You hear screams for help coming over the ridge, and you ski toward them. A
disaster awaits you. Avalanche! The slope face has torn free and slid
to the bottom of the gully. A skier lays nearby, disoriented, his leg broken
by blocks of snow the size of Subaru Outbacks. Far across the avalanche's path
you see another skier, equally dazed, pointing frantically to the huge deposit
of snow stretching the length of a football field into the canyon. There are
people buried out there. You have half an hour to find them before they're dead.
That scenario was the final exam presented to a class of 12 students of Glenn
Kessler's popular weekend Avalanche Safety Course on Mount Hood.
With more and more skiers, snowboarders and snowmobilers seeking the solace
of the winter backcountry, the likelihood of situations like this increases
every year. And so for 11 hours on a Saturday, I learned what makes an avalanche
happen--from the weather conditions that make an area avalanche-prone to the
type of snow accumulations that indicate a mountain slope is ready to slide.
I learned to read the terrain of a potential skiing area and how to avoid the
traps that the land had waiting for me. I also got to practice using the tools
of avalanche rescue--the metal probe, the shovel, the homing transceiver.
Sunday saw the whole class out in a snowfield a short hike away from Timberline
Lodge. All morning long we took turns burying and finding "bodies": beacon-transmitting
transceivers sealed in Tupperware. Then it was final-exam time: a huge, simulated
slab avalanche with multiple burials.
After a half-hour buried in snow, the chances for survival drop below 5 percent.
Teamwork, speed and thoroughness are essential. When our group saw disaster
before us, our training kicked in. We picked a leader. The leader assessed the
danger of additional avalanches and then sent two people over to the skier on
the far side of the avalanche track to assess his injury and gather info: two
victims buried with transceivers. One without. We switched our transceivers
to receive and headed down toward the snow deposit, finding the two victims
with transceivers quickly enough, then using probes and common sense to find
the victim without a transceiver in the densest area of detritus shortly thereafter.
Then we learned there was a fourth victim, unaccounted for in the post-slide
reconnaissance. A probe line was set up, everyone elbow to elbow, probing left,
probing right. Thirty-five minutes after the scenario began, we found victim
#4. Dead.
So, we lost one. Not too bad, especially considering how Glenn threw that last
victim into the mix on a whim since we'd found the first three so quickly. Losing
a victim was a good lesson, though. We weren't avalanche "experts" now; the
knowledge gained from the Level 1 class was only a beginning. We did leave the
class with a new sense of being able to handle ourselves more safely in treacherous
situations, along with an appreciation for just how dangerous nature can be.
