Nisqually

So last year’s crevasse rescue outing was pretty awesome, so I was pretty stoked about this year’s outing. I was hoping for some good weather, but for the third outing in a row, we were in a cloud, and instead of rain, we had a bunch of snow.

The morning started off with Alex forgetting his ice-ax, so Luke and I went back with him to the parking lot so he could retrieve it; while the rest of the team continued towards the moraine of Nisqually Glacier

We booked it back up the mountain and met up with the team about 10-minutes after they arrived. Students were flaking out the ropes for the trip onto the glacier! Not gonna lie, I was pretty tired…

We had students put on, and practice with walking with crampons, but since the conditions didn’t warrant crampons, we had them take them off after they went up and down a few slopes. Also, when Luke, Alex, and I were heading down to retrieve Alex’s ax, we had passed three climbers that were heading up to Camp Muir. Shortly after the crampon practice, they showed up, asking if they were on track…

They had gotten a little lost in the weather, and were actually supposed to be up towards Panorama Point. Luckily, the weather broke just long enough to show them a path (up that slope, and further up towards the mountain… womp! woomp!).

Soon after, we set off on our rope teams!

Mark led the way, and that blob of a person in front of him was Pae on the second rope team. Devin brought what seemed to be an infinite number of wands to keep us on track.

Every once in a while, the clouds cleared a bit, so you could see juuuuust a little bit more… like this instance when you could see the rest of my rope, Youssef and Clare!

It was around this time when another pair of climbers passed us heading the opposite way. They too were lost, and were supposed to be on their way to Muir. Instead, they blindly followed our steps out to the glacier… #KNOWYOURROUTE

Hey look! you can see THREE people now!

After a little while, the clouds broke even more, which gave us decent views of the other teams setting up near the crevasse!

A closer shot of that ice cave and the serac? is that considered a serac?

When Devin’s rope team arrived at the crevasse, they set a fixed line; so the remaining rope teams could file in safely. Once we were there, we had the students build snow anchors for the rest of the ropes. Here, Mark is building two dead man anchors for one of the belay stations.

Remaining students setting anchors for the two ropes that we’d use for Z-Pulleys

That view!

After everything was setup, we started lowering students into the crevasse so the other students could build a z-pulley to pull them out! Devin and Pae were by the lip, sending down encouragement in the form of snowballs!

David was on belay for the second rope, happily staring into the never ending wind…

Clare getting lowered into the crevasse!

Later in the day, I got a chance to man the station at the lip of the crevasse… it was much narrower than last years due to this year’s normal snowfall

Will trying to catch some Z’s… he ended up dropping his crampons, and I was sent down to retrieve them near the end of the day…

Throughout the day, Devin built a small wall in front of his belay station to block the wind…

I got cold and finally got to put my belay parka to use!

A look at the remaining teams

So after all the students had a chance to be lowered into the crevasse, we still needed to run one student (Mark) through the middle portion of the z-pulley. Thus, I was into the crevasse. Mark would work with Alex on pulling me up via a regular z-pulley. Meanwhile, Pae was also dropped in so the rest of the team could pull her up via brute force. ALSO, the secondary objective was Operation RWC (Rescue Will’s Crampon). I was able to snag the crampon after getting lowered to the bottom of the damn crevasse…

Another thing… the wind and snow rendered my camera inoperable (when my camera gets too wet, it stops reading the memory card), so I borrowed Alex’s camera for the trip into the crevasse (thank you, Alex)

After getting a shot of her, we traded gear! Nothing like passing shit around in a crevasse with huge gloves on! I’m surprised we didn’t drop Will’s crampon a second time…