Skiing inbounds with a beacon?

[fatbob]

Wanted to follow up to this post now that I am back from St. Anton. Here are some random thoughts:

Based on an informal survey during après ski, as well as an unscientific test of switching my beacon to search every time I rode the gondola, about 30% of inbounds skiers in Europe are wearing beacons everyday. I assume that number goes up when you only include off-piste skiers. Additionally, there were a surprising number of airbags being worn inbounds, and they are near universal off-piste.

Sounds like you got the balance right although of course technically in Europe there is no such thing as inbounds powder. I think St Anton does skew perceptions a bit - lots of people on lifts and on pistes will be beeping because they are headed somewhere to ski offpiste. The airbag thing is particularly noticeable there, much more so than say a similar sized area in France. I think this is because as a flagship area the airbag companies got in pretty fast to sponsoring /doing deals with guide ops which means they are more or less mandatorily adopted by guided groups. Plus it attracts lots of "freeride" type skiers from Northern Europe who are more likely to invest in the kit themselves.