(Images courtesy of Snowpulse.)

Speaking of avant-garde wear, the Swiss company, Snowpulse, is selling an avalanche protection gear that can protect skiers and general hikers if they happen to get attacked by a mountain.

Following are some of their selling points:

Similarly to a life-jacket used in the sea, the Life Bag keeps you on your back and your head out of the snow. It’s the best solution to avoid being asphyxiated.

Snowpulse airbags offer a high added value option: the automatic deflation of your airbag. The airbag deflation creates a cavity around the victim. This cavity is a real help to extract the victim and also provides 150 Liters of air to breath if you are buried. Survival time is therefore drastically increased.

Up to 20% of avalanche deaths are due to traumas. Snowpulse airbags are the only one designed to protect your head and thorax against shocks.

What the company should manufacture next is a model that can increase survivability if you happen to be buried in a hundred feet of snow and perhaps at a deeper stratum.

Let's say you and your adventure buddies are traversing a little explored valley in the Rockies. The snow is freshly fallen, the smell of pine perfumes the air, the sun gently pricking your frozen cheeks. And then you hear a low rumbling sound, and it's getting louder and louder. But even before you notice that an avalanche is racing towards you, the motion detectors built into your Life Bags Xtreme® automatically trigger rapid inflation so that in nanoseconds you are enveloped in a protective bubble stocked with emergency supplies that will last for weeks. Your companions, too, are safely domiciled inside their own caverns, to which your wearable anti-avalanche home plugs in instinctively with filamental tunnels. Under all that snow, a quaint mountain hamlet forms.

And perhaps this has been planned all along. You're a new breed of extreme property developers intent on developing a new ex-urb of Denver located deep in the wilderness. Avalanche urbanism.


(Reyner Banham and Francois Dallegret's Environment Bubble, 1965.)

Or: you're hiking through parched landscapes on the periphery of Los Angeles. And as predicted by FEMA, a perfect firestorm appears from behind a ridge, soon to engulf you and your companions. Of course, no one panics, because everyone's wearable anti-wildfire homes swell to form a protective bubble filled with supercooled air. And since there's a minibar, everyone waits out the fires.

Through insulated windows, you see a cinematic struggle better than the Apocalypse of the Week movie now playing at a theater down on Hollywood Boulevard. Disaster tourism.

A fellow disaster tourist will swear that he's on the surface of the sun. Others will think that they're experiencing some sort of therapeutic cleansing. It's the new California spa town: mobile, ridiculously trendy and a passing fad.

In the Archives:
Sites of Managed Anxiety
Wearable Homes

(Spotted at Medgadget.)