SNOW AND ICE CLIMBING THIS YEAR WITH RICK AND FRIENDS
   I was ice-climbing with a guide in Utah several years ago. "Ice axe arrest is bull", he said. "Most any snow slope soft enough to arrest a slip on, you don't need no axe to arrest with. Stiffer snow where you need an axe to arrest is so perfect for crampons, you shouldn't be slipping and falling anyway. And on the steep, boiler-plate stuff where you very well could be falling, a falling climber likely couldn't get a pick planted without ripping his arm off."  I told him that I thought there were cases where you could be roped up on "ice axe arrestable snow" and you wouldn't be able to arrest a fall caused when your rope partner slips and starts pulling you down with him.  "Well, there's that. But I would never tie up with an idiot like that. Unless, of course, he happens to be payin' me", he said, looking at me.
   At home here on snow and ice in the Cascades I think of that conversation quite often, and I always ask myself a series of questions when I'm looking at a snow slope to climb.
1.    Am I or my partner(s) likely to fall on that slope and why?
2.    What would be the consequences of a fall?
3.    If I take a roped fall, could my partner arrest my fall on this slope?
4.    Do we need intermediate protection?
5.    Can we protect it?
   In February of this year, I went to climb Whitehorse Glacier with Chris Danilson, Brian Heinrich, Rob Seip, and Don Slack. It was a beautiful cold clear day and it would feel good to get some winter elevation gain. Getting out of the brush and putting on crampons, I got a chance to look up and down the route and assess the situation:
1.    There was a good chance (>1:1000 is enough for me) that someone would fall on that slope because it was steep; in some places it was icy, some places powdery, and in some places crusty on top of powder. Not to mention hidden crevasses.
2.    Consequences of a fall? The faller would go into a crevasse if he were lucky, otherwise we'd look for him near Darrington.
3.    Nope. If I fell roped, I'd take my partners with me. Or they would take me with them.
4.    Duh, yeah!
5.    Oops. It was perfectly un-protectable snow conditions. Maybe huge pickets and major excavations would hold a fall, but probably not.
   So, our choices were to either (a) turn back and go for a hike somewhere, or (b) climb solo-style, un-roped, as fast as we could go, every man for himself, while trying to stay out of the other guys' fall lines. To see what decision was made, read again the party members listed above. It was mid-March before my sphincter tightness returned to normal levels.
   April saw class outings to Mt Higgins and North Twin Sister. The snow around Higgins was classic Western Cascades mid elevation spring mush. Post-hole heaven. The students' greatest challenge with the ice axe arrest drills probably was to work up a fall worth arresting, with or without an axe.
   We found some slopes steep and stiff enough to make ice axes useful on the north side of North Twin Sister's west ridge and the north slope. A small party of us bailed off the west ridge to the north, rappelling down a steep snow-filled couloir. For these kinds of rappels, it's good to holster your ice axe in a gear loop and have it long-leashed and lock-binered to your climbing harness. That way, you can un-holster and anchor yourself picket-style before coming off rappel.
   While I'm thinking of it, there is an ill-conceived fad I've noticed among some climbers of short-cutting the ice axe to harness connection. They forego donning their harnesses, instead threading their backpack waistbelts through their ice axe leash wrist loops before buckling their packs. If you are one of these folks, listen here: THAT'S A PLASTIC BUCKLE, KNOT-HEAD!! In the event of a good stiff fall, your plastic buckle will snap instantly, leaving you connected to your axe with nothing more than your cold, mittened hands. So, if you do manage to successfully plant your axe, it's likely to get torn from your grip. On the plus side, your ice axe will nicely mark for investigators the approximate initiation point of your fall. Your body will mark the end point.
   Anyway, the north slope, as usual, offered a great glissade. I like to stop the glissade and start the traverse west kind of early, forcing the students to use their axes to control their speed and effect a stop well above the runout. And all but two of the students did use their ice axes for the task. One of the renegades, however, opted to aero-brake via the "cart-wheel descent" method to control his downward velocity, while the other took the opportunity to demonstrate to his classmates (read "pins") the "bowling ball" contact-deceleration technique. This latter demonstration was met with considerably more lively interest than appreciation.
   May and June snow in the Cascades was, for the most part, more of the same. Besides post-holing and camping in mush, the mountaineering students and instructors were able to practice team arrests in mush and set dead-man anchors in mush.
