by Andy Selters
GLACIER
TRAVEL &
CREVASSE
RESCUE
SECOND EDITION, REVISED
ANDY SELTERS
READING GLACIERS
TEAM TRAVEL
CREVASSE RESCUE TECHNIQUES
ROUTEFINDING
EXPEDITION SKILLS
Published by
The Mountaineers
1001 SW Klickitat Way, Suite 201
Seattle, WA 98134
©1990, 1999 by Andy Selters; illustrations by Jennifer Hahn
All rights reserved
First edition, 1990. Second edition, 1999. Revised edition: first printing 2006, second printing 2009.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Distributed in the United Kingdom by Cordee, www.cordee.co.uk
Manufactured in Canada
Edited by Brenda Pittsley
Illustrations by Jennifer Hahn
All photographs by the author except as noted
Book design by Jennifer Shontz
Layout by Nick Gregoric
Cover photograph: Mike Hoover, Foster Plateau, Antarctic Peninsula, Antarctica
©Michael Graber (Front);
Michael Graber on Yerupajá, Peru ©Andy Selters (Back)
Frontispiece: Crevasse self-rescue practice, Mount Shasta, California ©Ace Kvale
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Selters, Andrew.
Glacier travel and crevasse rescue/Andy Selters. — 2nd ed. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-89886-658-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Snow and ice climbing. 2. Snow and ice climbing—Safety
measures. 3. Mountaineering—Search and rescue operations. I. Title.
GV200.3 .S45 1999
796.52'2'0289—dc2l
99-6454
CIP
Printed on recycled paper
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 UNDERSTANDING THE CREVASSE HAZARD
Glacier and Crevasse Genesis
Snowbridges
Glacier Seasons in Various Climates
Health of Glaciers
CHAPTER 2 PRINCIPLES AND PROCEDURES OF GLACIER TRAVEL
Arranging Members: How Far Apart?
Knots and Harnesses
Clothing
Rescue Gear
Routefinding
The Rope Leader
Team Travel
Whiteouts
Holding Falls: The Glacier Traveler's Belays
Ice Slopes
Avalanches
Serac Fall
Gathering Together
Travel on a “Dry” Ablation Zone
Camping Considerations
CHAPTER 3 RESCUE TECHNIQUES FOR THE GLACIER TRAVELER
Ascending Systems
Prusik or Ascender as Self-Belay
Victim Procedures
Surface Member Procedures
Crevasse Rescue Procedures
CHAPTER 4 ADDITIONAL RESCUE TECHNIQUES
Additional Hauling Power: The Z×C
The Canadian Drop Loop System
The Windlass 4:1 or 8:1
Building in a Tension-Release Mechanism
Rescuing Over a Newly Prepared Lip
Two-Person Parties
Rappelling to Aid a Victim
CHAPTER 5 SKIING AND HAULING SLEDS
Glacier Skiing
Hauling Sleds
Afterword The Game of Crevasse Roulette
Appendix 1 Rescue Practice Sessions
Appendix 2 Some Useful Improvisations
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I inherited the concept of this book from Dave Bishop, former guide for the North Cascades Alpine School. In the many years and many revisions since Dave left the project for medical school, a number of others have helped me develop this text. Of those, Brian Okonek of Alaska-Denali Guiding provided valuable information from the standpoint of an expert in Alaskan mountaineering. Others who helped were my coworkers at the American Alpine Institute; John Schutt offered an especially wide range of helpful suggestions, glaciologist Ron Johnson added his expertise to the hazard evaluation chapter; and Jill Fugate helped edit early drafts. Steve Boyer, Tom Dickey, Bruce Hendricks, Mark Houston, Kathy Cosley, Alex Sebastian, Howie Schwartz, Alan Kearney, Dr Eric Larson, Lance Machovsky, and Robert Parker all had answers to various queries, as did pack maker Rick Lipke of Skagit Mountain Rescue. I also appreciated learning new information about glaciers in Sue Ferguson's book Glaciers of North America (1992), which enhanced my thinking about the natural history of glaciers. Finally, thanks to Jennifer Hahn for her patience and creativity in developing the illustrations.
Party crossing South Cascade Glacier on Ptarmigan Traverse, North Cascades
INTRODUCTION
“Man has evolved while the great continental ice sheets have waxed and waned through time, and he still has many lessons to learn in the art of living with the ice.”
— Brian John.
The Ice Age Past and Present.
This is a manual for traveling over the white lands, the mountains, and high latitudes where the snowpack never melts away. These lands cover about 10 percent of the earth's surface and contain about 98 percent of our planet's fresh water. In these places where billions of tons of accumulated snow and ice entrain downhill, any travel is an adventure into raw beauty and intrinsic hazards.
When European cultures started taking geographic and personal quests into the mountains two and three hundred years ago, glaciers inspired as much or more fascination than even the peaks that surround them. From weaving over the Mer de Glace to discovering the Colorado pocket glaciers, early alpinists and tourists marveled at the rivers of accumulated snowflakes melded into flexing towers, popping fissures, groaning walls, and silent source fields. How incredible to walk over the back of something so huge and moving, almost alive! By the early 20th century a preliminary understanding of the major role glaciers have played in shaping mountains and even continents became widespread, and so appreciation of glaciers as awesome geology in action contributed much to the modern vision of a dynamic and ancient planet.
