Here is the latest Avalanche Center (www.csac.org) update. It has been a hectic season so these have become less frequent as the project grows, and therefore there is a lot to report. Many people probably just want to know what's new on the website, but there is a lot of other news that is important as well. This project only exists because people who believe in it support it. It is not government funded. Industry sponsorships are difficult to sell. (Those who do sponsor it seem to do so because they support the cause rather than for marketing.) So we want everyone to know a bit about how things are going and what they can do to keep this resource alive and current. If you really don't care, well skip ahead to the "Whats New" part ... General & Organizational News How you can participate Whats New on the website General & Organizational News ============================= Now that the avalanche season is well underway we have our computers all working ok again. We suffered a set-back this fall when our SHARP notebook ate its hard-drive. While it was under warranty SHARP was not too helpful as far as allowing for data recovery. Fortunately Fujitsu sent a new drive and allowed enough time for the return of the old one to allow us to recover data. Accurate Data Recovery in Canada did this and gave us good rate because we are a public service project. So thanks to ADR. Still, this misadventure did not help our budget situation any. Our funding situation seems to be improving slightly, although it is hard to tell yet whether we will cover our operating expenses this year or not. Contributions are up some, we received some help from the State of Montana Snowmobile Safety Fund, and we have just added a new sponsor. Zephyr Cove Snowmobile Center is sponsoring our Education page. Given the high rate of snowmobiler incidents in the US we are very glad to see Zephyr Cove and the Montana Snowmobile Safety Fund offering some support. We now have a new secondary address for those of you in Canada. We hope to have a European address at some time in the future also. Our Canadian address is: CSAC Canada, #343 - 3495 Cambie St, Vancouver BC V5Z 4R3 How you can participate ======================= In the last update we mentioned the need for volunteers. Thanks to a few people who have offered to help. Unfortunately it takes resources to incorporate volunteers and we have been too busy just keeping things running. (Remember we have no funds to pay anyone for any work.) We still hope to get back to a few people when time permits. Meanwhile, there are a few things people can do to help out: 1) Send a press release to your local paper You can find all of our media releases at http://www.avalanche-center.org/Organization/releases/ They are not earthshattering but they do let people know about our site. Last year we were able to have our release translated into several languages. If anyone can help with that for this years release it would be appreciated. We try to make our services as international as possible. 2) Contribute materials One of the things which helps us keep such a large website reasonably up to date is input from many people. We have received accident info, telephone number corrections, and many other important items from many people. Any time you can contribute something please do, and many thanks to those who have done so! (Some on a regular basis.) 3) Help us expand internationally. As noted above, we now have an address in Canada. We would like to extend our charity status to be recognized there as well, if anyone is interested in helping with this. We are also interested in setting up an address in Europe, along with a bank account and ultimately charity status. This will make it practical for people there to contribute and perhaps to order from our store. Thanks to those in Europe who have offered to contribute, even though there is not any easy way to do so yet. (We are also working on credit cards but are not yet large enough to justify the costs involved.) 4) Help with fundraising We are very pleased that the State of Montana has helped us out this season. It is especially appropriate since so many snowmobiling incidents have occured there this year. But where are the other states, provinces, and countries? What about the snowmobiling associations? With modest contributions from more jurisdictions and organizations we could have a more stable funding picture. Can you help with this in your area? What's New ========== Bulletins Section: There are not too many new things here, but some small changes are worth noting. There is a new link to a site with avalanche info for more or all of Austria than the previous link. The Missoula Regional Avalanche Advisory was missing for the early part of the season due to a change in personnel in Missoula, but it is now back online. Thanks to Gene Thompson, USFS, for getting this set up once again. The bulletins which we post on our site are glossed - linked to our glossary of terms - this year. We still need to improve the glossary and expand the terms which are linked, but we think this is a good feature with lots of potential. We have added some mailing lists this year, but these should have been noted in a previous update. For more info on getting avalanche advisories via e-mail, and to see which ones are available, see: http://www.avalanche-center.org/Bulletins/maillists.html You can subscribe and/or unsubscribe from this page as well. Education Section: Quite a bit of new stuff here. A new link has been added under "Basic Information" to a series of eight articles by the Canadian Ski Patrol System called "Avalanche Beware!". This is a good source of basic safety information - have a look at it. We have a glossary set up in the Education section which we primarily use to link to from bulletins and incident reports. But it is possible to go directly to the glossary as well - /Education/glossary/ or look for the link near the bottom of the resources on the main Education page. The glossary is still at the rough draft stage and we have yet to review, correct, and/or expand the various entries. Course and instructor/school listings have been updated and expanded. While they will never be complete they are the