Scotland might not be the snowiest place on earth, but it’s now home to the world’s first year-round avalanche transceiver training school. While in summer the school uses wood chips to simulate the white stuff, the training works just like it does in winter (it was designed by Backcountry Access), where transceivers simulating victims are buried and students have to learn how to find them quickly. And unfortunately Scotland does see numerous avalanche deaths each winter, since there’s plenty of backcountry skiing and climbing there.

Rando Steve over at Teton AT brings us this video of a close call with an avalanche and reminds us to “always look up.” The footage was shot last year by a couple guys skiing the Northwest Passage in Granite Canyon and the Jackson Hole backcountry. This is what it looks like to be a couple turns away from being buried.

A massive avalanche of snow and rock swept down Mount Rainer, and fortunate for us a local was on hand to shoot some footage from a safe vantage point. It sounds like rock falls in that area have been extremely common. It’s like an avalanche x10. You’d need a jackhammer to dig a friend out of there.

How do you know it’s been a record snowfall year? When the US Forest Service has to reopen an avalanche center for Memorial Day weekend. Snow is still packed over 13 feet deep in some parts of the Tetons, and the danger of avalanches is high - even in places that haven’t seen an avalanche in decades is high. Get your daily avalanche warnings online this weekend.

Telemark champ Nick DeVore was caught in a slide 600 feet long last Thursday near Aspen. He ended up with his head above snow but snapped his femur. There’s been a lot of bad news coming out of the backcountry the past week in these late-season avalanches. Be careful out there.

Jeff Wyshynski was heli skiing in Alaska when a slide caught  up with him. He was wearing a Backcountry Access Float 30 backpack, and he pulled the airbag’s ripcord and it inflated, likely contributing to keeping him on top of the slide. The video’s 11 minutes long, but all of the action happens right in the beginning.

Mt. Hood was hit with a significant avalanche last week in a section of the mountain that Ski Patrol had closed. Hopefully no one ducked the rope to take advantage of the untracked snow to get caught in this monster. Hood Ski Patrol posted some photos to their blog of the historic March 10 avalanche.

A study in Canada that looked at avalanche fatality data over the last three years has found that snowmobilers are more likely to die than skiers. If you consider that snowmobilers can cover a lot more ground and therefore traverse more avalanche-prone terrain, it makes sense that they’d be more likely to get caught in something catastrophic.

A group of risk scientists from fields as varied as food borne illness and terrorism gathered at Alta in Little Cottonwood Canyon for a demonstration on how the local authorities deal with avalanche risk. After pointing out the irony that blasting Howitzers and firing artillery literally over homes and into the canyon’s avalanche chutes is one of the better ideas, the reporter from the Salt Lake Tribune shared this:

Little Cottonwood experiences several times as many avalanches as other stretches of road in North America and more than 50 structures have been hit by snow slides. Considering the amount of traffic on SR 210 during ski season, avalanche experts say it is one of “the most dangerous highways in the world.”

So far, only one person has died when hit by an avalanche on the road. One death and this is the most dangerous stretch of highway in the U.S.? If experts on risk analysis are coming back with this kind of data on LCC, I’d double check their other findings.