Walking the Tightrope with Bruno and Edge — Avalanche Safety at BCA

A few days ago I sat down at their Boulder, Colorado corporate headquarters for a Q&A with Bruce “Edge” Edgerly and Bruce “Bruno” McGowan of Backcountry Access. Since 1994 when they worked with electronics genius John “Herf” Hereford to develop the world’s first digital avalanche rescue transceiver, Edge and Bruno have made a life mission of avalanche safety for all snow recreators. Below, enjoy our paraphrased conversation. Edge and Bruno’s words are combined under the title “BCA.”

Lou:
Here at WildSnow.com we’ve been emphasizing a return to basics when it comes to avalanche safety. By “basics” I’m talking really basic — about being sure all avalanche beacons are enabled, or pulling your airbag without hesitation, or being sure you somehow will have your Avalung in your mouth in the event of a burial. Over past years I’ve learned that a significant percentage of avalanche deaths, worldwide, could be prevented by somehow insuring or incentivizing backcountry skiers to adhere 100% to the basics. I’m fully aware that designing fail-safe product design is often a tightrope walk between conflicting features, but surely the future is bright — are you guys working on “basic” solutions?

BCA:
From the start, we’ve thought about ways to address the issue of basics. The avalanche beacon mantra of “put it on, turn it on, take it off, turn it off” is the first step of course — education. But yeah we’ve examined all sorts of things. For example, we looked closely at the Ortovox system that used a bayonet connector on the harness that switched the beacon on and off. At least that made sure your beacon was on if you were wearing it. But we viewed that sort of thing as too much of a failure point (and was as far as we know the most warrantied part on those Ortovox models). It was asked to do too much.

We’ve brainstormed things such as building an incentive program into our beacons, where you can try to outdo other backcountry skiers based on the number of hours you’ve worn your transceiver while activated (Lou note: “Perhaps with an ‘honesty’ function connected to a motion sensor?”)

BCA:
It’s a depressing statistic, but we are sure more people have died due to their leaving their beacon in the car, having it switched off and so forth, than have died because someone couldn’t solve a 4-person multiple burial problem. If you get back to the basics, you’re going to get more “saves” for your efforts in pushing this kind of education to the masses than by promoting boutique multiple burial features that apply to less than 1 percent of beacon users.

Same thing with the airbags, we have run into situations where people don’t take the time to connect it properly — as a result they’re not actually wearing an airbag, while they think they are. Potentially tragic. Then there’s the basic of having your airbag trigger out and deployed rather than stowed. More, studies such as that by Pascal Haegeli suggest that ~ 20% of the times that a deployment is perhaps necessary, users have some sort of malfunction (not with ours, of course 😉 or simply don’t pull the trigger when they should.

Lou:
I’ve certainly made most of the mistakes. At least once a winter I realize I’ve forgotten to switch on my beacon, for example. Luckily I’ve never had to pull an airbag for real, just in practice. It annoys the heck out of me that beacon companies expend so many resources on incredibly complex features, and do little to nothing about basics, often user errors, that cost lives. (For our readers new to avalanche safety, good to mention here that airbags are also problematic in that they don’t “float” unless you’re entrained in the flow of an avalanche. They’re possibly ineffective in small, short distance events.)

BCA:
Again, in terms of basics, BCA sees education as the key, while we keep looking at technological solutions as well. There are several issues with airbags in terms of making sure it’s enabled: You need an easy way to disable (for situations such as helicopter transport or dense bushwhacking). Because of that, avalanche airbags are easy to “turn off,” which in turn demands thought and discipline about enabling them again.

More, in the old days it was always expensive to fire off a cylinder, and even now (though costs have gone down) you’re still creating a pain point, having to refill, swap, recharge or whatever. Making renewal of a discharged cylinder as easy as possible is important in terms of getting people to pull without hesitating. That’s why we have the extensive BCA refill network.

BCA:
Airbag backpacks also need an easy method of practicing — we figured that out right away when we got into the airbag market. Just that tactile experience of pulling the trigger is so important, and needs to be repeated to develop muscle memory. Our foremost goal with the practice issue is to keep our design simple, so you’re not spending your airbag time configuring or otherwise maintaining the system, but have time to simply practice wearing it, enabling-disabling, and pulling the trigger.

It really all comes down to ease of use, so we keep that as our overarching design goal. If the pack isn’t easy to use in any way, you’re going to spend time on issues that get in the way of basics such as practicing with the trigger. Enhancing all that, we provide as much education as we can via our website, videos, and so forth. Those are the best ways we know of helping with the “basics” issues you’re bringing up.

Lou:
How about trailhead beacon checks in terms of ‘back to basics?’ you don’t see many people doing trailhead checks. Myself and my regular ski partners try to make a rule of it but I have to admit to occasional failure in that regard. I wonder if some sort of electronic solution to this could happen, perhaps something linked to a motion detector that sensed when the beacon was powered up and moving, and required you to switch to search mode and back one time after the beacon was enabled.

