The equinox has come and gone and other than a bit more daylight to play in I haven’t noticed much of a difference! Yesterday was one of the coldest days I’ve had this season as we concluded another AIARE 1 Avalanche Course but first lets talk about how awesome the ice climbing conditions are!
Last Thursday, March 19th, I took former AIARE 1 student Kurt out for a day of Private Ice Climbing instruction. Kurt had a couple seasons under his belt (or harness) but wanted to get a jump start on his skill set. We headed out to Frankenstein and covered quite a bit of ground and information in a very fun filled day!
We started with a very big & blue Standard Route (Grade 3, 350 feet).
Standard Route at Frankenstein Cliffs
Despite it being a little bit of a PITA stopping in the cave I choose to do so as I think every first timer should see this cool feature. Experienced climbers who have seen it can greatly increase communication by skipping this feature and combining pitch 1 & 2 in a long 190 foot pitch.
Being first on route we see other climbers queuing up for a busy dayWrapping up pitch 2 of Standard
We topped out around 11:30 and made our way back down to the tracks for some lunch, then headed over to the Amphitheater. There Bob’s Delight, (Grade 3+ 100 feet) was still in great shape, though a little soft. After I led the route I lowered off and Kurt took a top-rope lap on it so we could focus on efficiency & technique.
Bob’s Delight
One more run up it to clean the anchor and I grabbed a shot of Kurt finishing the route.
Bluebird day!
We had just enough time to squeeze in one more route so we hopped over to Cave Route, and finished on that 75 foot Grade 3. Definitely a fun day out I look forward to climbing with Kurt again soon!
The next day began a full AIARE 1 Avalanche Course that ended yesterday. As is becoming custom this winter we had perfect conditions for the course, despite yesterday’s field day being quite arctic we still learned a lot and enjoyed some fresh powder in the Cutler River!
Making some snow pack observations below Hillmans HighwayDebriefing our Tour DayMy field notes from the day
Despite air temps far below 0 and even colder wind chills we had a really good day up there. Today I’ve spent catching up on errands while preparing for an AIARE 2 Course that starts tomorrow.
While the calendar may say Spring I am certainly still in a winter mindset!
While Spring is in the air today (48 degrees in North Conway) we have snow on the way this weekend and I’m not quite ready to hang up the skis or ice axes! Last weekend I was stoked to be back to work with a full 12 person AIARE 1 Avalanche Course, followed by a Mount Washington attempt yesterday. Conditions during the avalanche course were quite ideal both for the field sessions and hands-on learning.
Heading out through Crawford Notch for our Observational Outing on Day 2Practicing the quick & easy “Hand Shear” stability testLooking at some route options from Hermit LakeAnother round of Hand Shear tests next to the Little HeadwallOne of our groups spreads out while crossing the run out of The Sluice & Lip on their way to The ChuteA nearby group practices self-arrest in Lobster Claw GullyClimbing up to Left Gully
We poked around in the snow between Left and the Chute before heading half-way up Left for a nice run back to the floor of the ravine. The Little Headwall was enjoyable but the best turns were made in the Cutler River just below Hermit Lake. I had never skied in there before and there was some really nice un-tracked powder all the way down to the bridge. The rest of the Sherbi was a bit scraped and fast but pockets of powder could be ferreted out in the woods.
The next day I had the pleasure of taking the Brooks School faculty Tim & Leo, and Leo’s daughter Stacey, up on Mount Washington. Over the last couple years I’ve been able to work with Tim & Leo when they bring a group of their kids up to experience some ice climbing with EMS Schools. It is always a fun day at the cliff, and now Tim & Leo wanted to get an idea of a Mount Washington winter climb experience for a potential future student trip. Mount Washington definitely served us up some classic rock-pile conditions!
Ready to go!Tackling the steeps of the Winter Lion’s Head TrailRe-fueling at tree-lineWinds picking up, visibility dropping…
It was quite clear with the weather that reaching Lion’s Head would be a challenge. Bouts of white-outs would reduce visibility down to a dozen feet at best, and winds gusting over 70mph would start to challenge our balance as we got closer to Lion’s Head. Our tracks were filled in with blowing snow within minutes of us passing through an area… it was… typical awesome Mount Washington weather!
We reached Lion’s Head!Group shot before descending
We made our way down in good spirits reflecting on what a unique place we have here to experience, and I’m much looking forward to seeing these three again, along with a dozen or so eager High School students ready to experience the same type of challenge!
Last weekend we had a great course run out of the AMC Highland Center. Fantastic snow conditions and very interactive participants led to 3 knowledge-filled days as we learned about decision making in the back-country. I apologize for keeping this post so brief but what little free time I have right now I am dedicating to prepare for this weekend’s AIARE 2 Course. I’m pretty excited about the first AIARE 2 course of the season but I won’t lie and say organizing 40 hours of classroom & field sessions for a 4 day course isn’t the slightest bit stressful. At least Mother Nature is providing the best possible outdoor classroom!