Nowadays we look more to the summits, often traveling over glaciers as a means of access. But glaciers hide crevasses, and avoiding a cold death in one of these hollows is a surprisingly technical problem unique to glacier travel. Although crossing a deceptively smooth glacier surface isn't usually compared with the drama of high-angle climbing, the person who breaks into a crevasse arrives suddenly in an utterly vertical world. He or she may face a demanding extrication, one for which a winter climb of El Capitan might have been better preparation than a dozen previous uneventful glacier excursions. Therefore, having the savvy to avoid crevasses and the skill to rescue oneself or a partner from one when necessary are unpublicized but challenging and important aspects of mountaineering. At the very least, glacier-travel and crevasse-rescue skills foster an authentic confidence to venture farther. For those who travel glaciers frequently, these skills save lives.
While it's important to have a repertoire of skills, a party's safety and efficiency still depend on the attitudes of its members. Ideally, glacier travelers adopt an attitude that balances a healthy fear of crevasses with a cautious confidence in their own judgment and skills. Too often, however, an imbalance of attitudes either puts people in danger or causes them to fuss with barely relevant rigmarole. On one side are apparently naive climbers, from novice to experienced, who have thus far avo
ided a significant crevasse plunge and are prone to treat crevasses rather lightly. These people need to think through the reality of a crevasse fall and understand that slack procedures and rudimentary rescue skills will fail them in a real test.
On the other side are rule-conscious climbers who put their confidence in a combination of rigid procedures and safety in numbers. This attitude overlooks the dynamic of rope team plus glacier, and it fails to heighten skills, techniques, or intuition—all of which build genuine confidence and make glacier travel safer, more efficient, and more enjoyable.
The Glacier du Taconnay, 1853, painting by George Baxter from Ascent of Mont Blanc,1853. From LeMont Blanc Dans La Gravure Ancienne, edited by Cherado Priuli and Patrizia Garin, 1985.
Party using a ladder to surmount a crevasse wall on Mount Rainier in the 1920s (Courtesy U. S. National Park Service)
With increased glacier mileage, a climber's attitude often progresses in an opposite manner from say, rock climbing. On trustworthy rock, climbers build their skills and strength and come to depend on their own expertise.
“…we made our way over masses of ice connected by shaky bridges of almost loose snow, most of which were either broken or incomplete. All of us broke through more than once, but by the careful use of the rope no accident occurred. Through the great holes with jagged margins produced by these stumbles, we saw mysterious azure caverns deep below, of the most marvelous blue ever created by snow, with a sheen like watered silk, and brilliant, almost metallic reflections.”
—Filippo de Filippi, 1897.
The Ascent of Mount St. Elias.
With practice, they can climb confidently with less protection. But on glaciers, experience with crevasses typically amounts to numerous incident-free trips punctuated by terrifying and eye-opening surprises. Just one or two serious incidents may occur in a decade of glacier travel, but one or two are enough to deepen respect for the unpredictability and seriousness of the crevasse hazard. Thus, the common pattern is for seasoned climbers to become more reliant on their backup systems than they were when they were first learning.
Whatever degree of safety you hope for (and degree of risk you accept), you will of course strive to bring your procedures in line with those hopes. For some time, however, “common practices” did not meet reasonable expectations. From anchors to harnesses, from haul systems to judging snow, the general body of knowledge in glacier travel did not keep up with other advances in climbing. Especially little thought was given to the added risks of today's more demanding expeditions: small parties, heavy packs, hauling with sleds, and traveling on large, remote glaciers with rotten snow conditions.
While advances in awareness and technique have made glacier travel safer and more efficient, they can never attain perfection, so each traveler must make compromises according to personal comfort levels. In this book, enough procedure is described to satisfy the safety conscious, and those who are more interested in speed can compromise as they wish.
In that sense, this book should not be considered a catalog of rules, but rather a reference on which to build your own experiences. Also, discussion and controversy regarding glacier travel should continue, because refinements in technique will result. While this guide integrates techniques from climbers around the world, a bias toward the techniques familiar to the Pacific Northwest region of the United States is inevitable. Readers are presumed to have basic mountaineering skills, particularly the basic knots and techniques for ice-ax arrest, rappelling, and belaying. Beginners can find these skills described in a general mountaineering text, and should seek competent instruction in them.
In any case, as with any skill, reading by itself does not produce proficiency. Glacier-travel problems are impromptu engineering problems, with materials and time crucially limited and no certainty of the forces involved. The keys to competence are snow savvy, practice in roped travel and rescue techniques, a constant, critical evaluation of situations, and a bit of a sixth sense. These can be achieved only through applying “book knowledge” to years of excursions and to mock (or actual) rescues. Therefore, beginners and those of intermediate experience are especially warned to err on the side of caution whenever there is a question.
