Getting there is half the battle (Prussicks are your friends)

On Thursday Matt and I departed from Dulles Airport, and as fate would have it, though we both connected through Salt Lake, I had a 3 hour layover and he did not. So we both got a lot of reading done. Which was good, seeing as this was the allotted time to brush up on (in his case) or learn about for the first time (my case) glacier rescue. Basically, what to do when one finds oneself or one's partner dangling from the rope in a crevasse. The whole subject is rather more complex than I could have imagined, but to boil it down, you are either the rescuer or the victim. If you are the victim, you are responsible for recovering from your fall, righting yourself on the rope, and if possible, ascending with a system of knots tied on smaller auxiliary ropes. This of course assumes you are conscious and not seriously injured, or that you don't freeze to death in a dark crevasse while your partner tries to figure out how to extricate you. The rescuer is responsible for arresting your fall by digging his ice axe into the snow and hoping he can absorb the shock of your fall. Once he's stopped your downward descent, he has to place "protection" in the snow. Protection is anything you can tie the load on the rope onto that will hold. There are various ways to do it, but basically you've got to put something in the snow and then tie the victim to it. For example, using a "snow fluke" (picture a shovel head turned backwards with a wire tied to it) carve out a trench for the fluke and the line coming from it, bury it, then clip a rope to it. Anchor the other end of this rope to the main rope with the victim on it, and gradually shift the weight from you to the fluke. Assuming it holds, build some other mode of protection and either tie it inline with the first one or ideally equalize the load between the two. Now you can actually unclip yourself from the main line, and repel down the rope and see what kind of shape your partner is in. If he needs immediate attention, you have to repel down to him to administer it. Once he is stabilized, you have to ascend the rope yourself in the aforementioned manner. After that, you need to set up a pulley system to pull him out.

There are several methods for doing this, and I found it particularly interesting that after they painstaking explained all of them, the casually mentioned that unless you are directly related to He-man or your partner is significantly smaller than you, most of the methods are completely hopeless because they only multiply your pulling power on rope by a factor of 2 or 4. Not only do you have your partner's weight to haul up, but also his pack, and the friction caused by the rope moving over the surface of the snow and invariably the deep groove it cut into the lip of the crevasse as your partner careened into it. So unless you can flag down some help, your only hope is to use a combination of techniques with multiple pulleys that only a sailor could properly appreciate (you know who you are).

So I'm reading through all this material, while practicing tying all the knots I'll need to facilitate them. I'm sure everyone the plane thought I was crazy, with a carabineer locked into my seat belt and ropes of every size and color tied onto it, each other, my legs, the seat in front of me, etc. [Aside: besides the actual climbing rope, I ended up with 8 other ropes of my own. More on this in the "gear" post.]

After my 3 hour lay-over and yet another airplane absolutely full of crying babies [Why is a mid-week flight from Salt Lake to Seattle completely full? Why is the plane full of screaming infants? Why do these people fly with young children? Why do we pay outrageous prices to be jammed into a flying tin can like livestock? Why do you think you can change your child's shit laden diapers in the seat next to me? Why do they only feed you enough food to keep you barely alive? Why is "The King of Queens" the featured entertainment on both of my connecting flights?] we got into Seattle. Matt called me while were deplaning to explain that he already had my bags, evidently they were ok to fly into Seattle with him but I was not. Gotta love the airlines.

Dad collected us at the airport and back to the house. We skipped the late night gear review before the shopping trip to REI in the morning since it was so late. It's astounding really how much stuff we had to cram into our packs for this trip. They both topped out at about 55 lbs when full. It felt unimaginably heavier than the 40 lbs I'd been training with.