At last month’s Outdoor Retailer trade show, Salomon and Atomic announced plans to launch an online, backcountry education platform dubbed Mountain Academy. The program, set to debut at the end of this summer, will feature online courses and videos focusing on backcountry and avalanche safety and created in conjunction with the American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education (AIARE), Avalanche Canada and U.S.-based avalanche centers.
“There’s a big effort for everybody to be using the same terminology, and we want to make sure we’re speaking the same language,” says Evin Catlett, digital marketing manager for Salomon. “As we push more into the backcountry and focus more on the backcountry product, we realize that we need something like this.”
![[Photo] Courtesy Salomon](https://backcountrymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/salomon2.jpg)
[Photo] Courtesy Salomon
![[Photo] Courtesy Salomon](https://backcountrymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/salomon1.jpg)
[Photo] Courtesy Salomon
For more on these programs, visit mountainacademy.atomic.com and mountainacademy.salomon.com.
I would love to purchase your program and use it as an educational tool to accompany a course and refresh people’s skills. This is a great initiative! I would also like to get in contact with someone about the Mountain Academy online program. Looking forward to hearing from you soon! Congratulations on great work!
Amy 🙂
Great Idea!! Count me in with signing up next fall.
Interesting tool, but not brand new: check out the comparable safety academy lab from Ortovox (launched last year)
http://www.ortovox.com/safety-academy-lab/avalanche-basics
And the best: It´s free (for all!)
As europowder said , the ortovox safety academy lab website launched last winter is a really innovative tool, it completes a paper safety guide book of 30 pages that has been launched already 5 years ago, and which is delivered for free to each ortovox retailers and partners, or on demand. For next season, Ortovox announce a new “SAM 3D” wich is a 3d model of a mountain delivered with some tool like a clinometer and can help to build the bridge between theory and practise when it comes to tour planning : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbok5Ie4Z4o .
Anyway it is good to see monster of the outdoor industry having interest in such topic, where a lot of small actors has been working hard for a long time but without marketing power. Hope it could help people to have a better reflection at the end.
Cool idea! I think the one of Ortovox is pretty good as well. And there are some others that are not too bad and a few that really suck haha. But why all develop something like this for our selfs? Why not unite! As Frenchpowder also kinda mentioned it’s a pitty that smaller initiatives like my personal favorite http://www.wepowderacademy.com from http://www.wepowder.com might struggle (I don’t know their financial situation?) to get funds and grow bigger. A brands can set something like this up from their marketing budget. Question is if they do it out of the right intentions and will it be there to last? I am a proponent of one international (and I mean true international, so euro, usa, japan….) powder platform supported by some of the mayor brands to get this important info to the public. So don’t make this kind of resources harder to find between all the other (great but growing) initiatives but step over ego’s and create one that combines all the good shit!