A Spring Update from the Avalanche Center (www.csac.org) May 14, 2001 As the season winds down we would like to mention a few things we have done over the past couple months, a few things we plan to be working on over the next few weeks and some resources related to spring and summer avalanche hazards. We also have a limited number of items from our store to liquidate for summer and as a subscriber to our list we are pleased to give you some advance notice before posting the sale on the website pages. Clearance Sale We always end up with a few items in the spring which we do not wish to keep on our shelves for the next six months. There are several beacons, four shovels and six probes as well as a snow study kit and the new and popular CSAC Nalgene Bottles. Prices are approximately 30% off. For a list of items and prices please visit: http://www.avalanche-center.org/store/sale.html This page will be linked into the home page within another week or so, but for now it has only been announced here. We will try to keep it up to date as the items sell. We may lower some prices further as needed, but in most cases we have just one in stock. So if you wait you may save a couple more bucks, or you may miss out. Purchasing our clearance items is a chance to get a good price, to help the avalanche center, and especially to help us convert our last inventory into funds to help pay our bills until next winter. While the snow goes away we have plenty to continue working on (and we get some use from the Southern Hemisphere). But we have no real opportunity to raise funds to cover the fixed monthly costs which also continue. Recent Developments Over the past weeks we have done a number of things. We just recently updated all the bulletins posted to include a reference at the top of the page to the fact that they are no longer being issued/updated and to refer people to our materials on spring and summer avalanche hazards which are in our Education section. We have left the final bulletins in place following this notice at the top. Most final bulletins discuss spring and summer hazards. Many themes are recurrent, but reinforcement isn't a bad thing. The topics get presented differently and in some cases with a local angle to them. So if you plan to continue skiing and climbing you may wish to spend some time reviewing the final bulletins in general as well as our files on spring/summer hazards. We have done some final updating to the Incidents section. A few weeks ago we brought all incidents in Canada up to date, including links to the bulletin in effect at the time. The CSAC Canada table (see http://www.avalanche-center.org/Canada/) was brought up to date as well. The other night we added all of the fatal incidents for Switzerland for the season to our tables. These are not linked to archived bulletins yet, but will be soon. While there are some clean-up tasks to complete with our incidents section it should now be fully up to date. A few weeks ago we received a first hand account from a person involved in a nearly fatal spring (April) incident near Field, British Columbia, last year. His account has been added to the "First Hand Accounts" in the "Other" section (see http://www.avalanche-center.org/Other/). Matt was anxious to share his thoughts and experience with others for the common good - we are glad to help with this and appreciate his interest in helping others learn from his experience. One final new project has been implemented even though it needs further work for next season. This is a new collaboration called the "Avalanche Zone". It started out as a webring idea but grew to incorporate a common search engine as well. Member sites have material of common/public interest and a single search will span these sites but not include any others. The logo and search box are on our home page now. We are still trying to get a couple of the participating sites to add the search code to their home pages, and we are still working with at least one potential member site while they overcome some server and scripting problems. There should be other sites included by next fall once they finish adding enough content to their websites. (It has it's own domain - http://www.avalanche-zone.com/) Right now we are working on a new issue of "The Avalanche Gazette" which will hopefully be released in a week or two. In addition to that there is always a lot of maintenance work following the busy season - archiving bulletins offline, cleaning up links and headers and titles, etc. (You can find the Gazette in the "Other" section - http://www.avalanche-center.org/Other/) Near the top of our list at the moment is the Avalanche Store. While we would prefer to spend all our time on content the store is an essential component of covering our costs. If time invested (including that which involves various professional skills) is included the project runs at a huge loss. However, with all time being donated it does manage to pay its other real costs. Barely. Improvements to the store which we hope will improve sales include product page modifications for better indexing of each product and the implementation of a shopping cart system of some kind. A Brief Review of the past Season We implemented and attempted several new projects this year, with varying success. We set up an online raffle and gave away a few shirts and one avalanche beacon. This was not widely used, participation was disappointing. Next season we will either use this on limited occassions such as in conjunction with our fall fundraising auction or we will abandon it. We would be happy to raffle off more items if interest increases, but our feeling right now is that it will not. One of our highly successful projects this season was the introduction of our new online publication called "The Avalanche Gazette". This has been popular and feedback on the first two issues has been entirely positive. The third issue is currently in the works. Watch for this to continue next season, and probably even during the summer with an issue including a few things from the southern hemisphere if we can manage that. We attempted to promote the idea of a worldwide week of Avalanche Awareness in February. Our problem this year was that we were just spread too thin at that time and couldn't promote it adequately on our own. We would like to think that this idea holds promise for the future, especially if we can involve others so that the entire burden is not on our own very small and unpaid staff. Finally, we have worked at introducing the new Avalanche Zone (http://www.avalanche-zone.com/). This has gone much slower than originally hoped but is finally coming along and shows promise for the future. Its success depends on the participation of those sites which have avalanche related content of general interest. Not all such sites have shown interest in the idea and some who have shown interest have been extremely slow to follow through. But it appears that these shortcomongs will be overcome with time. Center Funding Paying for this service continues to be a struggle, although we are continuing to cover all non-labor costs such as running an office, computer resources, etc. Our funds come from a variety of sources. The largest is user contributions, and we thank everyone who believes in avalanche safety enough to support the cause. Our average contribution is small but it all adds up. Another revenue source is sponsorships, which have been more or less flat since we began. Industry simply has not shown an interest in supporting avalanche safety through financial sponsorships. If you appreciate the support which is provided then please thank the companies which do sponsor our work (http://www.avalanche-center.org/Organization/sponsors/). Other income is from our store and our fall fundraising auction, which attracts more industry support than sponsorships do (in participation, not dollars). One of the things we will working on over the summer is funding, so that we may continue to serve the public at our current level with the resources developed over the past six years. As a minimum. We have some tentative plans for major new projects if we can find a way to pay for them. Have a safe summer As things wind down we may issue another update in a couple weeks, and over the summer we sometimes send one out. But things will be relatively quiet until the fall now. We wish everyone a safe and enjoyable spring and summer. And for those in the southern hemisphere (or travelling there) we do keep the site running year round and update it with anything relevant that does come in. Jim