by Andy Selters
Figure 4.7c Tying off a belay: tie bight around harness loop in whole hitch
To help, it's important to know what conditions can put a crevasse victim in mortal danger Hypothermia is probably the most common trauma that crevasse rescuers can do much about. Severe bleeding is another case in which rescuers might save a person's life by going down immediately. More mechanically, victims often get wedged between crevasse walls or swamped in snow, and need help getting free. A problem inherent to vertical rescues arises when victims hang unconscious, because sometimes their lax tongues slump over their airways, and in this condition a victim likely will suffocate in minutes.
Whatever the reason to go down, in rescue terminology the person going down to aid the victim is the third man. It's preferable for the third man to go down on a completely fresh rope, keeping the slack part of the victim's rope available for a hauling system. But let's assume a three-person party with only one rope:
With luck, the victim's strand was originally anchored as much as 15 to 20 feet down from the rope's center for this will allow enough slack to build a Z-pulley system and to rappel on. The anchor should be backed up for a second person's weight.
Tie the rappel strand to the anchor not quite 15 feet along the slack side from the rope's center (it pays to have the middle of your rope marked). This should leave you enough rope to reach the victim, and about 30 to 40 feet of slack to set up a Z-system on the victim's strand.
Gather the supplies you'll need for administering first aid, for keeping the victim and you warm, and for chopping or digging, as well as slings and prusiks for rigging support, as described in the next section. Remember prusiks or ascenders to get yourself back out!
Go to the lip, away from where the victim's rope disappears, and prepare a site over which to rappel.
Wrap a prusik around the rappel strand and clip it to your harness. This will be your brake upon reaching the victim. As you rappel, hold the prusik wraps open, bringing the prusik down with you.
As you rappel to just barely above the victim, halt your rappel by letting go of the prusik wraps and settling onto the prusik.
Take off the victim's pack and clip it out of the way. Administer first aid, free the victim from wedging or snow burial, or whatever else needs to be done.
Tell your partner on the surface to set up a haul system and prepare to haul.
Ascend with the victim as your partner proceeds to haul the person up.
Figure 4.8a Improvising support for an unconscious victim: rigging a chest harness
Figure 4.8b Improvising support for an unconscious victim: an improvised C-pulley allows victim's torso to be raised and clipped into supported position
Figure 4.8c Improvising support for an unconscious victim: use prusik and runner to support victim's legs
This basic sequence of third man procedures has omitted the most technical consideration, because it deserves a discussion of its own: making sure that the victim, especially if unconscious or semiconscious, hangs with his or her head upright, and as comfortably as possible (see fig. 4.8a to c). Here the third man's crucial job is to rig support for the victim's torso and head, keeping the head tilted back to keep the airway open. A conscious but badly injured victim or a hypothermic victim who might go unconscious should be given this support during a rescue. However, even an experienced climber will need practice to get this procedure down:
As you hang off a waist prusik just above the victim, rig a chest harness on the victim (see fig. 4.8a).
Put a prusik or ascender on the rope the victim hangs from.
Clip a runner to the prusik and run this through a carabiner on the chest harness; this carabiner then acts as an improvised C-pulley, and you can raise the victim's torso by pulling the runner back up to the prusik (see fig. 4.8b). Without this “pulley” it will be virtually impossible to raise the victim's torso. Set the prusik so that the victim's torso will hang from it at a slight incline, and then clip this other end of the runner into the prusik.
With another runner padded by an article of clothing, support the victim's neck and head, clipping this runner to another prusik or perhaps the same one as for the chest harness. Make sure the victim's head is supported but tilted back to keep the airway open.
If necessary support the victim's legs with another prusik and a runner or two (see fig. 4.8c).
Clearly, rescuing an unconscious victim is a demanding procedure, and it might not be fast enough to save a life. Perhaps the most important lesson is to emphasize the seriousness of severe crevasse falls, and the value of a full-body harness. But as third man procedures become more widely known, perhaps lives will be saved.
COMPLICATIONS
At the Kahiltna Glacier airstrip, a party of sixteen climbers divided themselves into rope teams of four They loaded their packs and sleds, and readied their chest harnesses, ropes, and prusiks. This day in late June was the first in their quest to climb Denali, the highest peak in North America. They embarked at about 7:30 p.m., a time when snow conditions were sloppy, but the coming twilight would gradually firm the surface. Two and one-half hours up the glacier the second member of the lead team broke through a snowbridge. She and her sled fell in about four meters, giving both of her adjacent teammates a strong yank, but one they held by ice-ax arrest.
Within minutes, a member from another rope team was belayed out to the hole, where he heard her give a faint cry for help. They immediately built a Z-pulley system onto her rope, and began to haul. Quickly the hauling got difficult, then impossible; she was being hauled into the overhanging lip. A member was belayed out the unstable eave. He saw the woman unconscious, her spine arched back from her tie-in. Her sled, which may have clubbed her in the fall, still hung free from her harness and her pack was still on.
