frank4short - 21 March 2013 01:20 PM
The biggest wonder at all is that with the mass proliferation of fat skis and other gear that makes it easier to ski off piste and access the back country is that there haven’t been more skiing avalanche fatalities in Cham over the last couple to ten or so years.
You’d expect accident rates to be in approaching 3 figures every year, especially with the number of people who’ve taken up ski touring in the last 5 years but no, except for some outliers the accident rate stays around the 30 mark each year.
Obviously Search & Rescue as well as hospital care have improved. A lot of people wear transceivers and a growing number, airbags. People know more about avalanche avoidance and rescue. Fatter skis may even help reduce accidents by reducing the impact on weak layers. But still.
Frédéric Bunoz, a moderator on Camp2Camp has a theory that accidents regulate themselves to a certain extent. After an accident that is publicised people take much less risk, their tolerance to risk then slowly increases to the next accident. The various parameters are the amount of time it takes them to get back to their normal risk level, the amount of media coverage of accidents, how much they decrease their risk, limit the number of incidents in a season.
You can add to that the fact that certain popular routes are so tracked these days they must reduce the risk on those routes compared to the past.