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Professional,
Technical, and Educational |
Avalanche Education Programs
Recreational Programs - Avalanche Courses
Specifics:
AlpenPro offers recreational avalanche safety courses. Over the course of many seasons of teaching in many locations we developed our own formal curriculum from scratch. This includes a list of lesson plans (or modules, online) with objectives and a student handbook. As of the 2009-10 season this has been implemented online and turned over to the non-profit avalanche center. Major revisions, improvements and additions continue to be made on an ongoing basis. These changes are based on new developments, teaching experiences, and feedback from students as well as professional reviewers. Our materials are proprietary and copyrighted and may only be used in approved courses. We do not want instructors who have no interest in, or background for, creating a curriculum and the necessary materials to be using something handed to them.
AlpenPro offers field days in support of the Avalanche Center online course on a volunteer basis. We do not charge anything for these field days. We do expect participants to be prepared, as demonstrated by having the prerequisites as outlined in the course overview. All fees related to those online prerequisites go to the Avalanche Center to support it's non-profit work. Past avalanche courses and field sessions have been offered in New York, New Hampshire, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Utah, Montana and Nevada. Other locations are always possible.
We will continue to arrange traditional courses for groups of six or more on request, but we are now focusing on the new online approach. This allows for a much more comprehensive course without the limits imposed by time, attention spans, and other factors that are inevitable when trying to cover too much in a weekend. There is no way a traditional 24 hour course can cover what the online course does, and there is no cost savings by taking even the best traditional course. So we now strongly recommend the online version.