We devote a considerable amount of our time to providing a broader range of educational services. For example, our director traveled to Southcentral Alaska last winter during the big avalanche cycle, where he helped various agencies and operations with explosive avalanche reduction, safeguarding work crews, forecasting, and assessing dangers to houses and communities. We do our best to serve our entire region. We have done trainings so far in Haines, Petersburg, Wrangell, Ketchikan, and Sitka, as well as in Juneau. As an interim measure, Center members are put on a subscription list for weekly e-mail snowpack updates and avalanche news.
Members also receive a newsletter and a course discount.
For a small, shoestring operation in a thinly-populated region with difficult travel conditions, we have reached a large audience. Initially, it will be a simple site with information on our courses, but will include the full set of most-current outlines, information sheets, and links that we use as our course handouts. In time, we plan to add pages on the avalanche history of Southeast Alaska, climatology, current forecasts, avalanche news, case histories, and an interactive section that would allow people throughout the region to post and share their field observations. We believe the web opens up a whole new educational form with which we can reach far more people than conventional courses and forecasts ever could. We are moving our course materials from the old slide and overhead projector talks, and boxes with thousands of 35mm slides, to scanned-in computer presentation formats with easy editability and web capability.