As the man reached to free her, the lip gave way, and he fell a couple meters onto his belay. From there he cut away her sled and pack, and tied a new rope onto her harness. With this rope the team hauled again, and hauled harder She was still embedded in the lip. With a dozen or so people heaving, suddenly the line went slack. The woman's harness loop proved to be the weak point of an over-stressed system; it broke and she dropped to the bottom.
At this point another team came along, and one of them was lowered into the vault. He found the woman and tied a rope to her. Then, as the others hauled, he guided her over the lip. But it was too late; the woman had died.
Here was a team with a moderate level of preparation, certainly more prepared than many who make their way up Denali. Nevertheless, they found themselves unprepared for a dire situation, not knowing the importance of attaching sleds to the climbing rope, of freeing the victim from a load, of descending to assist a struggling victim, or the severity of an overhanging lip.
Skiing up a glacier on Mount Baker, North Cascades (Courtesy Ace Kvale)
CHAPTER 5
SKIING AND HAULING SLEDS
Skis and sleds allow parties to cover more ground and carry more weight. But they also throw new factors into glacier travel and crevasse rescue.
GLACIER SKIING
Traveling on skis gives the obvious benefit of spreading your body weight over a greater surface area, making you less likely to fall through a snow-bridge. The increase in surface area is about six to ninefold, although this does not make you six to nine times less likely to fall through. The bridging effectiveness of skis varies with a number of factors, including the direction the ski's point relative to the crevasse and what type of snow is present. But clearly the greater surface area and greater bridging ability of skis make them a safety item.
Of course, the joy and real efficiency in skis comes from traveling downhill. And, unfortunately, skiing downhill and safeguarding against crevasse falls are not very compatible. Even the best skiers should hold no illusions about trying to link turns while roped to a partner who's trying to do the same, while both are looking out for and avoiding crevasses. Many people try it once, and find out that they're more likely to get pu
lled off into a crevasse. Therefore, skiing downhill while roped for glacier travel means, at best, skidding along in a measured snowplow, perhaps cutting an occasional christy to change direction. The better skier should ski behind, because he or she adjusts to the pace of the skier ahead to keep a minimum of slack in the rope. Skiers should have runaway straps to keep a released ski from disappearing into a crevasse.
The other problem with skiing uphill or downhill in crevassed terrain is holding a fall. When one member crosses a known crevasse, the adjacent member can turn his or her skis sideways to the potential pull, to better resist a fall. But in any serious fall adjacent members will be pulled off their feet. For this reason, ski poles should be rigged with ice-ax arrest grips. Another option is to wrap an ice ax or hammer to one of the poles using duct tape. For getting out of a crevasse, one should make arrangements to remove skis and attach them to the pack.
Some people feel that the added surface area provided with skis makes crevasse falls unlikely enough that they can dispense with a rope. While it's indisputable that skis help, no one can make this judgment absolutely, and it's easy to base the judgment more on a desire to have fun than on the glacier's conditions. On Oregon's Mount Hood, a cohort of mine was linking telemarks down an apparently crevasse-free snow slope, and he carved one right into a covered slot, plunging parallel to the walls for 50 feet. Amazingly, he suffered only minor injuries and his buddies were able to rescue him.
A party can easily be tempted to ski downhill unroped if they have skied up a glacier as a rope team, checking out the best route and general snow-bridge conditions. If everything seems safe enough, they can ski down with more confidence, roping up where prudent. Even with this prior inspection, though, ski parties tend to skew their judgment because once the skis are pointing down, the temptation to value fun over safety can be great. Also, snow-bridges generally weaken as a day progresses, and bridges that seemed fine on the morning climb can fail during the afternoon descent.
Snowshoes also reduce your chances of breaking through a snow-bridge, although their surface area and bridging length are significantly less than with skis. There's no problem controlling a downhill plod with snow-shoes, though, so for those less skilled at skiing or who are carrying a large pack or sled, snowshoes can be a smart compromise.
HAULING SLEDS
Other than traveling unroped, there's probably nothing a glacier traveler can do to make crevasse falls more dangerous than to haul a sled. We might marvel at how much easier it is to haul a 60-pound expedition load on a sled than in a backpack, but in a crevasse fall that sled plunges in right after you. And when the rope brings you to a halt, those 60 pounds plummet onto you with a deadly force. In recent years, at least two crevasse deaths on Denali can be partly or largely attributed to sleds.
The basic preventive to sled slayings is to attach the sled to the climbing rope behind you. This way, as the rope comes taut, the sled will halt and stay suspended above you in the crevasse. No system for setting this up has been devised that offers all the safety and convenience we'd like, but the best system is a pretty good compromise.
Most people on typical alpine budgets get by with the inexpensive plastic sleds designed for kids' snow frolics. Haul poles of aluminum, conduit, or PVC can be improvised onto them for better downhill and sidehill control. Commercial sleds with rigid haul poles are nice, but they don't prevent the load from crashing onto you. Another good option is to drag a haul bag made of smooth, heavy fabric.
