Avalanche Center Update www.csac.org "The Avalanche Gazette" - a new pdf publication Online Raffle - win a free avalanche beacon New Content (and summary of new incidents) Store News Before summarizing the news listed above we would like to welcome two new sponsors, Colorado Mountain College (ski area operations program) as a patron sponsor and Patroller Supply as a new sponsor for our "Professional Resources" pages. "The Avalanche Gazette" This is a new newsletter which will be issued periodically. It's home is on the CSAC Other Cool Stuff section, where you can now find the first issue. Our goal this season is for three issues, with the next one slated for mid-February. The intent of the newsletter is to publish articles of general interest on avalanche related topics. While we hope that this will include articles about avalanche science at times it will not include scientific works. The Gazette is assembled with the public general interest audience in mind. To read the first issue follow the link on our home page or from the "Other Cool Stuff" section at http://www.avalanche-center.org/Other/ This first issue was more involved to get off the ground than anticipated, especially since a lot of effort went on through the holiday season. We would like to thank Steven Reinfurt as the first member of the editorial board, Frank Tsirchy of the SLF in Davos for the summary of incidents there as of press time, and authors Bill Glude of the Southeast Alaska Avalanche Center and Bernard Giraudon of Nic-Impex/ARVA. Online Raffle New raffle starts today - win a free avalanche beacon (winners choice of model). The winner will be selected from all entries made in January or the next 100 entries, whichever is first. Just look for the "Enter our Raffle" graphic on select website pages and click on it to enter. Details on how the raffle works are posted at: http://www.avalanche-center.org/Other/raffle.html As a hint, we usually put this graphic on pages of current interest. Such as those mentioned in our updates. The graphic loads randomly so on a given page it doesn't appear on every view. We also move it around from time to time so surf the site and you'll come across it. New Content During the early winter we are generally overwhelmed with getting the bulletin posting debugged and working correctly and answering lots of e-mail. Then we get into building store inventory and holiday orders. And there is the auction as well. And somewhere in there the incidents begin to come in. While the first one in North America has sometimes been as late as the end of December they began much earlier this season. As of this time we have 11 fatalities in the US and 3 that we have reports of from Canada. There has been mention of a 4th in Canada a while ago but we have no confirmation of that. We have also received more information from other parts of the world this year. Thanks to Yuri Seliverstov at the Laboratory of Snow Avalanches and Mudflows, Moscow State University for information on several incidents in Russia and to Johan Persson in Sweden for alerting us to a recent fatal incident in Norway (for which we have some info posted in Norwegian and Swedish). Our goal has always been to be a global resource and we are glad to receive so much input from so many places. While the largest amount of new content at this time of year is incident reports we also added a map of avalanche prone regions of the world sent to us by Tatiana Glazovskaya of the Laboratory of Snow Avalanches and Mudflows, Moscow State University. The map is from her dissertation. While it isn't new content we did scan the site for bad links over the holidays. Most sections are up to date with bad links removed or tracked down and corrected. During our server move the linkscanner configuration had developed some quirks so we installed a newer version of Linkscan, which is a great program for maintaining a large site with many links. (See www.elsop.com for this product) We are also updating our development software, along with our seriously outdated computer, so that we can develop new resources in the coming months. Store News The postal service just increased shipping rates significantly as well as making the very simple flat-rate packet much less simple. It seems like an increase in shipping charges will need to follow, although we are not anxious to do this and have not set new rates yet. We will continue to waive shipping costs for project contributors, so to save on shipping order soon before we raise the rates or contribute so that it won't matter. -- *********************************************************** Cyberspace Snow and Avalanche Center (CSAC) 131 NW 4th St Suite 397, Corvallis OR 97330 #343 - 3495 Cambie St, Vancouver BC V5Z 4R3 http://www.csac.org snow@csac.org ***********************************************************