Crevasse training was way cool, downright chilly in fact. Michele and the kids came down with me and spent the night. We went to Northwest Trek on Saturday and saw all the wild animals there. That was fun. We went up and hiked around some at Longmire and watched the pools bubble up. I had to carry the sleeping Henry - the boy refused to nap earlier - and now he couldn't keep his eyes open to check out the deer munching about. Not as heavy as our packs will be, nor as steep of a trail, but a start.
I was better dressed this time with lightweight nylon pants that the legs zip off to make shorts. Didn't do that, too cold and not a speck of blue sky. I was concerned that I would be underdressed, not so. Our guide was in a hurry to get up to where we could practice and I was soon sweating like an overworked peasant farmer. Plenty warm, shed the hat on the way and I remembered to put the hat back on when we got up to the precipice at about 6600 feet. I still need to figure out a sweat management system to keep my glasses from fogging up and becoming useless. Even remembered to reapply sunscreen frequently and happily my head didn't fry.
Before we took the bus up to Paradise, we spent an hour practicing knots, prussic, overhand, figure eights, clove hitch, etc.. At the precipice we started out building ERNST (Equalized, Redundant, No slack, Secure, & Timely) anchoring systems, dead men buried in the snow, stakes driven in, lashed together with rope and carabineers (scratch your nose, don't pick it...).
We then broke up into teams of three with one of us falling over the edge and the other two arresting our fall and rigging up the ropes to pull us up to safety. Single pulley, Z pulley, all pretty cool stuff. A little head scratching trying to remember which end of the rope to pull on after running it through pulleys and such and not let the pour sod dangling over the edge down any more. Realized that I need some more toys and chunks of rope so that I can practice pulling furniture around the house.
The weather was not quite miserable, but it was blowing, raining, and sleeting intermittently. Visibility started out at about 100 yards on the way up and shrunk to about 10 yards on the way down which led to an interesting trip down the mountain. We dropped into a bowl a bit prematurely and had to hike back up to get a better track down to Paradise. It was eerily quiet as we scrambled along trying hard not to lose sight of the person in front of us. We all made it safely back to the bus and made it back to RMI.
Back at RMI they had ropes hanging from the rafters and we practiced climbing up the rope using prussic slings. Felt a bit like Bond, James Bond (and Jim Whittaker) when he used his shoe laces to climb. Henry was cheering me on yelling "Yes! Dad, Did it!" as I rang the bell - that made the whole thing worthwhile, that and the big high five he gave me.
...To which JohntheClimbingMentor replied:
Wow-sounds great, Bob. Rob can regale you with our Vermont version of same, dangling from the warm and dry fly grid 30 feet over the Hyde Park Opera House stage. Thought I'd lost Rob in the lobby for a minute or two, but eventually we did manage to make it out the front door....
Hyde Park Opera House:
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