BCA:
As an example of that sort of thing, we’re constantly questioning whether getting people dependent on trailhead electronic beacon check stations (for which we are often responsible) is so great. Sure, check stations determine if you’re switched on, but you need more information than that, for example you need to know if your buddy is actually wearing their beacon, and if everyone knows how to switch to search mode. So your group’s hands on beacon check — at the trailhead — is what we continue to recommend. Same goes for getting your beacon tested with an electronic device in a shop setting.

Really, a simple range and activation test at home or at the trailhead requires you to put some thought into actually using, rather than just handing your rig to a guy in a ski shop or seeing a light flashing at a trailhead check station. You need to know your buddy is transmitting, that he at least knows how to quickly access their beacon and switch to search mode — whether you’re transmitting at EXACTLY! 457 Khz isn’t the point.

We just came up with a couple of trailhead test videos, reinforcing all this. They’re on our videos page at backcountryaccess.com/education.

Lou:
Another syndrome is folks forgetting beacons at home and not telling anyone. I carry a spare in our vehicle at all times to remedy this.

BCA:
I carry two with me on tour, one turned off of course. We’d add that the most common mistake we see is the “trailhead test” happening too late in the process — when you’re far away from the car. That proverbial “should we turn our beacons on now?” statement you really don’t want to hear.

Lou:
Circling back to airbags, what could make them easier to pull? Lisa and I have found that grabbing some of the handle shapes, with bulky gloves and cold hands, is not highly reliable. We sometimes clip a length of sling material suspended in a loop from handle to the opposite pack strap, to make a much more available trigger. I learned that from a guide, who said he does this quite often for clients who obviously need a much more robust trigger configuration.

BCA:
That’s another example of the design tightrope we’re constantly walking: easier to deploy on purpose most often equals easier to trigger by accident. We made one trigger that was shaped like a hook, super easy to grab but it frequently was accidentally triggered. Our trigger is cone shaped now, and it’s very easy to adjust the vertical position so it’s in the easiest place to grab, depending on your torso size. We did tweak our handle a bit for next season, it’s ovalized so it fits better in the shoulder strap sleeve when stowed. But that’s not a change to make it easier to grab. Interestingly, the new standard for airbag rucksacks places much emphasis on preventing accidental deployment, not so much on ease of triggering. In the end, practice is key, both in grabbing the trigger handle as well as doing a full deploy now and then. In either case, go through the motions while you’re skiing, not while you’re just standing there in your living room thinking things through.

Lou:
What was the most challenging part of the airbag development process, back in ancient corporate history?

BCA:
Part of it was (and still is) the European standards — stiff, and in the beginning the requirements were somewhat vague. Since we were so early in the game we had a set of different standards than companies doing this over the past few years. Early on, there actually was no “official” standard, instead you had to work with a sort of customized thing out with TUV — this resulted in our designing to a ‘mythical’ standard that TUV had developed while working with ABS. This “standard” was treated almost like a trade secret. One thing TUV wanted from us was TEN fully documented deployments in REAL avalanches. That was a huge project. We borrowed a couple of 185 pound manikins from Rocky Mountain Rescue. We drove those out to Snowbird, put them on the tram, positioned them in Mineral Basin in the avalanche starting zone. The patrol couldn’t get anything to go, so we had to Z-drag the dummies back up the mountain, then haul them to the tram and drive them back to Boulder. We did eventually get the manikins into avalanches — but we and ABS were the only companies that had to do this level of testing.

Lou:
How about your new system, Float 2.0, challenges?

BCA:
Float 2.0 isn’t new science, it’s simply another few steps in development. The usual challenges such as balancing weight and durability are there. Here at Backcountry Access we’re still of the opinion that when people pay good amounts of money for a pack, it should probably be fairly durable even if it weighs a few ounces more.

The weight issue really is a tightrope walk. Technology wise we wanted to go to smaller cylinder, that packs in the airbag compartment, thus allowing us to get the last of the engine out of the pack’s cargo area. That’s a hidden weight savings as you don’t need quite so large a pack to carry the same volume of gear. The downsize required improving the efficiency of our engine (valve system) from roughly 65 percent entrainment (of ambient air) to around 75 percent. To accomplish that we now use 3,000 Psi pressure in the redesigned engine instead of the former 2,700.

Lou:
Last questions, what’s your design philosophy behind the BC Link radios?

BCA:
The radio (BC Link) is a classic example of just ‘making it easy to use.’ We started with what do you need a radio for? So we took the existing concepts of FRS radios and stripped it to bare necessities, added water resistance and a useful hand mic control, that’s it.

Lou:
Indeed, using radios beyond basics can be intimidating and ultimately unsuccessful, due to menus that force you to step through all sorts of garbage. And those horrible beeps and blurts…

BCA:
You can turn those sounds off Lou (chuckling).

Lou:
I know, but…everything can be improved.

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