Avalanche Center Update www.csac.org "The Avalanche Gazette" - new issue coming up Avalanche Awareness Week - Feb 17-25 Before the primary news listed above we would like to mention a few other things of a more ongoing nature. Congratulations to Erlinda Stafford, the winner of our raffle in January for an avalanche beacon. This was the largest prize we have raffled off yet. The raffle has been reset, but we have not decided yet what our next major prize will be. For now we will continue to draw for CSAC shirts and our new Nalgene bottles fairly frequently. We may do something more for Awareness Week (see below). The largest amount of updating to our website lately has been accident listings. After a period of relatively slow but steady additions the past week or two has suddenly seen a burst of new entries, from both Europe and North America. Many times we receive the most accurate and detailed information quite a bit later, and contributors to the site/project can join a mailing list to be notified whenever we add incident information. Either new files or the detailed reports which can come much later. "The Avalanche Gazette" This is a new newsletter which is issued periodically in pdf format. It's home is on the CSAC Other Cool Stuff section. 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/ We are working on the second issue right now and hope to have it out later this week. We are trying to orient it towards awareness type articles since Feb 17 is the start of Awareness Week. Anticipated content includes a summary of a survey given to tour leaders in Austria thorugh the Alpine Club, some news briefs following lawsuits over avalanches and guiding in Europe, and an article on the rates of involvements in avalanches and the survival rates in Switzerland. The first issue had an article on the non-profit SE Alaska Avalanche Center and this issue will continue that idea with articles on the non-profit model as it exists in Montana. We are also working on including an avalanche beacon related article in each issue. Avalanche Awareness Week We are making an effort to establish the week of Feb 17-25 as avalanche awareness week. Since we have been too busy to work on lining up specific events we are taking a grass-roots approach and hoping that we can encourage individuals and groups of friends and activity partners to use the week to heighten awareness. This is consistent with the project philosophy also, which is that the ultimate responsibility for safety in the backcountry rests with the individual and ther travel partners. We have a web area in place for this week, at http://www.avalanche-center.org/special/awareness-week/ There are suggestions for simple events that individuals and different groups can hold, even if its just among friends. If people holding video viewings, beacon searches, etc report the event to us we will list it on a page. One thing we will do on the webpages is to have a "beacon contest" for the duration of the week. Anyone can post their results during the week usng an online form and the results will be added to a table. This will show the initial time (before any practicing) and the best time, and the calculated improvement in time and as a percentage. There is obviously no quality control in terms of search parameters, but hopefully the improvements (as a percentage) shown during practices will encourage people to spend some time with their beacons. We may decide to offer some prizes, but due to the lack of quality control we need to see how things go. This page and the script to post results is in place but still subject to final tweaking, so it will become functional on Sat Feb 17. Another thing we encourage people to do is to take a class during this week, if you have not done so yet. We have a list of classes we know of during the week posted on the webpages. Finally, you can help promote avalanche safety locally by contacting the local press with information that it is awareness week. Our PR volunteer who helps us out sometimes is working on a press release this week, or you can use a simple letter to the editor. You can also wear your CSAC t-shirt during the week as another way to show our support and promote awareness. As a final note related to press releases and other services, the international distribution of press information a couple times a year is one of the previously free services we benefited from which is no longer free to us. Along with broadcast faxing, which we have used to promote industry sponsorship. These two services now cost us money. In the ongoing process of the big dot-com shake out most companies which have done good things for free are under too much pressure to produce profits to continue that. They are either being bought up by people who terminate free assistance to non-profits or they are going under. (Another which has disappeared is Mr Goodbucks, which was trying to help groups like us by setting up "shopping centers" that returned a percentage to the non-profit.) Where will non-profits such as the CSAC fall in this shake-out? This is too early to answer. Certainly we are not on the verge of closing down, by any means. We have never made a profit and don't have stockholders pushing us to turn a profit. But our costs go up when we lose these services, and the level of work involved in maintaining the project has slowed down the rate at which we can add new content. If you use free websites offered by non-profits we hope you will appreciate the efforts behind them and consider supporting them in some way. (Not only the CSAC, but others you may use for other types of information as well.) Watch for more information on awareness week, and think about what you and your friends/partners can do during that week in the spirit of awareness. -- *********************************************************** 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 ***********************************************************