It’s been another busy 5 days of winter fun in Mount Washington Valley and I’m just now getting a moment to recollect some of the fun this past holiday weekend has brought. It started last Thursday when I had the opportunity to take a few of the motivated Catskills Hiker Group, Team Danger Girl, up a very fat & plastic Willey’s Slide as part of their 3 Day Accelerated Mountaineering Course.
EMS Climbing School Guide Cheyenne styles up the center of Willey’s Slide with two guests below…Looking back down the route our two rope teams await their turn…Dorcinda picks the steeper, somewhat wetter, line through the bulges with Mt. Willard in the background…At the top and preparing to rappelBack at the bottom of the 700 foot slide this tight group poses for a pic…
I wasn’t with this group on their Mt. Washington Summit attempt the next day but it sounds like they had quite the experience up there with hurricane force winds and wind chills below -40!
Friday I enjoyed a day off and took advantage of the nice valley weather for a quick climb of Goofer’s Delight with EMS Climbing School Guide Mike Lackman. The route was in excellent shape, but this photo does not do it justice. It’s 180 feet of some of the best Grade 3+ ice around IMO, a great moderate classic!
Goofer’s Delight
Saturday started our 3rd AIARE 1 Avalanche Course of the season. As with all our avalanche courses this season we were booked with 12 students and despite a bit of rain during our 2nd Day Observational Outing we had fantastic snow conditions for learning about avalanche danger.
Mike demonstrates his Mammut Pulse Air BagOur group descends our test slope on Day 2 to learn about Snowpack ObservationsThe group practices some Hand Shear tests on our approach to the Little HeadwallJust below Little Headwall
With a Considerable Rated avalanche bulletin with plenty of new reactive wind slab potential along with some existing Persistent Slabs, and a fresh natural avalanche in the Lower Snowfields, the class had much to look at. I won’t upload my field notes from the day but here is the techno-babble gist for my previous students to see if this doesn’t get an eyebrow raise;
Small natural slab in Lower Snowfields, shooting crack on Little Headwall, CTE Q1 x 2 at 40cm & 90cm, ECTP24, and RB2 WB!
Layman’s terms, there was some really cool reactive snow to look at which re-enforced the groups decision to not travel into Tuckerman Ravine that day!
After the course ended on Monday I had one more day of work ahead. Julie had booked me for a private ice climbing lesson as a surprise birthday present for Ben. Off to the North End for their first ice climbing experience!
Looking down a beautiful blue North End SlabBen going over the edge while rappelling the North End PillarsJulie surmounts the first bulge…Then tackles the upper tier!
Introducing Ben & Julie to ice climbing was a great wrap up to a very busy 5 days. Today was laundry, dump, and swim lessons with my 3 year old son. Tomorrow will find me swinging tools at Frankenstein. I hope you are all staying busy and enjoying the winter climbing & skiing season so far… while we could definitely use some more snow the ice climbing is excellent right now!
See you on the mountain,
P.S. That contest for 2 free ice screws ends in 10 Days. Get 1 entry for liking North East Alpine Start on Facebook, and another for subscribing/following this blog! The link to do so is at the top right of this page!
It’s been a fun filled 4 days with two ascents of Mount Washington, a multi-pitch ice climbing day at Willard, and a half-day of ice climbing with the excellent kids of Brooks School from North Andover, MA at the North End of Cathedral. Winter is in full swing and I have a day off tomorrow to attend to the less exciting things in life like laundry & dump runs but I’m looking forward to some multi-pitch ice on Thursday and a booked avalanche course for Sat-Sun-Mon.
Lately every day brings another couple inches of snow to Washington and we have an excellent outdoor classroom to run a course right now. Given the latest headline news of a couple young US Ski Team hopefuls (one quite local) losing their lives in an avalanche last week in Austria and another recent fatality in Silverton, CO I’ve been thinking a lot about the White Mountain Avalanche Fund set up by the US Forest Service and how I might be able to liaison between EMS Schools and this fund to get some potential “at-risk” high-school students into an AIARE 1 course next winter. Juniors & Seniors at high-schools with strong ski teams are the most likely to be entering avalanche terrain soon after High School and establishing some solid decision making skills at this critical age could hopefully help prevent some of these tragedy’s in the future.
EMS Schools Management is behind the idea so my next step is to find point of contacts at regional high-schools with strong ski programs. Kennett & Fryeburg Acadamy are most local, but the abundance of private high-schools with great ski programs in NH is quite long, and it will take some research to make sure the right people are aware of this educational, potentially life saving, opportunity. My goal right now is to have at-least 1 AIARE Course next winter comprised of 12 high-school students most likely to ski in avalanche terrain in the years following their graduations.