   Some thoughts on crossed snow picket dead-mans: You'll probably only be using them in a rescue situation, and as such, you'll be putting a lot of weight on them- so they'll need to be backed up. An advantage to working on ice or snow is that you can place your anchors almost anywhere; as opposed to working on rock, where the rock will constrain your anchor rigging possibilities. And since the loading factor applied to your equalized anchors increases exponentially in proportion to the angle between your anchors and vertex of your load point, why not make that angle as small as possible? How about zero degrees for a load factor of just one?
   During failure, crossed picket dead-man anchors will blow out a volume of snow roughly wedge shaped, with the thin end of the wedge pointing at the load. The bottom boundary of the blow-out wedge is defined by the buried depth of the pickets and the sub-surface length of the connecting runners. Thus, burial depth and runner length and angle to surface are critical.
   To minimize the load factor, I like to rig dead-man anchors stacked in line with the direction of pull. If you do this, be careful to place your back-up far enough away from the primary anchor so that the potential blow-out wedges do not intersect. Prussiks are convenient for equalizing the load between anchors, as well as transferring the load from an arrested team or some other emergency anchors.
   Not until Fourth of July weekend, did I get a chance to use pickets the way I like to use them- by whacking on them. Brian Heinrich and Angie Vandenhaak climbed the Adams Glacier route (on Mt Adams) with me. We carried six pickets, two screws, and an oil-can sized Foster's up the route and made about dozen or so leads out of it. I'd guess about 40 or 50 placements total, mostly pickets, and a couple screw placements, while the Foster's stayed in Ang's pack till we got back to camp.
   Rained out of the North Cascades in August, Brad Monrad and I accompanied Kirk the Virginia Wildman to Mt Hood. There, we wandered around and traversed the heavily crevassed Elliot Glacier to a rib that led to the summit. This rib ran out of ice about 900 feet below the summit and ran the remainder as a spectacularly loose and unstable heap of sand, pumice stones, and boulders. Weirdly enough, the other ribs on Mt Hood looked the same. Apparently, in later season Mt Hood (and possibly other volcanoes further south?) loses its snow and ice covering off the top and works down, kind of like a man growing a bald spot. In contrast, our northern volcanoes keep their ice caps and instead lose their snow coverings from the bottom up, sort of like girls raising their skirts. This is more as it should be. To summit, we had to drive around to Timberline Lodge and run up the easy side of the mountain.
   Finally, on the last day of September this year, I was able to climb the Coleman Glacier route with Jenny Baker, Don Jenkins, and Brad Monrad. The original leisurely plan was to spend a couple days up there to practice whacking pickets and turning screws. The weekend weather forecast, however, made a one-day trip necessary. The glacier was in great shape, all the crevasses clearly visible, and most of the surface perfect for crampons. There were a few stretches of blue-gray boiler plate bare ice that we had to negotiate, but they took screws well. In topping the route, we were able to witness first-hand the birth and development of a lenticular cloud, and for this I'm sure we are truly thankful.
    When you're climbing hard glacier ice, there's a lot of stuff attached to your person. If I'm climbing at the end of the rope, I like using two axes, one with a hammer leashed to my right wrist, and one with an adze long-leashed to a locking biner on my seat harness. Another locking biner on my harness has a prussik loop clipped into it. The climbing rope is tied directly to the harness, and routed through a locking biner clipped high on a packstrap. To make things cleaner and less confusing, I don't wear a chest harness and I hang the Texas kickers from a gear loop.
   Also hanging from gear loops or pack straps will be a couple pulleys, several pickets, runners, and ice screws. (This stuff is omitted from the diagram for clarity.)
   If I'm in the middle of the rope I won't wear a chest harness, nor will I biner the climbing rope to pack-straps. The middle guy's most important job is to clip through efficiently, and he can't do that with a cluttered gear setup in front of him.
   It seems like a rope team of three offers the best combination of efficiency and security. I've included two more diagrams, these depicting rope team negotiating a crevasse field with and without intermediate protection. The arrows show the initial direction of fall to the climbers when the center man on the team loses purchase. Note the vulnerability of the team on the right. Also, you can see why it is so essential that the middle man is able to clip through efficiently.
   Ice is a fascinating medium and for me, climbing it offers the most rewarding challenges of all climbing endeavors. There's a lot to know, and a lot of technique to develop and master and those of us working at it are having one heck of good time. You should think about joining us when the snow gets hard.
-Rick Rogers