped party members can use their transceivers to home in on the signal, which can range up to 80 meters.

This winter alone, avalanches have killed 26 people in North America. The toll includes 12 skiers, three snowboarders, five snowmobilers and five climbers and a hiker.

Vandenburg and his partners had been enjoying a foot of new powder snow. But there was a hidden danger.

A southwest wind had redeposited fresh snow, forming hard slabs of cohesive yet unstable layers of snow under north-facing ridgetops, according to an avalanche forecast the skiers heard that morning.

The group negotiated two runs from the top without incident. At the start of the third, a 3-foot slab broke a few feet above them.

“It made this whump sound,” said Paul Grams. “My first reaction was it was settling and then it started moving slowly.”

He and Klassen were able to claw their way out as the snow broke into blocks around their skis - but Vandenburg and the dogs were not so lucky.

“I did a jump turn and tried to ski out to the right,” Vandenburg said. “I almost got to the trees but I got knocked off my feet.”

Vandenburg tried “swimming” with the churning snow to stay near the surface, but he felt himself being pulled down by the skis clinging to his boots by their safety straps.

“Then I hit the tree that broke my pelvis and I realized how fast I was going,” Vandenburg said. “Snow started filling my mouth. I put my arms in front of my face and wished I would go unconscious because I was suffocating… . The next thing I remember are some fuzzy faces as they carried me to the helicopter.”

The debris funneled down an adjacent bowl and gully, then fanned out to a width of 250 feet near the road at the bottom of the canyon.

Klassen and Grams switched their beacons to receive mode and traversed down to search for their missing friend. The pair split up. Grams searched the top while Klassen raced through hardened chunks of the slide path to check the bottom.

“It was like skiing through icebergs,” said Klassen.

Rescuers should first look for any visual clues, like the victim’s last-seen point and his gear lying on the surface, experts say.

“The victim is usually in the flow line” of recovered equipment, said Rob Faisant, an avalanche consultant with the National Ski Patrol. “But skis can be a deceptive clue because they can shoot to the side.”

Rescuers should also check terrain features where debris collects - behind trees, in gullies and below roads. Trained ski patrollers and mountain rescuers can find a buried transceiver in less than two minutes.

In the Big Baldy rescue, the avalanche deposition area was huge. Vandenburg could have been anywhere under the expanse of quickly hardening debris.

But luck was with Klassen. As he coursed downward, his earpiece picked up a sonarlike pulse, which then became faint, indicating he had gone too far. When he stopped just short of the slide’s leading edge, Klassen spotted the glove.

Confident he was in the right area, Klassen pulled off his skis and walked up the slope until the signal again became weaker. He then scanned a line perpendicular to the slope and followed the direction producing the strongest pulse. He followed this grid pattern to what he hoped was the source of the signal.

Klassen wished he had a probe pole to determine his friend’s exact location before he plunged into the cementlike avalanche debris with his collapsible shovel, another indispensable piece of safety gear.

“If Colby was deeper, I would have questioned if I was digging in the right place,” Klassen said. “I had to put full force on my shovel to get through the snow. I was dead on the beacon. I found his arm first. His hand was blue and limp.”

The victim, who was not breathing, was 2-feet deep, lying on his side, head down slope. His skis were gone and one pole still clung to his wrist.

Klassen reached his face after another long and frustrating minute of digging. He then administered four breaths mouth-to-mouth before Vandenburg started gasping.

Luck intervened again when a snowmobiler with a cellular phone cruised by and called for help. Vandenburg was on his way to a hospital about an hour later.

A victim’s chances of survival drop off quickly after the first 15 minutes of being buried. About a fourth of avalanche deaths result from traumatic injury. The remaining fatalities are from suffocation.