Crevasse rescue incident on Coleman Glacier

Here is the photo from inside the crevasse looking up. You can see the two rectangles which is where my feet punched through as I jumped.

thx scoobydoo - now that's a sight I really would prefer not seeing anytime soon

Hi,
I'm the one that fell into that crevasse. The fall was shockingly fast....there wasn't time to yell falling or anything else for that matter!

When I fell in a crevasse on rainier, I didn't have time to holler either. Very weird. I remember just falling and thinking, at the time, it was an avalanche (it was January). I remember landing and looking to my right (I had turned around somehow) into blackened space with wisps of light hinting at the depths. If I had leaned right instead of left when I sat up, I would have fallen much, much further.



I didn't feel the same climbing for about a season after. Made me think a lot more. You can see my see my skin track behind me in the photo above which is where i fell and climbed out. Where the snow is seen is the only place it reconsolidated. This crevasse collapsed in a much bigger area than you can see...

Glad you are safe and I thought I'd share my wild experience, too.

Jason/Scoobydoo:  thanks for the scary but fascinating pictures.  Glad you both made it out OK out of your respective "incidents".

Jason:  I'm curious, how was the snowpack that year and the weather that day?  Newby question here ....  I'm sorta thinking that given good visibility like you had, crevasse falls in January are VERY rare unless you have a really thin snowpack and/or warm temps (??)   And which glacier was that on? 

Double E. this fall was on the Ingraham Direct route on Rainier at about 13.5 in 2001(?). There were high winds on the upper mountain (that picked up late in the day) and, being early january, the snow hadn't had time to build up a good solid base. Overall, this time of year between whenever the first snows come and january is the time of year that glacier travel worries me most. Crevasse danger is high then and I don't think you hear of many incidents because there aren't that many climbers out and about.

Jason/Scoobydoo:  thanks for the scary but fascinating pictures.  Glad you both made it out OK out of your respective "incidents".

Jason:  I'm curious, how was the snowpack that year and the weather that day?  Newby question here ....  I'm sorta thinking that given good visibility like you had, crevasse falls in January are VERY rare unless you have a really thin snowpack and/or warm temps (??)   And which glacier was that on? 

The lesson I picked up years ago is that unless completely bridged and not active, the likelihood of bad bridges in winter has to do with the rate of snowfall vs. the rate of glacier movement. I went in on Glacier while skinning with Carl Skoog 15 years ago. The crevasse had a "bridge" of 8" about 2' wide, then a lip of 2' thickness, 4 feet wide, then nothing for the next couple hundred feet. Lucky I caught myself with my elbows on the 2' thick lip. There hadn't been a lot of snow in the spring of '92 and we were in an active area, so.... The picture of the January incident shows the same thing, thin dry bridge on an active glacier. Recall there were six weeks of very dry, warm weather in January - early February this past winter. So the lesson is: if the glacier is active, and snowfall rates are low, all bets are off, even in winter.

I have the feeling that since the mid-80's some glaciers or portions of glaciers have essentially been inactive; little or no motion at all. My sense for that comes from the fact that the crevasses on these slow glaciers seem to always be in the same place....all that happens is that the old crevasses get bridged every year and then at some point in the summer fall in. A good example would be the Quien Saber - all but the very upper part, or the Sloan Glacier. Even the Heliotrope margin of the Coleman seems very stagnant (although the main corridor is very active). The Coleman moved very little on the Heliotrope edge until after the banner 98-99 snow year. About one year later the crevasses patterns seemed to change as the heavy accumulation must have sped up the glacier after some lag effect. (I don't know what the Coleman is doing now, relatively speaking, although coverage this year is very good above 6K).