Safeway Beaconing

Friday night, 3 of my fellow students decided that they were going to go to Safeway to practice using their avalanche beacons. I got brought along so that I could photograph the occasion for use in my blog. Once we got there, we met up with another student from the college who happened to be there buying groceries. Then, as we were standing in an aisle discussing logistics, 3 more students from the college showed up.

Once we got everything sorted out, I got sent off to hide the beacons. About halfway through the first search for beacons, Wolf decided that we should time the people searching for the beacons. Then the beacons were found, hid, found, hid, etc, approximately 10 times.

My lesson of the night was, the number "14" does not mean you are near the beacon you're searching for. "11" isn't much better. See, I had never used an avalanche beacon before, so I was thinking more on a scale of "1" to "100". Turns out that "14" is basically the farthest away that the beacon will measure. So, once Ben came and rescued me from the search for a beacon that was nowhere near me, I discovered that my partner had just found the 3rd beacon.

Other highlights of the night include:
*Andrea's tracking beacon suggesting that the beacon she was searching for was upstairs.
*Wolf hiding a beacon on the shelf full of diapers, Troy taking off two rows of diapers, feeling around for the beacon, and then putting the diapers back. We figure he had to have basically touched the beacon, yet he put the diapers back anyway.
*Hiding a beacon in a magazine display... It frustrated Wolf and Koleby to no end and took them forever to find.
*An older lady, who sounded rather concerned, asked me if I was searching for a bomb. I informed her that I was practicing using an avalanche beacon and that no, I was not searching for a bomb. However, she still hurried out of the aisle.
*This doesn't exactly relate to searching for avalanche beacons, but Troy dropped a 5 pound bag of sugar on the floor while standing in the check-out line and it did an excellent job of emptying out onto the floor.

All in all, not only did we have a fun time searching for avalanche beacons, Andrea and I wore dresses just for the heck of it since there really is no good place to wear a dress in Leadville unless you're going to church. Except for 2 incidents, all 3 beacons that we hid were found within 5 minutes. In the other two incidents, the beacons were found within 10 minutes. As Wolf said "What a fun training program they came up with, huh?".

Pictures to come at a later date... I'm still working on getting photo release forms signed.

As far as the new student interviews go, I'm not sure you'll be seeing them, because I gave questionaires to the 18 new students, and none of them have returned them to me yet. I have the suspicion that many of them do not check their mailboxes.

Well, I'm off to Student Government now. I'll write more later this week.