How safe is it? Has anyone died?

We take your safety, and ours, seriously, and our safety record speaks for itself.   BRC has never had a fatality - while it would be hubris to assume that it is all due to skill, we try to reduce the risks as much as possible by having good procedures and a highly qualified team.  That said, there is always risk in the back-country because we are dealing with a natural and uncontrolled environment.  

In addition to the lead and tail guide, we believe that we are the only cat skiing operation of have a mobile safety team on the mountain every day.  During our ski guide training course, we will often have a 3rd tail guide with the group.

Some of the many steps that we take to help manage this risk are:

1. We use only qualifed guides:
   Supervising Guides must be ACMG Ski Guides or Canada Ski Guide Level 3 qualified
   Lead Guides must be Canada Ski Guide Level 2 qualified or ACMG assistant guides.
   Tail Guides - must have at a minimum their CAA 1 and a 40 Hour wilderness first aid, but often have CSGA1 and additional avalanche and first aid qualifications.   
2. We have a safety and support team out on the mountains every day - they are mobile on snowmobiles, doing stability testing and providing rapid extra assistance if required.
3. We use our own radio repeater - that gives us constant communications in the whole area.   We also have a satellite phone, and cell phone coverage in half of the area.
4. We do snow testing and take weather observations every day.
5. We are part of Infoex for the CAA - this means that share information with about 100 other operations in Canada every day in relation to avalanche and weather observations
6. We have rescue caches in the snowcats and on the top of the main mountains that we ski.
7. We use what we think are the best transceivers - the Mammut "Pulse"
8. Our terrain and cat roads allow us to get to the top of all the mountains that we ski - this is helpful as it means that we do not have large uncontrollable avalanche slopes hanging above us