Metal detectors to find lost skis

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niels043

Member
Anybody have any luck finding skis in pow with metal detectors? Gonna give it a shot this weekend and wondering if anybody has any tips/pointers... has look p18s it so I am hoping the detector will be able to hone in on that big chunk of metal... Guys at the rental shop were pretty pessimistic.
 
when you are gnar/the ultimate/the man like me and sending cliffs like it's your job skis tend to fall off. luckily there was 4 feet of pow to cushion my fall, un-luckily there was 4 feet of pow and I cannot find my ski.
 
stevens pass got about 70 inches in two days a couple weeks ago and my buddy lost his in the pow aswell. never thought losing a ski was possible until this season
 
My friend lost a ski in Flute Bowl at Whis last year and didn't find it until the summer. I don't know if a metal detector will pick up the metal in the edge, but it's worth a shot.
 
yeah the guy at the shop told me that but if it can pick up a ring in 2 feet of sand it should be able to pick up metal look binding in 3 feet of snow... I hope
 
happened to my brother a while back. pretty sad thinking about it, one minute your shredding pow and the next you dont even have skis anymore
 
i had a buddy who lost a ski inbounds at squaw valley and hired a local who managed to locate it with a metal detector, so locating it should definitely be possible.

on a side note, after giving said buddy huge servings of shit for several seasons i myself managed to bury a ski... after 6 hours of searching and a return trip in the summer i was still unable to locate it. shit sucks, i pretty much never ride without streamers if i'm gonna be sending it now.

vibes for dealing with what must be one of the worst feelings you can experience on the hill, hopefully you have better luck than i did.
 
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happened to me this morning and i thought i was gonna lose my fucking mind... actually i did, multiple times, screaming, cussing, stomping around like a little bitch, giving up, and then realizing i had no choice but to keep looking. i was so pissed i even contemplated burying my other ski, that way when the snow melts and someone found it at least they'd have a pair instead of one.
looked for close to 2 hours only to find it had run away 25-30 yards downhill... some asshole sprays me on his way down and then eats shit from running into my ski, way the fuck down from the crash zone.
probably the most enjoyable and relieving moment of poetic justice i've had in my lifetime
seriously though, skis can be sneaky little bitches on pow days; you think your brakes are gonna stop em but noooo, they'll submarine and haul ass under the surface with no drag until they hit something to stop. before my episode of pure dumb luck i was gonna go down and try to do the same thing, but i'm in japan and would have better luck winning the lotto then trying to explain 'metal detector' to someone who speaks no english.
after the whole ordeal i went straight to the shop and bought some of these (not my skis but you get the point)
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kind of annoying to tuck into your pant cuff whenever you put your skis on, but well worth it if it saves you from losing your shit.
if i were you i would go back to the spot and start zig-zag traversing way lower than where you originally thought they would be. if you have a metal detector, even better, just keep in mind how far downhill they might have actually gone.
good luck man
 
I had the same experience but the person wasn't a douche. My ski was miles down the hill and I was digging like a dumbass. Some guy stood it up in the snow too.
 
I was skiing at Alta one day and my ski popped off. Looked for over an hour and then I told my brother to go take some laps while I keep looking so he could get some turns. He ended up hitting it about 40 yards down the hill. Best feeling ever to get that back
 
Out of curiosity say OP has to wait until summer when shit melts (hope not) does anyone know what condition the ski will be in after being submerged in snow for a few months? Usable or no?
 
also make sure you tell the mountain that you lost a ski because sometimes someone will stumble across it and turn it into patrol or the lifty or whatever. you never know.
 
ive seen it happen before. its definately a possibility, maybe not a very high possibility but it can be done. like most people have mentioned before, it will most likely be much further down from where u fell. check nearby tree wells or gullies as well
 
i havent lost a ski and then found it in the summer before but i dont see what would be wrong with it. People always seem to think that snow=water. while that is true snow is dry its not like they would rust out or something...i dont see what other concerns you would have

but to op i think your best bet would be to get a couple buddys together with probes and go do a full avy burial scenario type search of the area.
 
I lost a ski on a line @ snowbird, and kept going back all season because I know exactly where the line I was skiing is at, then hiked up multiple times during the summer after it closed. After many searches I found it once the snow melted enough, quite a bit further down from where I ejected.

Lost 2/28/2012, found 6/5/2012.

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The skis are still ski-able but the edges were quite rusted, so I had to do a good bit of work to them. I would only worry if the ski has a bad core shot where water would be able to get into the core. The FKS18 is totally fine.
 
