courtesy AvaTech
courtesy AvaTech
courtesy AvaTech
courtesy AvaTech
courtesy AvaTech
courtesy AvaTech
For all the recent technological advances in avalanche safety, the most crucial factors for any backcountry traveler are experience and judgment. You can’t outsource them, can’t automate them, can’t put them into a piece of gear. What you can do is improve them with access to better information.
That’s what a new company, AvaTech, is hoping to offer with an innovative hardware/software tool that could be the biggest advance in backcountry safety since the original transceiver locator beacon.
AvaTech started, as many companies do, from personal experience. In co-founder Brint Markle’s case, it was a near-disaster, when he and a group of friends skiing in the backcountry near Verbier, Switzerland got caught in a slide. One of Markle’s friends was almost swept over a cliff.
He was haunted by the experience. “I asked, ‘What had gone wrong? Why did we make the decision we made’?” he recalls. “It was the classic ability-above-education scenario. We had done the (safety) assessment and not understood what was under our feet.”
To understand what’s under their feet in the backcountry, a skier or snowboarder relies on an old tool: digging a snow pit. On or near the slope a skier wants to descend, he digs a hole roughly five feet deep in the snowpack, with a vertical face to the uphill side. Then a series of loading tests with arcane names like Stuffblock or Rutschblock determines how stable the snowpack is.
It’s time-consuming, inexact work and relies entirely on subjective interpretation of the results. Get it wrong and, as Markle and his friends were, you’ll be lucky to ski out alive. Last season, there were 35 avalanche deaths in the U.S. alone. (Even experienced pros get caught; in September, veteran extreme skiers J.P. Auclair and Andreas Fransson were killed in an avalanche in Chile.)
So when Markle enrolled at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, his business idea was to try to help people get it right. If the hardest thing about backcountry safety is understanding the snow, Markle thought, perhaps technology offered a way to get fast, objective snowpack data that could be easily shared with others.
The result: a hardware/software solution that is the first of its kind. The hardware side is the SP1. As the acronym suggests, it’s a snow probe.
Snowpack isn’t homogenous. As snow falls over a season, it settles into stratified layers. Sometimes, the layers are made of crystals that interlock securely and form a strong, stable bond. Other times, conditions during or after a storm turn a layer into a weak, granular pile of ball bearings that will eventually break loose and slide.
Avalanches break and slide on a weak layer; in the wake of a slide, avalanche pros will ask “what layer did it run to?” Finding that critical weak point, if it exists, is the key to staying safe.
courtesy AvaTech
Push the 150-centimeter probe on the SP1 into the snowpack, and its sophisticated pressure sensors detect how much force is required to punch through. It produces a histogram showing the hardness of every layer, down to millimeter-level resolution. The graphic readout is key. “It’s very obvious if there’s a dangerous layer,” says Markle. “It jumps out at you.”
The SP1 doesn’t replace digging a pit, cautions Markle. And right now, the $2,250 tool and subscription software will be available only to professional users like avalanche forecasters, ski patrollers, and backcountry guides.
“We cover 10 avalanche zones, each of which is hundreds of square miles of backcountry terrain,” says Ethan Greene, director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. Greene and the CAIC tested prototypes of the SP1 last winter.
In testing, the SP1’s rapid-sampling capability allowed his team to collect more data faster than they could with traditional tools. “In the field, we may not be able to cover more than one drainage in a day,” because they stop to dig lots of pits. The SP1 could, he thinks, allow them to collect data from double or even triple the amount of terrain.
Greene was encouraged by the quality of data the SP1 produced. “If you put six probes next to each other you didn’t get the exact same picture every time, but you were able to see the most important layer consistently,” he says.
That extra data becomes even more valuable with the software side of Avatech’s approach. The SP1 also takes readings on temperature, slope angle and aspect (which way it faces), geotags it and sends it via Bluetooth to an app on your smartphone, which then uploads it to AvaTech’s proprietary web-based software, Avanet. If you’re not in range of cell service, the app waits to upload until you get a signal.
The SP1 will never light up green to signal it’s safe to hit record on the GoPro and schralp the gnar.
There’s still a lot that the AvaTech system doesn’t do. It doesn’t measure things like snow crystal structure, which can offer important clues about weak snowpack layers. Critical factors like terrain, exposure and recent weather history, which help indicate how likely slides are and how severe they might be, must still be added via a manual report (which you can do on Avanet). And while Markle said Avatech is considering a consumer version of the SP1, the system, including Avanet, will remain pro-only for at least the coming snow season.
Markle said that Avatech’s design team—led by his co-founders, engineer Sam Whittemore and product designer Jim Christian—is working on adding more functions. A consumer version is a bit more challenging.
“We tell people that this 100 percent does not replace digging a pit and using your judgment and experience, your brain,” he says.
Greene agrees. “We need to be careful not to oversell the capabilities of any tool,” he cautions. In other words: the SP1 will never light up green to signal it’s safe to hit record on the GoPro and schralp the gnar.
Avatech’s business model won’t survive long on pro-only use, though, and Markle admits that a consumer version is likely coming at some point. But he predicts that, even with only professionals using the tools, Avanet will provide users with data that is “orders of magnitude” greater than what’s available right now.
That’s where the primary gains will come for all winter backcountry enthusiasts. Sliders and riders rely on forecasts by groups like CAIC who, in turn, rely on the data that AvaTech can help produce. “If you combine [what AvaTech does] with our other knowledge, then we can tell people what type of problem is out there and where to look for it,” says Greene.
And that’s the biggest bonus of all. Up until now, almost every avalanche tool ever created–transceiver beacons; airbags that help trapped skiers float in a slide; or the Black Diamond Avalung, which helps pull oxygen from the surrounding snowpack to help a buried rider breathe longer–are all focused on what happens after a shooting crack races across a slope and a mountainside of snow breaks loose on a hapless skier. AvaTech addresses what happens before that moment, and could potentially help prevent it from happening at all.
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