most extensive listings available on the web. Our page of resources for schools has been expanded and cleaned up and now includes links to some excellent resources for teachers covering or using the topic of avalanches in the classroom. There are also links to course info for some university courses in Austria and a program in Colorado. This section does not get the traffic we think it should. We'd like to think that more people visiting this section would shorten the table of incidents. Incidents Section: This section has certainly kept us busy this year! There is often a lot of interest right after a fatal incident, but the official reports often come out much later. Even some of the press reports take a few days. So if you are interested in a particular incident check back for more details after a few days and again after a few weeks. Info on Canadian incidents will now be limited to press reports and reports received from people via e-mail. The Canadian Avalanche Centre appears to have terminated the dissemination of official information. This is unfortunate since there is still confusion over some of this seasons incidents, and this can only be clarified with official and/or first hand reports. Info on incidents outside North America remains sparse and is limited to press reports on select incidents. Incident reports are now glossed using the same script as bulletins. (See the Bulletins section above.) In case anyone was wondering where other web sites get accident info, here are some log etries which immediately preceded an update to the incidents page on the WWAN (hosted at wasatch.com): wasatch.com [20/Jan/1998:15:12:42] GET /Incidents/ wasatch.com [20/Jan/1998:15:12:53] GET /Incidents/1997-98/Wyoming-011198.html wasatch.com [20/Jan/1998:15:13:12] GET /Incidents/1997-98/Wyoming-011198.html wasatch.com [20/Jan/1998:15:18:54] GET /Incidents/1997-98/Montana-011898a.html wasatch.com [20/Jan/1998:15:20:45] GET /Incidents/1997-98/Montana-011898a.html wasatch.com [20/Jan/1998:15:26:25] GET /Incidents/1997-98/Wash-011898.html wasatch.com [20/Jan/1998:15:27:01] GET /Incidents/1997-98/Montana-011898c.html wasatch.com [20/Jan/1998:15:30:18] GET /Incidents/1997-98/Montana-011898c.html wasatch.com [20/Jan/1998:15:41:47] GET /Incidents/1997-98/Wash-011898.html wasatch.com [20/Jan/1998:15:44:56] GET /Incidents/1997-98/Montana-011898b.html wasatch.com [20/Jan/1998:15:46:00] GET /Incidents/1997-98/Utah-011298.html wasatch.com [20/Jan/1998:15:46:28] GET /Incidents/1997-98/Montana-011198.html We are not opposed to this in general, and we believe that all the information involved falls under the fair use clause of the copyright law. Incident information for our own site comes from a variety of places. However, we find it disturbing when the sole purpose behind copying this much info from us is to compete with us. The CSAC is open to all to participate in directly, and always has been. We feel that if people are going to insist on competing the least they can do is not rely on our efforts and materials to do so! Professional Resources: Not much new here. This is the least used section of our web site, so we have not found much time to develop it. There are a few new links on the links page and a new section on avalanche related laws which is still sparse. Other Cool Stuff: Very little new here, except for some new links in the links area. While we don't have much time to keep up with links to us we do add sites to this section when they get in touch with us. We will be doing more with this section soon. Store: The only thing to discuss here is the DTS Tracker beacon - the new digital one. We have not been able to get any of these units in, so please stop asking us about them! We have changed the store page to indicate that they are currently unavailable. Aside from availability we refrain from commenting on products - please review the manufacturers claims and search out product reviews as they become available. (An exception to this would be a safety product we had good reason to believe was unreliable and thus dangerous, but we have no basis for believing anything on the market fits this description.) We are anxious to find a way to accept credit cards, but the upfront costs combined with monthly minimum costs is still prohibitive. We have a long list of possible merchant account providers but contacting and comparing all of them will require more time than we have during mid winter. Resource Usage: We do keep track of site traffic, and make all reports public on the web. The "Yesterdays Traffic" page now includes a link to the referrer report for the day, so it is possible to see where people come to our site from. After the recent large incident in France our home page received about 900 views coming just from one major news site - about half of that days total for the page. There is also a browser summary. While in theory we still make all html lynx compatible in reality we don't have time to check all pages regarding this. Most should do ok. But based on the browser summary it isn't too important anyway since an overwhelming majority of viewers are using Netscape or Explorer. In Closing ========== Aside from the web site there are many other things which keep us busy. With a mailing list distribution system of 1500 or more there are plenty of bouncing e-mails to stay on top of. And lots of correspondence as well. Not to mention running the store, acknowledging contributions, seeking sponsors and other funding, etc. Thanks to everyone who makes this possible. While many contributions (of money, time, whatever) may seem small they all add up. During the winter the Director travels for a large percentage of the time, and the main office is held together by a dedicated group of volunteers. Jeff Clarke, Andy Bower, and Dale Hubbard deserve special thanks. These are the same guys who held things together last year also. Jim *********************************************************** Cyberspace Snow and Avalanche Center (CSAC) 1034 NW 34th St, Corvallis OR 97330 #343 - 3495 Cambie St, Vancouver BC V5Z 4R3 (541)754-8353 (541)461-4279 Fax http://www.csac.org snow@csac.org Jim Frankenfield; Director ***********************************************************