pierre - 10 February 2010 11:30 AM
Yeah, right:
Skiers and snowboarders are advised to keep an eye on weather reports and if possible carry GPS devices which are triggered during an avalanche and help rescuers locate them quicker if buried.
They must be thinking of this 
A novel geolocation system makes use of signals from Galileo, the future European satellite navigation system, to locate avalanche victims carrying an avalanche transceiver or a cellphone, to the precision of a few centimeters.
“In the experience of rescue teams not everyone actually carrys beacons,” says Wolfgang Inninger of the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML. “However, nearly everyone has a cellphone. This is why we decided to enhance our automatic geolocation system that works with Galileo, the future European satellite navigation system.”… Starting from the approximate place where the victim is thought to be lying under the snow, the rescuers measure the field strength of the signal transmitted by the cellphone or beacon at three to five reference points. The system then uses a highly precise calculation algorithm to pinpoint the source of the signal, indicating with high probability the location of the buried victim.
http://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2009/12/digital-avalanche-rescue-dog.jsp
