June 7-8 – Mt Baker Crevasse Rescue Training

Welcome back :)

It turned out to be a pretty good weekend up in the mountains. Went on a good long hike, helped out some fellow climbers in recovery, and learned some new mountaineering skills while we were at it. The old body is a little sore, but it’s all good.

This weekend was OSAT Crevasse Rescue Training on Mt Baker. You may remember that I did this very same training last year as a student. This year, I had the privilege of attending as an instructor. The last time I was at Mt Baker, we summited after a long and arduous climb. I have heard that some people have a love/hate relationship with the highest peak they have summited, but for me, there’s certainly no love of Mt Baker. It’s a long drive to get there (the last 20 miles are down a dirty dusty gravel road). There’s no parking this time of year. It’s a long slog up to basecamp. And it seems twice as long coming back. But this is the highest peak for me so far, and it was kind of fun going back.

This was a 2-day excursion – Saturday hike in, do some refresher training on glacier travel, spend the night, then finish up Sunday. Friday night was for putting together the pack. It still takes a few hours to plan out everything, and it goes like this:  take down all my gear from the walls, set aside anything not absolutely necessary, swap out heavy items for lighter ones, separate the things that go inside the pack from the ones that go outside, plan how to stuff it into the pack (heaviest things in the middle, lighter things on the bottom and on the top), stuff it all in, then lash on the outside gear. Inevitably, there are a few things that are left out so after it is all buttoned up, I need to un-lash, unbuckle, put that one thing in (in this case it was the set of bamboo flatware and chopsticks), then put it all back together again.

Things that go inside a pack for a trip involving glacier travel:

·         4-season tent + tent poles

·         16 snow stakes + cords

·         0-degree down sleeping bag

·         Therma-Rest air mattress

·         Alpine Stove + one canister fuel

·         Harness bag with full harness gear stuffed inside

·         3 liter water reservoir filled with fresh water

·         Plastic drinking cup

·         Food for two lunches, one dinner and one breakfast

·         Hard shell jacket and pants

·         Lightweight puffy jacket

·         Extra socks

·         Extra shirt

·         10 essentials bag

·         Camera

·         Extra batteries for headlamp

·         Two pairs gloves

·         Balaclava

·         Neck gaiter

·         Glacier glasses

·         Reading glasses

·         Blue bags

·         Trash compactor bag for garbage – you want to use a trash compactor bag because there is the possibility of having to put your blue bags in this sack for the hike back down and you REALLY do not want it to burst open inside your pack

·         Hand wipes

Things lashed to the outside:

·         Snow shovel

·         Thermarest z-pad

·         Crampons

·         Bag of snacks for fueling up on the trail

·         Ice axe

·         Trekking poles

·         Climbing helmet

·         Kleen Kanteen thermos

Seems like a lot of stuff, doesn’t it? It does  to me as well. The best part is that there could have been a lot more, but the goal for this weekend was to keep the weight down while staying safe, warm and well-fed. Up until now, the most I’ve carried this year is about 30 pounds and now I was about to double it for this trip. I didn’t take the tent footprint, which is a piece of waterproof cloth which was cut to match the outline of the tent. Not needed on the snow – footprints are only necessary when camping on dirt or rocks to protect the bottom of the tent. Also didn’t bring the big super-warm down puffy. That’s a gamble because if the weather takes a turn for the worse, then I would really want to have a big beefy puffy that can go over everything else and keep me toasty. Also left behind the OR alpine mittens. No extra clothes except for a lightweight shirt and a change of socks. Fresh socks don’t weigh much and it sure feels good putting on clean socks right before bedtime.

Also did not bring any extra fuel for the stove. My practice is to always bring a new fuel canister on each big climb, even though I never use it all. I can then use up the half empty ones on easier trips.

After it was all put together, the pack weighed in at 54 pounds. That may not seem like a lot, but imagine strapping a 50 pound sack of dog food to your back then walking up a steep hill, across rivers, and along narrow ridgelines for a few hours. It gets heavy after a while. If memory serves, last time I had gone to Baker, the pack weighed 62 pounds. So getting it down to 54 is pretty good, especially considering that I was going solo and there was no one to split up the heavy stuff with.

We had to be at the trailhead at Schreiber’s Meadow by 7:00 Saturday morning. I set the alarm for 3:51 and tried to get some sleep, but of course, that rarely happens. The drive up to Baker went well and I got there with time to spare. There is still a lot of snow on the road as you near the trailhead so everyone was parking about a ½ mile away from the trailhead. There was a happy buzz in the air - folks were excited but also nervous about the hike. Many of these climbers had not been to Baker before and certainly had not gone into a crevasse.

