Avalanche Center Update http://www.avalanche-center.org/ This is the first update we've issued this year since October. We will never be able to cover everything new since that time but here is a bit of news on some new things and on how things are going for the season. Remember to visit our sponsors by clicking their logo when you check out our site. They help make the project possible, along with user contributions, store proceeds, and fall auction funds. Our home page sponsors this year are Adventurous Travelor Bookstore (new), Lifelink, and Marmot. We were kept quite busy over the holiday season with a move by our ISP to new hardware. This was a major change but everything should be fixed and be working ok, we've not had anything new crop up for a month or so now. We also had a few things which were not Y2K compliant and fixing those scripts was time consuming. Part of the upgrade by our ISP was a second connection to the backbone via alter.net so we no longer rely on one marginal link using Verio. That had been a problem for months and hopefully the site is responding better since December. Search the Site =============== You can now search our site from a search box on the home page, thanks to a partnership with FreeFind.com They index our site weekly and run a better search engine than we have time to. By looking at user search terms and seeing what comes up and what doesn't we will be able to improve our page keywords so that you can find what you want. The most popular search term so far is "avalanche" - remember that this search is of our site and we are the major avalanche site on the web. You will get many of our pages searching for just "avalanche"! A narrower search will be more helpful. Bulletins ========= We recently went though this section and improved a few things, and ran our linkscan program. All links are current. For some areas there are maps showing the coverage of the bulletins, and where those maps exist they are now linked to the main section page and the bottom of the corresponding bulletin. The bulletin for the LaSal mountains of southern Utah is now archived, at the request of the center there. A few people have begun posting occasional observations in a thread of their own on our Discussion forum for conditions - this is great. For several years now Matt from Valdez has posted updates for that area, thanks Matt! Store ===== We are updating the store soon. These pages were link checked too and all links are good. At the Outdoor Retailer Show we lined up new products to carry - a few this season and more for next year. We will soon carry Ortovox products! Watch our pages for these items over the next couple weeks. If you can't wait that long e-mail store@csac.org and we might be able to fill your order sooner than we can get the pages online. Our shirts are now available for retailers to resell, with a minimum purchase of 12. Cost is essentially our cost. More on this should be on the web soon too but anyone interested can e-mail store@csac.org and inquire. Anyone can order 12+ at cost, to resell or to share the deal with friends. Established retailers will be given credit terms, others need to prepay. We've already shipped a bunch to a ski patrol in Colorado at our special prices. Jeff Clarke, formerly a board member and treasurer, is taking over much of the retail store operation. Jeff has a strong background in retailing and the store will surely benefit from this. Incidents ========= As always, we have by far the most extensive list of incidents and reports on the web. We are getting more info from Europe this year too, although not all fatals as we do in the US. Unfortunately not enough people are learning from the experiences of others. There is a report of two out-of-bounds incidents the same day at a ski area in Canada, one shortly after the other. The fatality by Park City earlier this season was apparently almost repeated the other day. We hope that reading reports of others misfortune will keep you on your toes (or skis/board/sled) and remind you that complacency has its cost. New this year, as a service to contributors, is a mail list which will update you everytime the incidents page is updated. But not more than once daily. Details are linked to the incidents page. CSAC Canada =========== We have been working on this "entity" for some time. We've had charity status with Revenue Canada for a little while, now we have a bank account in Vancouver. Contributions made to CSAC Canada will now be kept in Vancouver and used for our work which is related to Canada. The web page for CSAC Canada is http://www.avalanche-center.org/Canada/ This is not linked in with the rest of the site as well as it could be yet, but it is available from the frop-down box near the top of all section pages. The Canada page has links to all of the avalanche bulletins for Canada, a table of incidents, weather links, etc. We will continue to improve and upgrade this resource. Thanks to Jennifer Clarke, our Canadian director, for her work on our Vancouver organization. Education ========= We haven't done too much new here for a while, but we do have a few online quizes you can take. If you haven't yet found this feature you should try it out. The glossary continues to be an ongoing project and will for quite a while. A few terms get combined or deleted as we review things so the index list may have a few bad links. We try periodically to clean this up but if you find links to terms that don't work we apologize. Please remember that this glossary has in excess of 250 files and is perpetually a work in progress. It is another very unique resource we are proud to offer. We continue to offer a comprehensive listing of courses. Some updating is done during the year when we hear of new courses so check back if you are in the market for some education. We also have a long listing of schools and instructors, so if you don't find what you are looking for listed contact these people directly. They may have something which is not listed, they may know of something else in the area, or they may be able to arrange something for you. While carrying safety gear is essential it is though a course that you will best learn how to use it, and more importantly how to avoid needing to use it. Enjoy the winter and stay safe!