Andrew Selters - Glacier Travel & Crevasse Rescue

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andy Selters has climbed all over North America, Asia, and Peru, and is the author of four other mountain guidebooks and numerous mountaineering articles. During his years as a guide and trainer for the American Alpine Institute in Bellingham, Washington, Selters observed a need for updated literature on glacier travel and crevasse rescue, from which this guidebook sprang. He now lives in Bishop, California.

MOUNTAINEERING:
The Freedom of the Hills, 7th Ed.
The Mountaineers Club
The all-time best selling standard reference for the sport of climbing.

CLIMBING SELF-RESCUE:
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ALPINE CLIMBING:
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ICE AND MIXED CLIMBING:
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CLIMBING:
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Build the muscles you need for this ultimate of
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CLIMBING:
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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

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.

But since the crevasse hazard can never be gauged precisely, glacier travel is always a gamble that a party's precautions will match up with the actual hazard. Not only is it difficult to know just where crevasses lie and how strong their bridges are, it's even harder to predict how severe a crevasse fall might be and what the extrication might involve. Thus, when a party settles on procedures such as the number of rope teams, how to cross what bridges at what time of day, how many anchors to carry and so on, they can't know exactly what they're preparing for.To emphasize this uncertainty, we can think of glacier travel as a kind of crevasse roulette, a game of chance in which the percentage of unlucky spins of the wheel is never sure.

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 scenariofalling 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 forin 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.

In this way, it seems that because crevasses generally are not hazards inherent to climbing, because the odds of falling through a weak bridge are irregular, and because many glacier excursions are incident-free, we don't view crevasses with the same wary eye as we do other climbing hazards like falling, fatigue, or even avalanches and rockfall. We forget that a single crevasse fall can become the major issue of a mountaineering endeavor. With the hazards not well thought out, our perception of playing crevasse roulette at a conservative level becomes a pleasant illusion compared to our real odds.