Backcountry Awareness Clinic at Kirkwood

This is a review of the Backcountry Awareness Clinic at Kirkwood, collectively written by the participants. This review was originally a wiki that all of the participants had access to.

Quick Facts

Participants

18 + 1 people attended the clinic of which 6 were snowboarders, 3 were telemarkers, and 10 were alpine/downhill skiers. A few of the participants were intermediate skiers/snowboarders. The majority, however, were advanced to expert skiers/snowboarders.

Expedition Kirkwood indicated that 18 people was the maximum sized group they could handle (6 persons/instructor, 3 instructors total). On the day of the clinic, however, 19 people showed up for the clinic and all 19 ended up taking the clinic.

Kirkwood Folks

Fee Negotiation

Jon Copeland agreed to give Powderbound a discount off the regular fee for the Backcountry Awareness Clinic if we could get 12+ people to take the clinic. After finding around 12 people interested in the clinic, we set the date for Sunday, March 5. Jon then offered a larger discount if we moved the clinic from Sunday, March 5 to Sunday, March 19 since he wanted to send the BAC instructors on a special clinic the weekend of March 5. We gladly obliged.

Classroom

Instructors: Todd Rudhall, Bill Jeffcar, Jon Copeland

I felt that the 2.5 hour session was too long, and the time would have been more productive on the hill.

We got started a little late, but that's because we were using the conference room and had to be rounded up from Red Cliffs and brought over to the conference room. I think the conference room was probably much better than having the classroom session in the lodge. I thought the things we discussed were useful, but they probably could have given us background reading rather than spending that whole time in the classroom. Also, they weren't used to such a large group, and I think they got more questions than usual, which extended the classroom time a bit. I would have been happy if they had included more material in the handouts to refer back to afterwards, or if there was material to read beforehand. The instructors were all very knowledgeable and have a lot of experience with avalanches, backcountry skiing and post-avalanche searches.

Reading the forest service website (http://www.avalanche.org/~nac/basics/ski_index.html ) Ann sent out beforehand was definitely helpful - especially the "A Day in the Backcountry" section which discussed spotting avalanche terrain and digging pits and doing the tests. This is another tutorial site that is also useful: http://www.avalanche.org/~lsafc/TUTORIAL/TUTORIAL.HTM

Classroom was useful, but long. Seemed a bit disorganized when we started, and the delay and relative disorganization carried through the entire thing. A lot of the topics could have been introduced briefly or on the hill and better illustrated on the hill. A more solid outline for the instructors of what was going to be covered in what area would have been useful. We kept skipping back to previous topics to add this or that comment. The good thing is you could tell the instructors really have a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge to share.

RECCO Rescue System. Popular in Europe, not so popular in the US. Are they using it at Kirkwood and what's their opinion of it?

We talked briefly about RECCO. Jon seemed to think it was a good system, but in the US we are really not set-up for it. Kirkwood base does have a receiver, but individual patrollers don't. If you are backcountry, don't bet on anyone having it. Wear the type of beacon they present in the class as that seems to be the most universal and most likely to save your life if you should need it, particularly if you are depending on with-in the group rescue.

Beacon Basin

The beacon basin is in the area behind The Reut chair, toward the parking lot near the main lodge. They have 10 beacons buried beneath the snow, and the ski patrol can turn on/off individual beacons. In the beacon basin we broke into two groups for search exercises. They turned on one beacon for the first group to find – everyone did the primary search and secondary search, and then people got to take turns doing the pinpoint search. While one group was doing their first search the other group learned about searching for buried people who do not have functional beacons with a probe line. Then each group did a second search. There was some confusion about whether the group not searching should eat lunch while the other group was searching.

Pros

The system is pretty cool. It's good to know it's there to practice with, but you need to have your own beacon to use it.

Cons

Group was too big, no time for individual practice. If they could have had one group digging pits while another group was at the Beacon Basin, time could have been used much more efficiently.

We were pretty hungry at this point, but were discouraged from eating our lunches, even while the other group was searching. They told us we could eat while digging pits, but we didn't get to that point until about 3PM, and then we were encouraged to help dig the pit rather than eat.

Some of us really never did get a chance to eat because there was not set time period for eating.

Lunch Bags

Lunch bag contents: Orange, sandwich, granola bar, cliff bar, chips. No Cookie Boy!   :(   Bottle of water (no soda).

On The Hill

Kirkwood Trail Map

All Together

This group was also too big, as they didn't split us up until the very end. There was too much waiting and not enough individual attention. The principles of route selection, etc were mentioned but with only one run, there was not much emphasis on it. I felt that too much attention was focused on rescuing someone from an avalanche and not enough on avoiding them in the first place.

The instructors asked if everyone was comfortable taking chair 10 (Wagon Wheel, "The Wall"). Everyone indicated that they were. The instructors decided not to break us up into groups, and we all met at the top of the wall lift. We skied around the first set of rocks and skied through the chute at the top. It took a long time to get all 19 people through the chute, especially since it was a little too challenging for some in the group (I think that many people who ski that lift might not like doing that chute).

