2023 IPRW Highlights

2023 IPRW Cohort | Photo: Max Ritter

Have you ever wondered ... How do the pros practice backcountry safety?

Every December, Teton Gravity Research invites their entire athlete roster and members of their production team to the International Pro Riders Workshop to fine tune their backcountry safety skills for the upcoming season. Thanks to lead instructors Jim "Sarge" Conway and Jamie Weeks, IPRW has become one of the highest-level avalanche safety and rescue courses that exists, teaching everything from snow science to medical skills and large-scale rescue techniques. TGR recognizes the risks of working in mountain environments and puts a heavy emphasis on safety training for all athletes and production crew, and athletes who have been involved in real-life backcountry rescues have credited IPRW for positive outcomes.

Views from Grand Targhee Resort | Photo: Max Ritter

This season, we returned to Grand Targhee Resort on the west side of the Tetons for a three-day workshop that really put the team's skills to the test. Thanks to support from our friends at Atomic, Backcountry Access, Rocky Talkie and Grand Targhee, our athletes and crew feel well prepared for the year ahead, and inspired to continuously practice our skills.

Photo: Max Ritter

Avalanche Safety and Rescue Skills

After TGR co-founders Todd and Steve Jones welcomed the crew and introduced the instructors, we got right down to business, with athletes learning that they were "on call" for the next 72 hours for any rescue duty. Nervous looks were exchanged, with IPRW veterans knowing exactly what this meant - every IPRW, the instructor team dreams up a series of very complex rescue scenarios and throws the team into the mix. It's called the inferno, and there's nothing quite like it.

Photo: Max Ritter

The first lesson saw the team going over a new beacon search strategy called a Parallel Group Search. It's a method that instructors and guides have recently found effective in large-scale multiple burial scenarios when a group of searchers is available. With a leader standing in front of an evenly-spaced line of searchers, the group moves forward methodically in parallel strips. Every 10 meters, the leader stops the group and asks each searcher what their beacon is reading out. The group then keeps moving forward, 10 meters at a time, until a member gets a reading below 10, when they break off and perform a fine and pinpoint search and start probing for a buried victim.

Photo: Max Ritter

On the afternoon of Day 1, athletes grouped up with instructors to head up the mountain's Dreamcatcher lift and hone in on their snowpit skills in some fresh snow in the Mary's Nipple area. With a particularly reactive early season snowpack in the Tetons, there was plenty to see under the snow. Gabrielle Antonioli, a forecaster at the Bridger-Teton Avalanche Center demonstrated some of her favorite tips and tricks for quickly gathering a ton of data from a snowpit. The group was also introduced to a new snowpit scoring method that rates stability on a scale of 1-9 based on a variety of factors including strength, structure, and propagation propensity.

Photo: Max Ritter

Finally, to round out the evening, the group returned to the Targhee base lodge to review and practice all manner of rope skills including glacier travel techniques, rappelling and belaying on snow, and setting up haul systems.

Photo: Max Ritter