By Lisa Manfield

Two hundred kilometres north of Vancouver and 600 meters above sea level, far from traffic jams and office towers and ringing cellphones, in the remote surroundings of pristine mountain peaks and majestic glaciers, Mike Watling sends thrill-seekers hurtling through untouched landscapes.

The general manager of TLH Heliskiing operates a ski lodge without modern amenities like electricity or phone lines, but despite the low-tech surroundings he doesn’t send any of his adventure-hungry guests onto the sky-scraping alpine bowls that make up the Skeena Mountain range without first equipping them with technology that makes many of their adventures possible, and much more secure.

The heliskiiers’ first lesson: avalanche transceiver beacons.

“Those have been in use for many years, but recently they’ve changed from analog to digital, and you can now find a buried transceiver a lot quicker than you used to,” Watling said. “Before you had to look at the read-out, pause, figure out where to go next, move on a little bit, pause, etc. Now it’s one smooth motion, you just follow where the arrow is pointing.”

Watling’s high-tech arsenal also includes satellite phones, which give the skiers access to more isolated terrain. “There used to be dead spots where radio repeaters wouldn’t reach, so now we have the satellite phone. Now you can go into spots where otherwise you couldn’t necessarily ski, and still have the peace of mind that if the shit were to hit the fan, you could get someone out pretty quick.”

And Watling has experienced some hair-raising situations.

“There have been some avalanche burials, and we’ve had people who have had heart attacks out in the mountains. The speediness of communications [which helps] get people to the right place has definitely saved lives.”

Global Positioning System ( GPS) receivers in the company’s helicopters have also given TLH’s pilots a greater sense of security as they plot a course through imposing terrain. “Before GPS you literally had to navigate using what you could see outside the window,” Watling said. “Now you can use GPS in order to help new pilots train a lot quicker and get to their location.”

S.O.S. AND GPS

There’s no doubt technology has stepped in to help mitigate the risk factors in wilderness adventures, providing a safety net for potentially high-risk activities, especially those in remote environments.

GPS technology is being integrated into products ranging from cellphones to PDAs to watches and car dashboards. “Most emergency location devices have a GPS receiver and this has now gone into commercialization in products like OnStar,” said Adam Holbrook, a faculty member at Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology. “It uses a combination of what amounts to a cellphone and a GPS receiver.”

GM car owners have been using OnStar for years to help them out of difficult vehicular situations. Using a simple threebutton system installed on dashboards, drivers can access services like roadside assistance, remote door unlocking, directions and routing information, and other safety-oriented services like airbag deployment notification Meanwhile, Garmin customers have long been using the Kansas City-based company’s GPS products to help securely navigate off-road and wilderness adventures. Garmin has recently seen massive growth—half of its US$8 million in sales since 1991 have occurred in the last three years. “It’s becoming more and more a mainstream technology,” said Pete Brumbaugh, senior media specialist at Garmin. “We take GPS technology and bring it to the aviation market, the marine electronics market, the outdoor recreation market. We’re talking about hikers and climbers and campers and hunters and fishers. The ability to locate your-self and know what is around you is such a benefit to a whole array of users.”

According to Brumbaugh, one of Garmin’s most popular products is the eTrex Vista, a “waterproof, very compact device that weighs about six ounces, hasmapping, an altimeter and a compass,” and which was used by soldiers and reporters during the war in Iraq.

Garmin customers are a vocal bunch who do not hesitate to publicly laud their favourite products and share tales of backcountry exploits and explorations. Since 1995 Garmin has operated GPS Adventures, a section of its corporate Web site where “people can write in their own stories of how their Garmin GPSsaved their bacon,” Brumbaugh said. Stories range from plane crash escapes to making it to a job interview on time after getting hopelessly lost on unmarked rural roads. One Garmin user from South Carolina was pitched off the stern of his sport fishing boat into the Gulf Stream off Charleston Harbour during afishing trip with friends. Because the noise of the boat muffled his cries for help, he was quickly left alone, without a lifejacket, in the frigid waters. Fortunately, his business partner had equipped the boat with a Garmin GPS unit and was able to track back on the boat’s exact course to locate the frantically bobbing fisher—a feat surely less likely to succeed sans GPS technology.

A SECURITY BLANKET?

But is all this technology providing a false sense of comfort—allowing people to believe that, given the right gadgets, safety and security is always possible in any risk-inherent situation? Holbrook thinks in certain cases it does, and warns that cellphones are the biggest perpetrators of the security myth.

“The cellphone system is a real and existing problem,” he said. “People are only beginning to get used to the idea that maybe the cellphone system isn’t (always) reliable.”

Holbrook warned that in large-scale emergency situations, cellphones simply cannot be depended upon for effective communications.

“One of the characteristics of cellphones is that they’re unable to distinguish between essential and non-essential calls,” he said. “The system gets overloaded and we haven’t solved the question of how to provide emergency access.”

Holbrook and a colleague undertook a study several years ago to discover to what extent emergency service providers relied on cellphones for their operations. “For the most part their actual operations are not (dependent on cellphones), they have radio sets and so on,” he said. “But they rely extensively on cellphones to call in off-duty personnel. So in the event of a disaster, they would need the cellphone service working in order to bring in additional crews.”

Holbrook does, however, support the use of GPS products, especially in wilderness environments, and uses a handheld GPS unit on his boat. “I can connect the GPS receiver to my VHF radio, and then if I hit a panic button the radio will start transmitting my latitude and longitude,” he said. “It’s a question of prudence. Will I ever use it? I sincerely hope not, other than to call up the marina and ask them to warm up the coffee. But it’s prudent to have one.”

Web adventuring

CPROST http://www.sfu.ca/cprost
Garmin http://www.garmin.com
TLH Heliskiing http://www.tlhheliskiing.com