 

Circling up in front of the privvies at the trailhead.

Rockin' the sleeveless Seattle U shirt Rachael gave me last year. Go Redhawks!

As per OSAT tradition, we circled up at the trailhead. We counted off to see how many were there (and also to compare against when we count off at the end of the trip, to make sure everyone made it back down), said the Serenity Prayer, then headed out.

Just crossed the stream, and working our way to the Railroad Grade

It is a long walk through Schreiber’s Meadow up towards the Railroad Grade, which leads to Easton Glacier. We reached the base of the railroad grade after two hours. I was hiking with a group of students who had not been there before so I kept pointing out features and things to look for. I told them how far we had to go and where basecamp would be. Once they were in sight, I also pointed out the crevasses there they would be lowered in to.

At the bottom of the Railroad Grade, pointing out the crevasses we would be using for training

Here they are. You can see the advance crew is already up there, getting ready for our arrival

I was doing fine with the weight of the pack, however near the end of the ascent, the quads started cramping up on both legs. Ouch. It was surprising, since I’d been hydrating all day Friday and Saturday morning, and had even swigged down some nasty tasting electrolyte water at our first break. None of that mattered, and now the legs were seizing up with each step. I hadn't had that feeling since running track in Junior High, back in 1976. As nostalgic as getting a Charlie Horse was, it was kind of painful too. I had to be careful because if it got worse, I wouldn't be able to keep going and that would be kind of embarrassing. I kept drinking more water and that seemed to help a little.

 

First break, feeling pretty good so far

Marmots!!!

We made it to basecamp by 12:30. Everyone spread out and started digging out spaces for their tents. Some of the other guys had Hilleberg tents similar to mine so I pitched mine nearby. We all like to show off our fancy tents and we spent a lot of time comparing set ups, interiors, etc. Mine is a three person tent so it was the biggest, but it still is only 7 pounds, which is not bad for a super sturdy, 4-season, 3 person tent.

 

My awesome tent

After a quick lunch, we broke up into groups to brush up on self-arrest, belay and z-pulley skills. As a leader, I was assigned a group of three students. I had them all rope up together before heading up the hills that surround basecamp. One of them asked, do we need to do the full tie-in like it was the real thing? I said this IS the real thing, so yes, do everything. We really are on a mountain. There is a glacier about 100 yards to your right. There are crevasses just a couple of hundred yards beyond that. This is the real thing.

From our viewpoint up on the hills, we were able to see the bowl where basecamp is set up. The tents huddled around each other like Subaru’s in an REI parking lot.

 

Basecamp, with the 5 tents of the Alpine Ascent group off to the right.

We spent that afternoon working on self-arrest techniques, z-pulley and getting used to travelling when tied together on a rope. The training went well, but I have no idea if they thought I was just another idiot or if they thought I knew what I was doing. I felt like just another idiot. I just hope my instructions helped them out and gave them some confidence. I tried to tell them how it was going to be out there when they were heading out of camp at midnight for the final push to the summit. Tried to let them know what to expect. I think I came across as an idiot.

It was cold up there. Highs in the 30’s, lows in the 20’s. Temperature on the mountains is all dependent on the sun and clouds. When the sun is blocked out by the clouds, it is COLD. Cracked lips, frozen nose, numb toes cold. When the sun breaks its way through the cloud cover Kool-Aid Man style, it gets HOT. You instantly want to shed your three layers of insulation. But don’t do it – it’s a trick. Cause the clouds come back and then it’s back to COLD.

Once the sun went down behind the neighboring peaks, the temperature dropped quite a bit, and exhaustion set in. I walked up a nearby hill to catch the last rays of sunlight. From there, you could see glimpses of the San Juan’s. Here’s a shot from that spot, showing the north end of Orcas Island, the friendly horseshoe harbor of Sucia, and South Pender in the distance.

 

The San Juans from Mt Baker

I fixed dinner, sitting in the vestibule of the tent. I had dug out a nice little footwell in the vestibule, and had left a pedestal in the middle of it. It was on this pedestal that I set up the stove. Cooking was very easy. I sat inside the tent with my feet resting in the footwell and cooked on my little snow table. Dinner was top ramen + tuna chunks. Sounds gross but damn it’s tasty. York’s Peppermint Patty for desert, along with some chamomile tea. Not bad. I shoved everything I had inside the tent to keep it warm (one of the advantages of hauling around a 3 person tent for just one person). Changed socks. Put my wet and frozen gloves inside the sleeping bag to let my body heat dry them out overnight. Also shoved in my lightweight down jacket down by my feet to provide extra padding and warmth. My feel were really cold and the puffy jacket helped a lot.

