My good buddy the Desert Mountaineer wrote a story some time back called Mt Rogers, and that is what prompted me to write this piece. I do want to make some things abundantly clear however… One I am not a mountain rescue professional. Two, this is not meant to be instructional in any way. This is not a comprehensive description of glacier travel and crevasse rescue techniques, it is merely a brief primer on the subject; and a warning… It is incumbent upon anyone who decides to do glacier travel to be fully aware of the dangers and risks and to take the necessary precautions, which include but are not limited to receiving adequate training and practice in such things as crevasse rescue from qualified individuals.
Five friends are out for a casual climb of a glaciated peak. They have decided to travel as one rope of three and one rope of two, which is pretty standard practice. It is a beautiful sunny morning. Suddenly out of the blue the end man on the rope of three falls deep into a crevasse. Fortunately his partners quickly arrest his fall, and equally fortunately he is uninjured. What we have here is a very, very serious situation, with an unknown outcome. Imagine how the level of seriousness would ratchet up if… There were only two guys on one rope… the fallen climber was unconscious or injured… or both… it was in the dark…the weather was shitty. You get the picture.
In any crevasse fall situation there are at least two things that need to happen almost simultaneously. One is that the rope to the person in the hole needs to be anchored so the people on the surface can move freely. Much akin to ‘escaping the belay’ in a rock climbing fall. The second is that the rope needs to be padded where it runs over the lip of the crevasse so that it won’t dig into the snow or ice and become immovable. If it does it will at least prevent the fallen climber from slipping any deeper, which effectively sort of takes care of point one, but it also severely hampers any attempts to use that rope to haul out the climber. The rope can dig in and freeze very quickly so time is of the essence here.
Once these two things are taken care of the next items to address are the security and stability of the surrounding terrain and the safety of the climber(s) on the surface. Once this has been addressed and it is safe to do so then the condition of the fallen climber needs to be ascertained. If the climber is conscious, and uninjured, and if they have prussiks on their rope, and if they know how to use them, and if the rope is not too iced up, then they should be able to do the majority of the extraction on their own. Yeah, I know… a lot of ifs.
If the climber in the crevasse cannot help themselves or are of limited use then the person(s) on the surface will need to effect the rescue. The simplest thing to rig is what is called a z-pulley. It provides some mechanical advantage, but although simple to describe and draw on paper, it is never really simple to do in real life. There are always numerous variables conspiring against the perfect set-up. And if there are only two of you… forget about it. Even if everything is set-up just perfect and you are using large diameter pulleys instead of karabiners it is virtually impossible for one person to haul out another.
I have done a fair bit of glacier travel in my time. Twice I have ‘poked through’ into a crevasse, but fortunately have never gone in all the way. I have practiced crevasse rescue and the simple scenario shown above is very hard to make work. In most things an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and this is doubly true in dealing with crevasses. It’s really best not to fall into one of the buggers in the first place. You need to get well educated in how to do this. Typically, but not all of the time, the crevasse you can see is the safest. It’s the hidden ones that are most deadly. Crevasses can be anywhere on a glacier but often they are more common in areas of elevation change or directional change. Sometimes there are subtle depressions and other telltales over a hidden crevasse, but not always and you certainly can’t count on that. Also in the dead of night or pre-dawn snow can be more frozen and consolidated making a snow-bridge over a crevasse passable, where by afternoon it might collapse with your weight on it. Seasonal variables play a big role in glacier travel. In the winter and spring snow may cover crevasses allowing for easy passage, although this very attribute can also be a bane as it covers the dangers. Summer and fall may leave the crevasses fully visible which is good, but may hamper route finding and even block passage. There are trade-off’s galore.
Often you can just step across a small crevasse. Once they get too wide to step over you might need to jump. Not exactly Bob Beamon stuff here but running long jumps are often used. Obviously fraught with peril however. When you are running on snow or ice and especially if wearing crampons and dragging a rope behind you anything can happen. Exercise any jumping manoeuvers with extreme caution and be well belayed.
In the Mt. Rogers story, the young lady around whom the tale revolves, spent a long time hanging in that icy hole, and only came away with a fractured hand. She had the good fortune of being extracted by professionals and flown out by helicopter. You might not be so lucky…