Avalanche awareness has gotten high tech thanks to the Utah Avalanche Center, which just released a new app for iPhone and iPad. The app has everything you’d expect to see and contains information you’ll want to know before heading into the backcountry. According to the UAC, the app includes:
- UAC advisories
- Avalanche observations
- NOAA weather summaries including current conditions, forecasts, satellite loops, radar, and mountain weather cams
- UDOT road updates
- Slope evaluation tool
Other features include the ability to photograph a slope where you set off or witness a slide that contains GPS location, steepness, aspect, elevation, time and date. You can also share that photo along with an observation form that can be emailed to the UAC.
But the most cool feature of the Utah Avalanche Center app is its ability to provide emergency numbers based on your phone’s GPS location. So imagine you have an accident in the Bear River Mountains, but you don’t know the local number to call and report it. The app will pull up the correct number because it knows where you are. Pretty amazing.
The new Utah Avalanche Center app was designed by a Provo company called Garafa LLC, and was paid for by charitable donations from backcountry users and Backcountry.com
Best of all, the app is free.
Unfortunately, the app is only available for iOS devices, but hopefully will be released for Android phones in the near future.
You can see or download the app at http://utahavalanchecenter.org/apps. Give it a test drive, and tell the Utah Avalanche Center what you think! This app could go a long way in helping keep all backcountry users “on top” of the snow instead of underneath it.
Below is a look at some of the screen shots of the UAC app.