Crevasse Rescue 5.8.11

After spending two weekends in the sunshine climbing rocks, it was back to the harsh reality of BCC this year - some sort of precipitation, poor visibility, and lots of snow. The outing this weekend was to the Nisqually Glacier on Mt Rainier for crevasse rescue training. The club rents a cabin near the park for the instructors so Aaron and I drove down Saturday afternoon. The weather looked pretty terrible Saturday so we decided not to go down early for any skiing or climbing. We arrived at the cabin sometime after 6 and had our pick of the rooms. Slowly people trickled in - except for those Saturday people which included Levi with the lasagna for dinner. Aaron, Morten, Kathy, and I went to Copper Creek for some dinner instead of waiting for the 11PM Lasagna. The Saturday teams didn't get off the mountain until sometime around 7PM - a long day. The weather Saturday had been awful - similar to what we experienced on Mt Persis. Blowing snow and very poor visibility. In preparation for our outing, I grabbed some GPS coordinates from Tim for the important turns in navigating to the crevasses.

Unfortunately Sunday morning was a repeat of the previous Saturday for me. I woke up early and couldn't fall asleep, and ended up yaking several times before getting in the car to drive up to Paradise. I had no idea what was going on with me but I was not feeling good. We were short on instructors, we only had 5 including me so I was worried that if I got sick and had to come down, that'd cut our instructors down to 3. The plan was to try and go as far as I could, until the glacier in case I needed to turn around. I lagged the team by quite a bit as we made our way to the glacier. I was really not feeling good and the teams were vying for which crevasse they got. Our team was the second one to get to the edge for roping up so we were suppose to head up to the crevasse at 8,000' passing the one at 7,200' - I was fairly confident I wasn't going to make it. Aaron worked out a deal so that we could get the lower crevasse and the team roped up. I was on the last rope team since I'd be traveling slowly. There was quite a bit of congestion with the first team stopping, the third team passing, and our team trying to get to the crevasse. We sent a fast rope up with Curtis, David, Keith, and Hiro to get the ropes set up and with my GPS for navigation. After all was said and done, all four teams ended up at the same crevasse at 7,200'.

The ropes were mostly set up when I arrived. I put on my puffy, grabbed food, water, and my sit pad and took one of the belay stations. Luke had not shown up so we had 7 students - translating into a team of 3 and 4. I helped the student belayer of the team of 4 and hunkered down. It was snowing pretty good, although you could barely call it snow - it seemed more like rain since it melted as soon as it touched you. Thai even had a puddle form on his pants as he belayed from the water being squeezed out of the rope. Aaron sat at the lip of the crevasse and lowered in once to get some pictures and videos. Emily belayed the group of 3 and Curits ran along the static line to help them. David helped the group of 4 from the static line. There were some great lowering in the crevasse moments - Keith and Thai both practically fell in. There was a big ledge for the group of 3 so they had some troubles getting pulled up into it, but everyone did a good job. The students knew what they were doing and moved through the exercise relatively quickly. The team of 3 flew through the rescues so we took 3 students from another team to help rotate them through quicker. The team of 4 finished up and we started digging up the anchors and breaking everything down. Since I still wasn't doing great, I headed down on the first rope with Thai, Sara, and Ben. Luckily two of the teams had set wands on the way up so that we could navigate back - I've never been in such poor visibility. Thai did a great job of navigating down with the wands. They were placed about every half rope length so by time I came to the wand, we'd make sure Thai had the next one in sight. We made it down basically at the same time as our other rope teams.

We took our harnesses off and coiled the ropes for the last bit to the parking lot. We started out following footsteps but they seemed to be going too high and we started cutting across the ridge. I was trying to check my GPS (I don't often navigate with it), trying to determine how to get back on course. Aaron, Curtis, and Keith glissaded down before realizing we had to continue up and not down, so once we got the team back together we continued just a little further and found the tracks and little red ranger flags. We were basically home free now and kept together as a team, plodding down the trail. After a quick team photo with Sara's Happy Mother's Day sign, we continued on the boot path and soon found ourselves in the parking lot - changing into warm, cotton clothing in the heated bathrooms and de-briefing. After the teams were all accounted for, we headed to Eatonville for dinner at Bruno's. I still was not up for eating so I half picked at a salad. Soon after we were on the road home after a long, wet weekend. Good news - everyone knows how to pull people out of a crevasse, weekend outing was a success.

View Crevasse Rescue 5.8.11 in a larger map Map for this adventure

Our route on Mount Rainier

Heading up from Paradise to the crevasse on the Nisqually Glacier near 7200'

Another closer look at our route

You can see where we started heading down - good thing we didn't continue!