So far this year we have had 4 in country avalanche fatalities, plus the 2 out of county, compared to 5 in country this time last year. The more sobering statistic is we had 35 fatalities last season… there is a lot of winter left! If anyone reading this has the names or email addresses of High School Ski Program Directors in NH/ME/VT please let me know, this recent tragedy can be turned into a catalyst of preventive education if we can connect the right people to the right resources…
See you in the mountains,
NEAlpineStart
P.S. Contest running until 1/31/15 for two brand new ice screws. Simple to enter. Like North East Alpine Start on Facebook for 1 entry, follow/subscribe to this blog for a second entry (link is top right). Winner announced on 2/2/15.
Yesterday wrapped up the second AIARE 1 Avalanche Course of the season. After a couple days of mixed classroom & field sessions the group was ready to plan a trip into Tuckerman Ravine. Mother Nature provided some excellent field conditions with an avalanche advisory listing wind slabs, wet slabs, and wet loose avalanches all possible, or even likely, if someone were to wander into a start zone or find that sweet spot.
Alpha group works through some trip planning before heading up the hillBravo group looks over some options for the day’s tourTwo of the the students preview some terrain choicesMy field notes from the day
We just had one spot open up for our January 17th course. All of our other scheduled courses are either sold out and have wait lists! If you know someone searching for a course this winter let them know!
Yesterday concluded our first AIARE 1 Avalanche Course of the season and conditions were great for such an early season course! Two EMS Schools New Paltz, NY guides and one of our North Conway guides joined 8 other aspirant back-country travelers to learn about decision making and risk management in avalanche terrain.
Beacon Range Check at the AMC Highland CenterExamining some Surface Hoar while on our Observational OutingDo you know how this is formed and why it is important in relation to avalanche safety?Team Orange conducts a trip planning session in the pack room of Pinkham Notch Visitor Center the morning of the tour dayTeam Black & Blue checks the updated avalanche bulletinSuccessfully skinning up from Hermit Lake into Tuckerman RavineThe skier group converses at the first aid cache before entering consequential terrain to make sure they are all still on the same page and to update their observationsTeam Orange is high up in the Sluice below the cliff band, you may need to zoom in to spot themTeam Black & Blue spreads out while crossing the lower center bowlTeam Orange visible just to the left of Right Gully while we make our way over towards The ChuteAll smiles during our run down the Sherburne Ski Trail at the end of the dayMy field notes from Day 3… I wish I had better handwriting skillz
What a treat it was to be able to skin all the way into the bowl so early in the season. The Sherbi was in pretty “fast” conditions and is definitely, as I noted in my book, in need of some love. Unfortunately Santa must have thought skiers where a pretty naughty bunch this year as he’s having his friend Mother Nature deliver us a hefty dose of our least favorite precipitation, rain. Personally I would prefer coal but what can you do. Let’s hope to bring in the New Year with some copious amounts of new snow!
To the 11 engaged participants of this first avalanche course of the season, thank you for making this a fun and productive 3 days. See you in the mountains!
Last week was the first week I could see the gravel in my driveway after a long frosty winter, reminding me it is time to recap this season’s avalanche courses before I get too caught up in rock climbing and adventuring with my ready-for-Summer-toddler-son!
In mid-December I flew out to Reno, NV and attended a 1 day AIARE 2 Instructor Refresher Course at Mt. Rose. It was mostly classroom based, which was a boon considering an almost non-existent snow-pack. Most of the material revolved around some changes in the AIARE course flow, mainly a split between a recreational/guide and forecaster bound flow chart. But I’ld like to focus on the Northeast avalanche course season.
Despite some big January rains this Northeastern winter was one of the best I have in memory. Not just for avalanche courses, but the ice climbing and skiing was quite good from December to today! We ran 8 AIARE 1 courses and 1 AIARE 2 course… and while I am slightly relieved they are over I kind of miss them already. I met so many enthusiastic outdoor people in these courses… from aspiring young back-country skiers to seasoned alpinists, each course was comprised of 7 to 14 like-minded individuals who love to spend time in the mountains. I really feel lucky to have a small part in these folks risk management education and to share some time on the trails with them.