I like sleeping in the mountains, way up high, on the snow. There’s not much to worry about. Things get nice and simple. Stay warm, and try to get some rest. Nothing else really matters. I was very comfy in my big tent. The combination of z-pad and air mattress was great. The only thing that was cold was my face, so I cinched down the mummy bag so only half my face was uncovered, then pulled the top down so I was completely covered up. That was nice.

I’d set the alarm on my phone for 5:30. I would be out at the crevasse Sunday morning and had to be ready to walk across the glacier out to the crevasses by 7:00am. Sometime in the middle of the night, I was awoken by voices outside the tent. Thinking it was time to get up, I started waking up all the way. I checked my phone – it was dead from the cold temps in the tent. Checked my watch – 2:18. Shoot. The noise was coming from the small group who was camped next door to our big party. This was a group of 2 guides from Alpine Ascent and four clients. Alpine Ascent is the same guide service who just lost 5 people on Mt Rainier. Before that, they lost some Sherpas on Everest during a massive ice fall. This morning, they were heading up for the summit. I found out later they were training for a climb up Denali later this season I hope it goes well for them; they’ve had more than their share of bad luck this season. I tried to go back to sleep but it was not easy. Every time I turned over, my legs would start cramping again. Damn! I tried stretching them out to get rid of the cramps but that didn’t seem to help. Finally one subsided, then I turned over on my other side and the other leg cramped up. I probably needed more water, but I sure wasn’t going to drink some now cause then I would just need to pee and there’s no way I’m getting out of my toasty mummy bag and getting all frozen again just to take a piss. Some people bring spare plastic bottles in the tent with them just for this purpose. No way man. Not me. You’d still have to climb out of the sleeping bag to do this awkward maneuver and then hope you don’t miss or spill. Either that or just stick the bottle down inside your bag and take your chances. Again, no way I was gonna try that. Net result: not drinking enough water = leg cramps at night.

People from our group started stirring around 5. I got up around 5:30, slipped on my warm boots and started heating up water for breakfast. This time it was instant oatmeal, pop tarts and some fine Italian VIA coffee. Pretty good. I had to get ready pretty quickly for the short hike out to the crevasses. I didn’t know if I was supposed to take my pack, but I knew I’d be out there for a few hours and I’d want some food and water, as well as my z-pad, so I emptied out all the stuff from the pack and added in just those few things. I was ready.

All the leaders who were on crevasse duty for that day gathered up and tied into a few climbing ropes, then headed out of basecamp and across to Easton Glacier, where the crevasse rescue station was set up. On the way out to the crevasse, I looked down and noticed that there were millions of ice worms on top of the glacial snow pack. Some were wriggling around. It was creepy man. I wondered if those damn things were in the water I’d melted last night. Hopefully not. I’d never seen em before. But they were all over. According to this article, there were probably billions of them on the Easton Glacier. Ew.

 

Getting set up to belay

 There are two positions for people working the crevasse – one is a lip walker, who helps the climbers get over their fears and helps them over the edge, then talks them through the process of extracting themselves, if needed. This person is attached to a safety line so they don’t fall in. The other position is the belay guy. I got to be the belay guy. This is the person who lowers the student down into the crevasse in a controlled manner (that’s the theory, at least), then pulls in the slack as they come up. I am their safety line. I keep them from dropping. For the belaying, I had to sit down on the glacier and dig my feet in to keep me from being pulled in on top of the student. My personal anchor was clipped to a runner that was attached to a snow picket, which was set dead-man style into the snow. When placed properly, a dead-man picket will hold a few thousand pounds, so there were no worries about being pulled into the crevasse.

Climbers who were going into the crevasse tied in to two separate ropes. First was the climbing rope. This is the one they tied their prusiks onto, and it was measured to extend about 30 feet into the crevasse. This line was attached to a separate deadman anchor. The other rope was the belay line, and the other end of that one came up through a GriGri belay device that was attached to my climbing harness. We were using the GriGri instead of the regular belay device because a GriGri will lock automatically if the climber on the other end slips, or if the belay guy just so happens to relax his grip at the wrong time and accidentally drops the climber a few feet (yes, I can attest that it works in that very situation).

 

Hanging out with Nik, the lip walker, waiting for our first student.

Are you ready?

I had never used a GriGri before, and certainly had never lowered anyone into a deadly hole. This was going to be fun.

  

Usually, if you see this scene on a mountain, it's not a good sign...

