Avalanche safety, like sex ed, isn’t really about abstinence. People are going to venture into the mountains, so the challenge is to minimize risk, take appropriate countermeasures, and understand when conditions are too dangerous to proceed. Still, things sometimes go wrong even if you’re following best practices, at which point the objective shifts to maximizing your odds of surviving and being rescued. It’s this last topic that’s the focus of the Wilderness Medical Society’s newly revised avalanche guidelines, published by an international team of experts in Wilderness & Environmental Medicine.
An estimated 300 to 500 people die each year in avalanches. The average figures in Europe and North America are about 130 and 36, respectively; numbers in the rest of the world are rough estimates. Three-quarters of those people asphyxiate; the other quarter succumb to traumatic injuries. Not many people die of hypothermia, because they don’t last that long. Time is of the essence: you’ve got a 90 percent chance of surviving if you’re extricated within 15 minutes, but that drops to 30 percent after half an…
