This Sunday I visited Arapahoe Basin ski resort. It stays open much longer than most resorts in North America because of its proximity to the continental divide and annual snowfall of more than 400 inches. A-basin (Arapahoe Basin) is a fun local ski destination for adventurists nearly three quarters of the year. Typically skiers drive up to A-basin to visit the beach. However, when the resort received 21 inches of snow in the last 48 hours nobody was dressing up in party attire and drinking. Its funny how weather can change a skiers mind. This time of year everyone was trying to get one final day of good skiing in.
Our intention was to ski an backcountry chute off the North Pole gate that was just off the top of the leeway chairlift at A-Basin. Unfortunately because of the recent snowfall and weather on top of the mountain, ski patrol did not have a chance to go up to the North Pole gate for a couple days and would not open that section. "It receives a lot of wind-loading in a storm like this, we are going to wait 'till the afternoon to check out if it is safe to ski" said one ski patrolmen we talked to. The area called the “East Wall Traverse” was open but it was already skied out. Scott and I decided to rearrange our plans a little bit. We skied one run on the East Wall Traverse and although it was fun we decided to venture over to the avalanche training facility called, beacon park.
BCA (Back Country Access) is a company based out of Boulder, Colorado that specializes in creating avalanche beacons for backcountry skiers. They make the most affordable and reliable beacons on the market. It has become an industry standard and is the most commonly used beacon that I see. BCA has created beacon parks all around the world to test their product just like the one we visited at A-basin.
My friend Scott and I both use Pieps beacons, they work interchangeably with BCA and other models so we decided to test out our skills at the BCA beacon park. I like to use a pieps rather than a BCA because it is a three frequency beacon and has a longer range than a BCA. When we arrived there were 4 different hidden boxes we could turn on in the park. They were controlled by a small box with a BCA sticker on it. We flipped the switch on one of them, turned our beacons to search and began looking for it. Within a few minutes we were able to find the source of the signal and begin probing. When we hit the small metal box buried in the snow with our probe, a siren went off from the control box. It was actually a fun experiment. Here is a video of Scott finding the box on his own.
We then continued to train on a variety of different scenarios. We turned two different boxes on at the same time and tried to search for both at once. Another man came and joined us and we searched one final scenario. The man, who called himself Cheyenne, turned two random beacons on and we searched for them together. We found the two very quickly as a team. Cheyenne told us about a competition that A-basin puts on every year called the Basin Beacon Bowl where skiers search for buried boxes emmitting beacon signals just like we did. He said he won the contest the last two years before they moved him up to the pro division wehre competition was just too fearce. This is a great activity if you have the to get to a beacon park. I am happy that BCA and ski resorts are taking the initiative to create these parks for their guests to use and I encourage everyone with a beacon to try one out!
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