Two years ago I lost a ski on my first pow day of the season in Quebec. Lost it at about 11 am and spent the entire rest of the day until 4 pm looking for it but didn't find it - had tonnes of people helping me also.

Went backup in June the following year and got my ski back. Deep rust damage on the edge and the top sheet was also rusty, but with some work it was good to go! Skied to following. 2 seasons on it!

You'll get it back man, good luck. Probably slid down the hill way far
 
Thanks for the good vibes!!! I am hoping for the best and I think with the detector I should be able to nail it (probed and excavated for about 2-3 hours with no luck I think it might be further down than I thought which from what I hear tends to be the case with lost skis especially on steeper slopes). I know the area it is in but we have gotten some snow since then so I am hoping for the best. really trying to avoid waiting until summer because I hear the rust damage can be pretty bad. Not to mention I wont have pow skis for the winter.
 
Good luck man. In my experience, if you can't find the ski in the first several hours, it probably tracked a long way under the snow. I found one ski in the spring (very little rust damage amazingly) about 300 feet below where I lost it. It probably would have tracked farther if it hadn't run into a group of trees. That's one problem with fat skis.
 
This is the best use of Recco going. It's a different system from a transceiver anyway, so your situation wouldn't ever present itself. Providing that your hill has Recco equipment, patrol would totally help you out and get your ski back because there is no way they would leave a ski with a Recco tag buried on the hill. They might be dicks about it, but you'd get your ski back for sure.

* I do not use the technique, not advocate it, just stating facts.
 
actually a metal detector will help. my mom's house is located on civil war land and people use metal detectors in our field all the time to find old civil war memorabilia. i'm talking about little, rusted musket balls a foot under high grass and extremely solid dirt and clay.
 
dropped a cliff at whis this season and lost a ski, looked for 3 hours and just when i was about to give up i went down past the cat track and looked in the trees below and there it was about 250ft from where i stacked it so make sure you look everywhere.
 
besides the difficulties with traveling around the slope, i believe a metal detector will help immensely. when people come to search for stuff on our farm they have absolutely no idea where anything is but they find it anyways. i'm guessing he knows approximately where his ski fell off, or at least the area where it came off. my vote goes to the metal detector, but thats just me. it may be a pain to carry it around but i believe it will help. thats just my .02! hope you find your ski man.
 
my buddy lost his ski and came back two days later with a metal detector and found it within 10 minutes. he was using some shitty mostly plastic binding too. if you can access one, go for it. that big metal toe piece will make the metal detector go crazy. just make sure to look way downhill. his ski was like 50 yards down from where he crashed.
 
lol what? Dont people just use metal detectors to scan random areas and find random things? I think scanning a certain area where the ski came off is more optimal than searching a beach in hopes that someone may have lost a ring or something.
 
for real, quickest way for your day to go from carefree and amazing to shitty as fuck. surprisingly hard to find skis in powder
 
absolutely not! terrible idea.

when your wife/sister/mother/father/friend gets buried in an inbounds avalanche you dont want partol diggin up your ski instead of your wife/sister/mother/father/friend.

horrible idea!
 
ehhh i think that may be a little too far. it's not fair to judge someone's intelligence on how well they know the range of a metal detector...
 
10 pounds? Our metal detectors at work weigh about 2.

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The only problem is that they cost $1000. If you could find and borrow one of these though you could sweep a large area pretty quickly, assuming there aren't any rocks with iron in them.

ElGato is right though, a hobby metal detector would be shitty to use on a mountain.
 
Mountain Hosts where I ski use a metal detector to find skis on the reg. They use the more industrial version.

And I'm glad others posted about the confusion/misunderstanding regarding recco tags and beacons. Also I've learned to check that one funny track below your crash zone that looks like a small snowball rolled over the snow, more times than not its your ski. Tough to do after its already snow again.

Good luck OP. Don't give up too easy.
 
?
http://www.google.com/search?q=metal+detector+lost+ski&aq=f&oq=metal+&sugexp=chrome,mod=7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

click the first few threads, ctrl+F search for 'detec' and see nothing but positive results for people who have tried it, the only negative result I saw was a guy who didnt find his ski but said something like 'found 100 lbs of other stuff'
 
but then if your in an avy, what if you spend precious time looking for your bro and it turns out its your ski? but if you could have some way to change the frequency on your beacon to search for a recco-ish tag with a different frequency would be a great solution
 
but recco (sensors? searchers? whatever you get it) searches for recco, and either way it would have to be a different frequency than recco or beacons.
 
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