SURVIVAL & REMOTE FIRST AID · Advanced Backcountry Judgement

CREVASSE AND GLACIER TRAVEL AWARENESS

13 min · Full library · written lesson, video in production

The point

After this lesson you can recognise glaciated ground and its hazard from a map and from the saddle, understand exactly why unroped sled and ski travel there carries a specific and different risk, and make an honest assessment of whether your party is qualified to be on it at all.

Half the answer, free

The Technique

  1. The first problem is that many riders arrive on a glacier without registering that they have. Under a winter snowpack the ice disappears and the ground reads as a smooth, inviting, gently sloping valley floor with better snow than anything around it. Read the map first: named glaciers, ice shading, moraine ridges running like railway embankments down the valley sides, icefalls, and contour lines that go strangely smooth and evenly spaced. Then read the ground: a surface that is too flat and too clean for the terrain around it, long sag lines and shallow trenches running across or along the slope, subtle steps, a slight sheen where wind has scoured. Trips that put riders on glaciated terrain are common in Alaska, western Canada, New Zealand, the European Alps, Iceland, Norway, Svalbard, Greenland and on high volcanoes, which is exactly the sort of terrain an Australian rider meets on their first serious overseas trip.
  2. Crevasses are not random, and the pattern is worth understanding because it drives every route decision. A glacier flows, and where the ice is stretched it cracks. It stretches over a convex roll, so transverse crevasses open across the flow above and below a steepening. It stretches at the outside of a bend and along the margins where the ice drags against rock, so marginal crevasses fan out near the edges. It tears away from the headwall, which gives you the bergschrund. Icefalls are simply that process taken to its extreme. In winter, snow bridges roof over all of it and hide it completely, and the strength of a bridge changes with the season, with temperature, with how much load you put on it and how quickly. A bridge that carried the whole party at dawn can fail under the last rider on a warm afternoon.
Still under the glass
  • Unroped sled risk, route selection, what real crevasse rescue demands, and the guide threshold
  • 6 more technique steps
  • The 2 mistakes that undo it, with fixes
  • The drill that builds the reflex
  • The safety non-negotiables

It opens when you book a trip that runs survival & remote first aid - these are the exact drills you run with your coach out there. Your booking unlocks this whole library.

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