Early depiction of glacier travel in the Alps (Courtesy American Alpine Club collection)
The most fundamental principle underlying this book is that any party on a glacier must assume that, in a mishap, either they themselves will be the rescuers or there will be no rescue. Accepting total selfsufficiency is the best possible incentive to be competent and prepared; it's also a responsibility to organized rescue teams and nearby parties who may or may not be available in time to risk their own goals and lives in a rescue. Thus, the bottom line reads that self-sufficiency is a responsibility. And after all, being self-sufficient in the mountains is really the essence of the “freedom of the hills.”
A NOTE ABOUT SAFETY
Safety is an important concern in all outdoor activities. No book can alert you to every hazard or anticipate the limitations of every reader. The descriptions of techniques and procedures in this book are intended to provide general information. Nothing substitutes for formal instruction, routine practice, and plenty of experience. When you follow any of the procedures described here, you assume responsibility for your own safety. Use Glacier Travel and Crevasse Rescue as a general guide to further information. Under normal conditions, excursions into the backcountry require attention to traffic, road and trail conditions, weather, terrain, the capabilities of your party, and other factors. Keeping informed on current conditions and exercising common sense are the keys to a safe, enjoy-able outing.
— The Mountaineers
Finding a way through an icefall on Siniolchu, Sikkim Himilaya, India (Courtesy Ace Kvale)
CHAPTER 1
UNDERSTANDING THE
CREVASSE HAZARD
Glaciers vary widely in the number of crevasses they hide, and their surface conditions change constantly. Therefore, the danger of breaking through a snowbridge into a crevasse ranges from negligible to very high, depending on the glacier and its condition. Just leaving camp on an Alaskan glacier in bad conditions can be riskier than climbing for two days on a typical alpine glacier On the other hand, occasional treacherous conditions can make an alpine glacier just as dangerous as one in Alaska.
Obviously, one would like to know just how hazardous a given place is at a given time. However beyond recognizing obvious open crevasses, “knowing” the crevasse hazard generally amounts to making educated guesses and using intuition. The starting point for making your guesses more educated and your intuition more practiced is to understand the origins of glaciers and crevasses.
GLACIER AND CREVASSE GENESIS
Glaciers form in the world's high, cold places where, during the average year, more snow falls than can melt away. Decade after decade the snow piles on top of itself. As it does so, it compresses the old, deeply buried layers, compacting them and squeezing air out. When the snow is compressed to about 80-percent solid, the remaining air pockets lose their connections and the snow becomes ice. This transition from snow to ice takes only a few years in a temperate area, maybe 15 years in colder regions, and more than 100 years on polar glaciers. Often you can see the layering of annual accumulations on a glacier's walls, like the annular rings in a tree stump. Each year's autumn surface stands out with ice from melt and dust from the atmosphere. Eventually the accumulation of snow and ice grows massive enough to sag and slide downhill. Compressed ice being in motion distinguishes a glacier from a snowfield.
Continuously fed by the deepening snows at a glacier's head, glacier ice creeps and glides down to lower elevations where temperate summers reduce it to melt-water Thus, geologists often look at glaciers as gravity driven systems that dissipate “excess” snowfall. The upper area, where more snow falls than can melt away, is called the accumulation zone. The lower area, where accumulated ice that has moved down from above melts away, is called the ablation
zone. In late summer and autumn when a year's melting is nearly complete, you can often easily distinguish the white, still-snowy, accumulation zone from the old, blue-gray ice of the ablation zone.
For an active glacier of average or smaller size in the Cascades or the Alps, it takes about 100 years for snow that fell in an accumulation zone to emerge as melting ice at a glacier's snout. Glaciers in very cold regions move slower, so for large, sub-polar glaciers this “turnover” can take more than 1,000 years.
Glacier ice behaves much differently than the rigid, brittle stuff of cocktail parties and hockey rinks. In response to the heavy pressure of tons of more recent ice and snow weighing on them, ice crystals deform, and molecules are shuttled from one crystal to the next. This process is called recrystallization. Acres of recrystallization result in “creep,” causing glacier ice to flow almost like viscous lava, speeding and stretching, slowing and pooling, turning and flexing with the terrain. Glaciers also glide on their bedrock, especially when there is melt-water to lubricate their bellies. Warmth speeds both creep and glide, so temperate glaciers move up to fifteen times faster in summer than they do in winter. Overall, surface movement on a typical temperate glacier averages about a foot per day, or over 100 meters a year. About two-thirds of this motion comes from creep and one-third from glide.
Although the majority of super-compressed ice within a glacier can ooze across the terrain, the ice closer to the surface is more brittle. So when moving ice strains over bedrock features, the brittle surface splits. These splits in the glacier's surface are crevasses.
Crevasses are formed by tension created within the overall flow when some ice moves faster than ice around it. The most obvious tension zone is where ice flows over a sharply angled slope. This situation is similar to air flowing over a wing, in that the surface ice has farther to travel than the ice at the bedrock. The surface ice therefore accelerates
