Archived Avalanche Center Update

Update - March 19, 2002

An Update from the Avalanche Center
http://www.avalanche-center.org/
March 19, 2002

Online in html: http://www.avalanche-center.org/Organization/updates/
Translations: http://world.altavista.com/

(To translate this update enter the webpage URL above and then follow the link on the translated page.)

This is a brief update on what is new and upcoming on the internet Avalanche Center, http://www.avalanche-center.org/

Quick Contents:

Store - Spring sale items
Incidents Section summary
Education Section shift towards spring
Thanks to Our Sponsors

Avalanche Store - Spring Sale Items

It's that time of year when we are ready to begin emptying our shelves. So over the next few weeks we'll be putting various items on sale. This year we will first post them in the Contributor Services section (on the Store Benefits page there). This gives project supporters first shot at discounted merchandise. However, after a few days to a week items will be moved to the Clearance Sale page on the main store for anyone who orders first. If we lower prices later in the spring the same process will be followed, the lower price being available to project supporters first.

To access all of our contributor services just click on the key icon found on the home page (and elsewhere as appropriate). Anyone who has made a contribution to the project can set up an account for access to this section instantly. New contributions take a few hours to a day or two to get into the system. Hopefully we'll get this fully automated next season.

The main clearance sale page is accessible from our home store page, http://www.avalanche-center.org/store/

The sale process has already begun with a few shovels, a number of probes, and a couple snow saws available at discounts of 20-40%.

Incidents Section Summary

One of our larger projects this season has been to upgrade and improve this section. We've made great strides in this effort.

We've kept the section very current this season, with new reports being added quickly. March, so far, has proven to be our busiest time for this. It's more like February in other years. Posting all these incidents is time consuming and certainly not very cheery, so we ask all of you to be careful right now. Things certainly seem to be happening with great frequency at the moment.

So far for this season we have posted reports on 120 incidents, over 27 of them in March so far. We don't add up figures mid-season but it is easy enough to count fatalities by country/state, activity, etc using our new database feature.

The database project is coming along quite well. All of this seasons incidents and all of last seasons as well are now in the database. This is a total of over 230 entries. We have a student employee working on
cleaning up and reformatting all the 1999-2000 reports so that those can be added to the database next, later in the spring. Using the database feature it is possible to list incidents in a given month, from a given
country or state, by activity, etc. One goal is to make it searchable by date range rather than just month and year. This shouldn't take too much effort once we find the time.

The public search page is limited to five entries in the results. In the contributor services section there is a search page which will return an unlimited number of results.

Education Section

We are working on shifting the key links on the Education Section page from fall hazards and early season to spring hazards. A few relevant files have been updated but we hope to do more of this in the next week or so. Time permitting we will develop a new quiz for the "test yourself" section which covers springtime issues.

The fact that we are going from fall hazards to spring hazards reflects how busy we were in between. After wrapping up the reorganization which was begun this winter we plan to spend the summer focussing on the key areas which remain, especially the Educational Section. Watch for some major improvements for next season.

We have also completed our current pass on the glossary. All terms should be on consistent formatting now, similar terms have been combined and consolidated, and some definitions have been improved. Some are still rather poor and we will be making another pass on the whole glossary this spring to improve these.

Thanks to Our Sponsors

While we have moved towards providing some extra services to contributors we are not a membership site and are not planning to become one. Most of our resources and essentially all of our content is available to everyone. This does not happen for free, even with just about all of the labor donated. We pay our bills in part through the help of our sponsors and we hope you appreciate their support of our non-governmental public service.

For a full list of this years sponsors please take a moment and visit this page: http://www.avalanche-center.org/Organization/sponsors/

Also take a moment to note the sponsor graphics and the Avalanche Network acknowledgements whenever you visit one of our main pages.

Without financial support, including that of our sponsors, we would not be able to offer so much to the public for free.

Summary

So far this spring there have been some conditions which are somewhat different from average. Colder temperatures, higher snowfalls and thinner underlying snowpacks are some of the differences found in different regions. Remember that spring brings changes, on both a larger scale and a daily scale. And keep in mind that different spring conditions may have different results than you may be used to. Visit http://www.avalanche-center.org/ to refresh your awareness skills and get the latest condition reports available.