It starts like this
Our first course started on December 28th, and as fate would have it 2 hikers from Massachusetts triggered and survived a nasty 800 foot avalanche down Tuckerman Ravine after getting lost coming down from the summit the day before our course! From reading the various media reports from the Boston Globe, Concord Monitor, and watching various news clips it was apparent they were not aware of the danger they were descending into and are indeed incredibly lucky to have survived. While they did not originally plan to enter this type of consequential avalanche terrain they lacked the skill in navigation needed for above tree-line low visibility travel that is in such short supply these days. Do you really know how to use a map & compass? Carrying them are not enough… but I will stop preaching. Some links to the media reports can be found here:
After that the season was relatively quiet as far as human/avalanche involvements were concerned… but things got interesting around early February. Back to back January thaws had us sitting on a relatively thin snow-pack. We then got hit with prolonged COLD… which set us up for a very high temperature gradient. So, all my attentive students from this season, what does extreme cold and shallow snow produce? That’s right… persistent slabs. To be honest when the rangers first started talking about it in the bulletin I resisted. We don’t have these issues in the East right? Well, turns out we do. For 3-4 weeks all I read about in the daily bulletin was persistent slabs issues. Felt like I was living in Colorado! But a little bit cheaper ;).
My field notes from a tour day
That January 11th rain crust became a household topic (well, maybe just my household), as the USFS snow rangers tracked it day after day wondering when something big might happen on it. As is consistent with the persistent slab problem, nothing happened… until March 29th.
On this early Spring day a historic avalanche rocketed the southeast snowfields on the summit of Mount Washington. Human triggered, and narrowly missing a large group of people who had been in the run-outs minutes earlier, the size and location of this rare event raised everyone’s eyebrows.
Photo from former AIARE 1 student B. GalluzzoPhoto from former AIARE 1 student B. GalluzzoPhoto from former AIARE 1 student B. GalluzzoPhoto from former AIARE 1 student B. Galluzzo
Former USFS Lead Snow Ranger Brad Ray confirmed nothing this size has happened here in at least 50 years! While it was inspiring to see so many ready to respond to this avalanche with appropriate gear it was a little disheartening to hear of the disorganization of the initial rescue effort (since no one was caught no harm no fowl)… but we should all read or learn a bit about rescue organization.
The only other real notable thing on my mind from this past winter was the support that Ortovox gave EMS Schools. This company produces some of the finest avalanche safety gear I have ever tested. I reviewed one of their shovels earlier this season here and have reviews for some of their beacons and probes coming soon. But beyond all the great gear they make they contribute SO much to avalanche education by partnering with AIARE and supporting EMS Schools with great gear. You’ll be hearing more about this company from me in the near future!
So that’s it, while I have 1 more Spring mountaineering ascent of Mount Washington planned my sights are on early season rock climbing and hiking around the Whites with my 2.5 year old son. Find guiding related stuff here, and toddler hiking/climbing related stuff over at my other blog, www.adventurewithalex.com.
Yesterday Dan & Paul joined me for a 1 day avalanche awareness course and intro to back-country skiing. While not an official offering from our course programs we are always happy to customize a day for someone. The crux here though is realizing there is only so much info and practical application you can squeeze into an 8 hour day. However we did cover quite a lot of ground, metaphorically speaking, when it came to basic avalanche awareness. The 2 hour skin up to Hermit Lake was filled with chats about snow climates, basic snowpack metamorphism, and types & characteristics of avalanches. When we reached the bowl we poked around in the snow under the Sluice and found some of the layers I had posted this video about the day before:
After finishing our observations we got a nice run back to the floor of the ravine before hiking down to Hermit Lake and skiing the Sherburne Ski trail back to Pinkham.
Dan eyeing his line from our high pointSelfie
Our Descent
We finished the day with a 1 hour companion rescue introduction at Pinkham, and Dan & Paul left with quite the appetite for more information. As Dan commented “Today has really shown me how much I don’t know”. That’s good to hear, and I expect to see both of them back for a formal AIARE 1 Course in the future!
To see what courses still have spots available please go here:
Just wrapped up an awesome 3 Day AIARE 1 Avalanche Course. Conditions couldn’t be better with reactive Wind Slab, Storm Slab, and Persistent Slab all making an appearance. 13 inquisitive and engaged students helped contribute to a very productive 3 days ending today with an excellent field day in Tuckerman Ravine.
Getting ready for a range check on our beaconsMike talks about measuring slope angles on Mt. Willard, Crawford NotchAM Trip Planning at Pinkham Notch Visitor CenterAM Trip Planning at Pinkham NotchBeacon Checks heading up Tuckerman Ravine TrailGetting close to Hermit Lake
I took a minute at Hermit Lake to review the shovel I have been using this season:
Staying warm?
Check out the pencil hard slab that failed under 1 finger slab while a student was digging out his chimney…Positive Tilt Test results
Some cool Compression Test Results, not sure why I am having an issue embedding these at the moment so for now here’s the link:
Our high point, just to the right of the mouth of Right GullyMy field notes from the day
Avalanche Awareness course tomorrow followed by an Observatory Overnight this weekend, and our one and only AIARE 2 course the following weekend. Two big storms in the forecast, so things should be exciting!
