Pirate Glacier School: Most participants left in an ambulance

Participants: Desmond McCarthy, Cove Beavan, Axel Rodriguez, Grace Li, Lexi Berger, Emmet Vannier,

Well, yes, it’s true, but maybe a bit misleading. Desmond drives an ambulance. He bought it from some guy on Craigslist. The lights and sirens work, if you’re wondering.

Glorious ambulance

People seem to like the trip reports where I get myself into a real pickle. This isn’t one of them, but I’m hoping at least a few people read this and are inspired to take the initiative to lead some of their own instructional trips.

The VOC gets bigger and bigger every year, but Glacier School does not. There’s a good reason for that: everyone needs crampons and mountaineering boots, the VOC only has so many, glacier school is gear-heavy, and organizing gear for everyone is hard. That doesn’t change the fact that 40 spots just isn’t enough and people who are keen are being left out.

I was on the list of people asked to be instructors this year, but I decided that they’d probably have enough instructors, and me taking one of their places doesn’t make anything better, but running my own glacier school in parallel does get more people out.

I started by inviting people on the glacier school list from 41 to 47, the first 7 people who were on the outside looking in. Some people from regular glacier school wanted get into mine and traded spots with those I invited, some got sick, so I ended up inviting 48 to 50 as well, but in the end still only had six students.

Until a few years ago, the dry school (instruction in the city, before the real trip) involved setting up a crevasse rescue, and people learned a lot. One year they were having a hard time getting enough instructors, and some gave the excuse that they didn’t have the time to do glacier school and dry school, so the dry school got merged with the pre-trip. It’s way better than nothing, but there’s a lot of material, so it’s a big opportunity lost.

We did a full dry school and practised hauling people over a swing set, sorting out roped travel, etc.

Having six students instead of forty opens up a bunch of options that would be logistically prohibitive for the large group. I’d picked Place Glacier, which is on the other side of the highway from Birkenhead. The trail up was quite steep and had a zillion fallen logs on it, so I went up with my chainsaw and almost cleaned it out before the saw went on the fritz.

We went up Friday afternoon and did the hike up mostly in the dark. The group moved quite quickly, and we’d made it up to the glaciology huts around midnight.

Waterfall visible on the route up

The scrambly bit just before the huts photo: Axel

We were out on Place Glacier reasonably early Saturday and did anchor instructions well enough, given the conditions. It was alternating between rain and snow, so people didn’t want to stop for too long at a time. We turned up towards Mt. Oleg, and the snow was starting to really accumulate to the point where it could hide a crevasse, so we roped up for real, not just practice.

We did a bunch of travel in the crevasses, including some places where you needed to jump and others where you really needed to use the axe to climb out.

Navigating around crevasses

Lexi awaiting rescue

Transferring the weight to the anchor

Our plan was to spend Saturday night on the glacier doing glacier school stuff and summit Mt. Oleg Sunday morning, but people were moving quickly and some were quite cold, so we crammed everything into Saturday so that we could sleep in the glaciology huts. We summited Mt. Oleg and did a bunch of crevasse navigation and two crevasse rescues with legit falls. On the way up to Oleg, Axel stepped on snow that looked just like any other and broke through into a crevasse. He caught himself on the edge, so people didn’t get to practise an arrest with no warning, but it really pounded home the lesson that it doesn’t take a lot of snow to hide a crevasse capable of swallowing someone.

Grace and Emmett on the summit of Oleg Photo: Grace

We got off the glacier at dusk. I had two ropes to deal with, so I was faffier. Grace and Lexi were a bit behind, too, so we ended up starting the hike to the glaciology huts five minutes behind the rest. It was dark and cloudy, so we didn’t have anything to look at. I ended up visiting the same place three times. The second time I blamed my stupidity, but by the third time, it was very clear that I was using my compass to circle a magnetic anomaly. We were still back to the huts at a reasonable time.

Everyone seemed really stoked to have done it, and I’d feel okay, at least in the sense of being confident that I’d be rescued, if I was incapacitated and dangling from a rope with any of them topside.

Scrambling down in the daylight

Hopefully a few people made it to the bottom of this and are inspired to make the VOC more beginner friendly by organizing something where people get exposed to something new and learn something.