Av Savvy

Christine and I took an avalanche safety course from The Mountain Shop last week. Wednesday was the "classroom" session where we watched some video and had a couple of people from CAIC (Colorado Avalanche Information Center) talk to us about snow instabilities, safe route finding, rescue, etc. It was all very interesting and I was glad I had recently read Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain because seeing the information for a second time helped solidify it in my mind.

Sunday we drove up to Cameron Pass for our field session near Lake Agnes. What a fun drive up. It's been quite a while since I've driven the R32 through Poudre Canyon without a dog in the car and with the road being dry most of the way up, the high speed canyon carving was a blast. By the time we got up to Cameron the winds were blowing snow all over the place, creating near white-out conditions. I was very glad that we had brought extra warm layers because it was quite chilly when we weren't moving.

One of the major items for the day was beacon finding practice, which was great because I haven't practiced much with my beacon. Hopefully I never have to use those skills, but they're absolutely essential. It was frustrating at first, but than it was kind of fun to find buried the beacons.

Following lunch, we did some touring to practice safe traveling techniques and later we dug a snow pit to learn some snow stability tests. Digging a pit was fun and interesting. The snowpack itself was pretty boring, but we were still able to find some layers in the snow and make them slide. It looks like we should have lots of good safe snow for our upcoming yurt trip. And now I'll hopefully be able to avoid dangerous terrain.