I was paired with a lip walker. As a team, we were responsible for the climber. The lip walker told the climber what to expect, checked their tie-in, and hung out on the edge of the crevasse to give them support. The first time we did this, it didn’t go very well. Our first victim climber was named Mick. He seemed a little nervous. He would have been more nervous if he had known I hadn’t done this before. We got the guy tied in, checked all his knots and gear, and he started walking backwards toward the edge of the crevasse with the lip walker by his side, giving him encouragement. This is where things started to go wrong. He was at the edge, and the lip walker told him to climb over the edge. The theory was that I would slowly lower him over the edge and down until the climbing rope went taut. The problem was, we had not accounted for the stretchiness of the belay line.  Oops. You see, these climbing ropes are dynamic ropes, which mean they will stretch quite a bit in the case of a fall. That way climbers who fall don’t get a broken back when the rope suddenly snaps taut. Anyway, here was Mick, all nervous and sitting on the edge of an icy, bottomless pit. I had made sure there wasn’t any slack in the belay rope, but there was no real load on it either. So, when he slipped over the edge, the belay line stretched out about 10 feet. This doesn’t seem far, but when you are falling into a crevasse, it might be kind of traumatic. The GriGri device locked up the way it was supposed to, and I pulled back on the brake hand to make sure the rope didn’t go any further as well. He had fallen a few feet before bouncing to a stop. Sorry dude! Hey, at least I didn’t drop you to the bottom, buddy. After a lot of cursing from everyone involved, I assured the poor bastard that I had him, and starting slowly lowering him down. The GriGri was attached to my harness, and there was a lot of pull on my hips where the harness went around me as I took the full weight of this guy and his pack, but my feet didn’t slip and I was able to control the guy’s descent fairly smoothly after that. I lowered him about 20 feet further down until my rope went slack. His weight was now on the climbing rope instead of the belay rope. I locked the GriGri and got ready to pull in the slack as the climber prepared to prusik up the climbing rope. He got stuck a couple of times (actually, every one of them got stuck at some point). When this happened, I pulled them up a little bit to help out, but with only one pulley, there was no way I could pull him out by myself. Mick made it out after a few minutes. He wasn’t particularly happy about his short free-fall, but at least he had a nice story to share. And he did make it out.

Couple of students having the time of their lives

Lip walkers, and dangling students

I stayed in that spot for 6 hours. Climber after climber came and went. I got better about controlling the belay. After Mick’s adventure, we made sure to have the climbers lean back against the belay line before going over the edge. I lowered eight climbers into a nasty crevasse that day and didn’t kill a single one. I thought that was a pretty good success rate. They all did really well. It was cool to see their helmets poke out above the lip of the crevasse as they finally neared the top. Most of them couldn’t stop grinning. This was a life-moment for them and it was nice being a small part of it. We had four stations set up and the one next to me was pretty tough. There was a big overhang on the lip of the crevasse and many climbers simply could not navigate it. In those cases, the extra instructors and lip walkers would rig up a quick z-pulley and yank the poor person up over the edge – wet, cold, exhausted, and in one case, bleeding a bit. But they were all happy. Happy to be out of there, happy to have done it. They went into a crevasse and got back out. That’s pretty cool.

We wrapped up a little after 1, pulled all the pickets, roped up then headed back to basecamp. It didn’t take very long to break camp and we were all ready to get out of there by 3. We all gathered around for one last group shot of the 2014 GCC students and instructors, then headed out.

 

GCC Class of '14

Yes, this is as steep as it looks

The walk back down is only a few miles, maybe 4 at the most, but it seems to take FOREVER. Maybe it’s the weight of the full pack. Maybe it’s the anticipation of finally sitting in the nice warm car, or of getting that big thick shake from the DQ at Sedro Woolley. Whatever it is, it takes For. Eh. Ver.

Finally got back to the parking lot and circled up one last time. Counted again – no students missing, but we were short 11 instructors. They had stayed up at camp in a bid to summit the mountain the next morning. This was the end of the group sessions for the 2014 Glacier Climbing Course. 39 students made it through this year. The next step for them are the graduation climbs up Mt Baker and possibly Mt Rainier. I wish them all good luck, and fair weather. Climbing is good for those in recovery. I hope their experiences from this weekend help them out

For me, climbing Rainier this season is not looking good right now. Chris F and I are looking for an experienced leader who isn’t going to be busy taking GCC students up. All the weekend climbing permits for Rainier are already taken. And I’m not feeling particularly motivated right now. It just seems like a lot of work, and I don’t have confidence I could make it even if we did find someone who was available. We still have time, though. There are maybe 6 - 8 weeks left to climb the Mountain. After that, the crevasses have opened up so much that it is very hard to navigate them safely.

I’ll keep you posted. 

KCM&DS