If you’ve been to a major resort with serious backcountry overseas, chances are you’ve seen or used an Avalanche Training Centre (ATC). With over 60 ATC’s in the European Alps the Mountain Safety Collective managed to install the first one in the Southern Hemisphere this winter at Mount Hotham.

So, what is an Avalanche Training Center and how did we get one here?

The ATC is a stationary system for training avalanche transceiver and probe searches. The control unit can handle between 5 and 16 transceiver signals that are buried permanently in the snow. These ATC transceivers emit the same signal as the avalanche beacon you have strapped to your chest in the backcountry, so can be detected by any well known brand using the 457kHz international frequency standard, whether it be from Mammut, Ortovox, BCA, Arva or Black Diamond / Pieps.

To find the ATC at Mt Hotham, head south on Lawlers Ct from the main Corral parking lot and it’s just past the last houses.

In exercise mode you simply choose the number of burials you want to search for and the time you want to give yourself. The control unit will choose the burials at random and your search time will be displayed on the screen after the exercise. The system is completely autonomous and powered by D-cell batteries that will last the entire Winter season.

For the last 3 years, individual pledges from Mountain Safety Collective members have been going into our ATC Crowdfund campaign. In 2020, Girsberger Elektronik in Switzerland sent the main control unit and two transceivers to the Mountain Safety Collective for the purpose of establishing an ATC at Mount Hotham in Victoria.

From there we had to source more funding to purchase four additional transceivers, the instruction signage and support structure. This was made possible with more individual pledges, a Bushfire Relief Grant via Into our Hands foundation, and generous corporate pledges from Alpine Access Australia and Mammut. The overall cost of this first ATC was around $30,000, so we’re very appreciative to all the individuals and organisations who provided this support.

This meant we had the full system in place by early August, and despite the ongoing COVID lockdowns through the season, more than 250 exercises were carried out. A great example of the system’s value came when the Victoria Police Search & Rescue team where training on the ATC and were able to practice various complex scenarios over and over again with a large group.

Where to from here? The Mount Hotham ATC will be back in 2022, and our immediate goal is to add more transceivers to it as funds become available. Our next big goal is to establish an ATC in NSW to serve the massive growth in backcountry users that we’ve seen in the past couple of years and the avalanche safety training providers who are taking their groups out through the winter. This might be augmented by beacon checking stations at key backcountry access points from the main resorts in both NSW and Victoria.

If you’d like to help with the crowdfunding, please donate what you can here, and if you’re a larger organisation that’s interested in partnering with MSC to help us achieve our goals, please contact us.