The chute is narrow and can be intimidating, although it does open up quickly and is less hard than it looks from the top. The open part of the slope is at least a black diamond if not a double black, and then we skied in the trees when it got less steep. The clinic is advertised to strong-intermediate and up - I don't think our run would be "super-easy" for a strong intermediate skier. I think that anyone who can comfortably ski the Wall chair could make it down that run ok if they are comfortable skiing in the trees, and I'm sure that if people had said they weren't comfortable skiing the Wall chair, they would have chosen an alternate route.

While we were waiting, we talked a bit about the weather, the wind, and the slope direction - this was the only time we did this, so the people who went last got almost none of this instruction. Then we skied down to the trees, one at a time in safe travel practice. They pointed out how to choose safe routes and to travel safely through the dangerous parts. This was a good lesson in why not to go to the backcountry with a large group with varied abilities – you get cold and tired waiting so long, and would definitely be tempted *not* to use the safe travel practive. Then we skied through the trees, and they finally let us speed it up a little.

As we got near the convergence of the two gullies, we prepared to do our field search. The instructors had buried three lift tower pads, two with transceivers. The scenario was that our group had seen three people not in our party get swept down in an avalanche. Todd broke us into groups doing primary searches, groups searching for the skier without the transceiver, and groups preparing to probe and dig after the search. In this scenario, it's important to let one person lead for each secondary and pinpoint search. Having more than one person try to pinpoint just makes it take longer. The take home message here was that it is almost impossible to find someone without a beacon – you'd have to be very lucky. We were looking close to terrain traps – trees and rocks that could catch a person. We looked near to where the other skiers (with transceivers) were found, and we had a bit of guidance from Todd ("Are you sure you probed in a 30 cm grid over here?"). We did find the body without the transceiver, but might not have without the "encouragement" from Todd. They used lift pads to simulate the bodies - they do give you a different feel when probing than ice or snow - some give.

Group 1

Guide: Bill Jeffcar
Group Members: Allen, Eli, James, John, Maria, Sherry

The first group to end the day.

Group 2

Guide: Jon Copeland
Group Members: Amy, Scott, David Barkin, Alex, Maggie, Brett

We split into groups for digging pits. We went into the trees down where the gully is flat. I was in Jon's group. We dug a pit down to the ice layer before the storms of the last few weeks – it was about 5' deep. We smoothed the walls and looked for layers of snow. The bad thing to look for is a heavy layer on top of a soft layer. I asked, and Jon said that if the bad layers are low enough (more than 4' or so below the surface) that it is not very likely to slide. Jon measured the temperature every 10cm, and he said if there is more than a 1 degree change over 10 cm, it means that there is a layer that insulates and prevents bonding between layers, which means it is more likely to slide. He said that it isn't something we would necessarily have to check, but that the partrollers always do it. We looked at snow crystals on a crystal card with a 10x magnifying glass. We did the test where you see at the different layers if you can stick your fist in, 4 fingers, 1 finger, or only the card. Another test was sliding a popsicle stick from the top of the pit to the bottom seeing at which layers the force needed to push through them changed. He used more popsicle sticks to mark the layers that had changes in force. We then looked at the snow crystals at the different layers to see if there was evidence that the layers were bonding well – round crystals are bonding well, square crystals are not. We then cut out a column of snow the size of the shovel to do the compression test. We did that on two columns to make sure that was consistent. We talked about the Rutscblock Test, but didn't have time to do it.

Jon used and recommended the Life-Link crystal card and snow pit cards: http://www.life-link.com/accessories.htm

We didn't get back to the classroom until 5PM.

I would have liked to spend more time learning how to avoid avalanches and had a separate class on searching for people caught in an avalanche. We didn't spend much time at all discussing how to determine wind loading by looking at the snow.

Group 3

Guide: Todd Rudhall
Group Members: Ying, Sean, Inbal & David Landsberg, Paulhwa, Marc

It sounds like we did the same thing as Copeland's group. We did the pit analysis under Snowkirk chair, near the bottom of the hill, but in some good untouched land with a little slope.

Overall Comments

If organizing a group again, I would not go over their normal group size for the clinic. They may have said 18 (19?) was OK, but I don't think they were prepared for a group of that size. I believe their typical group size is 12, and I would keep it to that. They did not break us into groups or try hard to keep us on schedule.

It was clear from the beginning that this was not going to be a guided trip to the backcountry but a class on how to identify avalanche terrain, assess the likelihood of a slide, to travel safely in avalanche terrain, and to use avalanche equipment. I had thought we might go into the backcountry, but I don't think that staying in bounds adversely impacted the clinic, although maybe if we had gone into the backcountry we could have spent more time on picking out signs of wind-loading, looking at evidence of past slides, and looking at the vegetation to determine what slopes were likely to slide. I would like to see this clinic focus more on avoiding avalanches than on using transceivers - maybe offer a separate clinic on using transceivers (could be a pre-req) or make this a 2-day clinic with one day for transceivers nad one day for the avalnche avoidance. I'm not sure why other people in the class were expecting a guided backcountry trip, but in the future it should be made clear to all participants that this in not what the clinic is. Kirkwood's Expedition office offers other opportunities to enter into the backcountry with guides, and those interested in that should be directed to the correct events.

Ratings and Rationale

Some of the participants rated the clinic by chosing a number between 0 and 4 and gave a rationale for their rating.

0 = absolutely do not recommend the clinic to others.
4 = definitely would recommend the clinic to others.