In any case, it's most comfortable to haul a sled with a separate haul line clipped to a carabiner on the back of your pack. Attach the sled to the climbing rope with a three-wrap prusik on the sled's trailing end. Adjust the prusik along the climbing rope so that when you're traveling and the haul rope is taut, the climbing rope has an absolute minimum of slack (see fig. 5.1). You don't want the climbing rope so taut that you're hauling the sled with it, but you also don't want it so slack that you hang from the sled's haul line when you fall through. It's wise to load gear into a strong duffel and attach the prusik to a strong loop on the duffel, not to the sled's plastic, which could rip under the stress of a fall.
If you have the appropriate minimum of slack in this system, when you do punch through a snow-bridge most of your weight goes onto the climbing rope, because the stretch and play in the prusik sink the sled toward you just enough to take tension off the haul line. Thus you hang from your seat harness as without a sled (see fig. 5.2), and when you remove your pack you also detach yourself from the sled.
Figure 5.1 Glacier travel with a sled
To ascend out of the crevasse past the sled's prusik, you need a spare prusik (or an ascender that goes on and off the rope easily) and a spare harness carabiner: With the Texas prusik system you simply ascend to the sled's prusik, wrap your spare prusik on the climbing rope above the sled's prusik, stand tall to clip this new prusik into your spare locking carabiner, and unclip the original prusik. When you rise up enough to hang from the new waist prusik, take your feet out of the stirrups and rewrap the stirrup prusik above the sled's prusik. If you use ascenders, make sure that both ascenders attach to your seat harness, and when you reach the sled's prusik, replace the ascenders one at a time above the prusik. If the sled is heavy, you will need to untie from the climbing rope to continue. It is best to get a belay from your partners above.
Figure 5.2 In a crevasse with a sled
Should a victim with a sled need to be hauled out, you'll want to send down a new strand to haul on, one without a sled attached to it. After being hauled a short distance, the victim can untie from the original rope, and the sled can be hauled up later
Another problem with sleds is dragging them downhill and along side hills, for they slide and roll downslope at their own whim, paying no heed to their owner's most fervent demands and sometimes threatening to drag the owner away. Clipping a sled into the glacier travel rope can help solve these problems, for the climber behind can help brake and even steer the sled. To aid in this you can clip clove hitches in the climbing rope in front and behind the sled, adjusting the hitches so there's slight tension between them across the top of the sled. When descending, the member behind brakes the sled with the climbing rope, keeping it from crashing into the partner's legs. Another aid for downhill travel is to run a knotted cord under the sled's belly as a friction brake, tying it at both bow and stern.
To keep the sled from swinging downslope while traversing a side hill, the member behind keeps tension on the climbing rope, and this tension holds the sled in line with the direction of travel especially with double-clove hitches on the sled. Though the member ahead is now pulling against this tension, and coordination between the two members needs to be close, this is far better than having the sled slide, flip, and pull downslope. Another consideration, though, is that the clove hitches in the climbing rope will be impossible to untie should the rope be tensioned with the weight of someone who's fallen in a crevasse, and this will make it impossible to haul the victim out on that rope. For this reason, it's wise to tie-in the sled with clove hitches only when another rope or rope team is available.
You may have noticed that all these precautions and improvements can't be applied to the last person in a rope team, who has no one behind to keep a sled in line. Basically, a team has two unsavory options for the last person. The first is not to give that person a sled and distribute that load among the other members. The second is to give the last person a sled and travel very cautiously, clipping the sled to the rope ahead when crossing treacherous bridges.
Al Pack on Shafat Glacier, Nun, Kashmir
AFTERWORD
THE GAME OF CREVASSE ROULETTE
As mentioned in the introduction, a party's style of glacier travel generally reflects its attitudes. People go into glaciated areas pretty sure about how much risk they are willing to take to complete their endeavor As they perceive various degrees of hazard they adjust their procedures to maintain that acceptable level of risk.
The object of crevasse roulette is to travel on a glacier with the minimum of gear and rigmarole, while keeping the chances of dying in a crevasse as small as possible.
When confronted with this metaphor for glacier travel, most of us say we'd like to play the game at a fairly conservative level. That is, we like the security of being able to rescue ourselves from the worst-case scenario—falling a good distance into a crevasse to a free-hanging stop, perhaps with injuries. This we want beyond the relative security of knowing we will usually avoid that worst-case scenario in the first place.
A major reason we want such safety is because we see crevasses as an unglamorous risk, not worth tempting fate for—in contrast to, say, scaling a peak. Unfortunately this same “not worth risking” attitude too often includes “not worth hassling for” This “nuisance” view of the crevasse hazard dilutes our interest in giving ourselves the safety we desire. We rope up but don't carry or don't know how to use anchors or prusiks; we carry heavy packs without chest harnesses; we travel with yards of slack rope between us.
