AST-1 Course - December 17th / 18th 2022

 So with the purchase of our condo I moved my AST-1 course from mid January to this last weekend so that I could work on renovations on the condo instead. I really wanted to get the AST-1 course done so that my partners feel better about ski touring with me.

The course started with a few hours of online training during the week I completed in the evenings that were quite helpful and the actual course was in West Vancouver. The first day we met at 8:30 at the West Vancouver Cricket Club for a long boring day of classroom training. Our instructor was Brent Hillier and while he was very lively it was still pretty dry subject matter and especially at the end I felt like they were filling time. We spent the first few hours doing mock trip plans for different areas and weather conditions and around 11 we headed outside to practice with our transceivers and probes. After lunch it was a few more hours of mock trip planning and it realllllyy dragged on. Even with all the coffee in the world I found it hard to stay focused and I wasn't the only one... Eventually at 4:30 we wrapped up and I headed home.

On Sunday we had to meet really early at 6:45 at the bottom of Seymour Mountain to take a bus to the top. I was nervous and ended up showing up way too early at 6 but at least I wasn't late... This meant I woke up at 4:45 and so I was pretty tired. It was snowing a fair bit in North Vancouver and the forecast was -10 to -15 at the top of Seymour so we knew it would be a cold day but lots of powder and the conditions were actually great. Once we got to the top we had a quick meeting where we went over the goals for the day and started our ski tour.

We went up the trail a bit and headed off in to the trees where we practiced burying transceivers and then finding them. It was pretty easy. Next we kept skiing and practiced evaluating slopes and testing snowpack. Then around 12 we got to to the top of Brockton Point and found a nice spot for the next 2 hours where we learned proper digging technique and did some mock scenarios where the instructor hid some transceivers in the snow and we had to locate and dig them out quickly which we did. Finally about 2pm we skiied back down to the lodge, debriefed and headed home.

The drive back was long because of the snow but not too bad. I got home around 5 and watched the Argentina-France world cup final (AMAZING!!) and PASSED out at 9pm. Overall I'm glad I did the course but I didn't find it super useful. I do appreciate sort of having a general idea how to read the forecast and evaluate conditions and definitely the practice on rescue but I think experience is key.

I pretty much didn't take any pictures so none on this post!