Phantom avy info? 04/06/11

I am so pleased that everyone will recover and ski another day.  Thank you for sharing your stories.  This confirms my discomfort with the upper Phantom.  It may be a favorite quick trip for some (although it sounds like most people stay lower down in high avy conditions), but has all the warning signs for me: steep pockets of wind loaded slopes with trees and cliffs below and sun in the afternoon.  

I appreciate the technical side of the discussion, but I find myself drawn more to the psychology of the story.  Experienced backcountry skiers putting themselves in a situation that they knew was pushing the envelope a bit.  I don’t think it’s easy to draw a lesson from this story since being in the mountains in the wintertime requires pushing the envelope at least a little bit.  Although it’s always easy to second guess your decisions after an accident, I think all of us have pushed the envelope at times without incident and never regretted our decision making.  Bottom-line, all we can do is learn from our own mistakes and other’s mistakes and try to be as safe as we can without boring ourselves (e.g., I wouldn’t be happy sticking to sub 30 degree slopes for the entire winter).

The Rescue

The first team on scene was actually a private party, close friends of Roger's, who'd been scrambled by daveb after a text message from Roger alerted him of the situation.  They dropped what they were doing and sprinted uphill just ahead of the formal SAR response.  They must have connected with the SAR coordinators at the trailhead, because they brought up the first Cascade litter and some extra supplies. 

The next teams were only a few minutes behind them with the additional gear necessary to begin the extraction.  Multiple EMTs in the first couple of teams and, to my delight, a paramedic that I work with in Snohomish County.

Everyone should have the privilege of seeing smiling, familiar faces arrive on scene when you're hip-deep in trouble of your own making.  It was an enormous relief and, for me, the moment I really began to spin-down and start to relax.  SMR, SPART, EMRU, ESAR and all the other units did a great job getting us packaged up and moving out.  The whole thing felt more like a happy reunion than an unfortunate accident -- which, I guess, it kind of was.

Once we got moving I fully transitioned over to "subject" -- I briefly offered to help, but there were plenty of people and I didn't want to become a liability, so I hooked up with a friend from SPART and just tried to keep plodding downhill on my loaner snowshoes.  Everyone was in good spirits and Roger was taking advantage of the deep powder to collect his last face shots of the season from the comfort of his litter.  Drew skied out with Dan's skis, my single ski and managed to scrape up one of Roger's as well -- he looked like some kind of bizarre antenna array.

I arrived at the trailhead at 5:45.  Roger got out about an hour later and Dan just after sunset.  The debrief in the command vehicle was fairly straightforward, moreso because I'd been on the phone with several of them a couple of times over the course of the day.  I almost lost it when Anastasia showed up at the trailhead -- she and Andy had tried to deploy into the field, but had gotten caught in the four hour pass closure and arrived at six instead of one thirty.  I wasn't sure whether she was going to punch me or hug me -- thankfully the hug won out.

I know I speak for all our crew when I give enormous thanks to the efforts of everyone who came out to help, as well as those at the other end of the pager who may not have made it out this time, but routinely put forth such effort to help our fellow hikers, climbers and skiers when they're unable to get themselves back to the trailhead.  It was an honor to be on that side of the experience and to see the skills and empathy of everyone involved.

The Mistakes

This is lengthy, so I hope it's coherent.  Apologies if not.

As much as I can, I'll describe the things that we did wrong (or I did wrong) that got us into this situation.  Much of this I've chatted about with others in the group (at particular length with Roger) and I think there's a fair bit of agreement among us, but I want to make it clear that I'm really only speaking for myself.  Dan's already chimed in with his thoughts, which largely echo my own.  I expect some of the others will do the same.

Communication
Far and away the biggest problem was heading out on a High hazard day with an unfamiliar group.  I spend probably 95% of my time skiing with the same half a dozen people.  Having skied so much, for so long, with such a small group, I take for granted how natural and predictable our communication has become.  Chats about objectives, expectations, stopping points, red-flags... all that stuff is just par for the course and typically happens without any prompting.

This is, of course, no reflection on our group -- a great bunch of guys.  There wasn't any "rah rah let's go CHARGE!" vibe at all, it's just that we set no baseline for what the plan was and didn't have a quick group chat at any point about the day.  No "let's discuss again when we get out of the trees" or anything like that -- had we established those open lines of communication and set some expectations, I think we would have been more diligent in our decision making and likely turned around to harvest the goods at the Snot entrance, if not below it in the trees.

Establishing that communication is tough.  To that end, for me, I think I'm going to have to put much more thought into whether I go out with an unfamiliar crew in conditions that require frequent, open discussion among all members.  I think we could have quickly and easily set that up with our group, but we failed to.

In a way, everything else just sort of follows off of that.  I don't feel that there were signs that I was missing, but for whatever reason I had parked my decision-making brain in a much less active place than it typically would be.  Roger and I were chatting at the switchbacks about what we were seeing, talking about the snowpack, but none of that chatting every bumped up to a quick group huddle to talk things over.

New Behavior, Missing Data
Another new element, for me, was the time pressure.  I don't dawn patrol very often and I knew that I had to be back in town by 11.  We were trying to crank our way through the trailbreaking to get a nice run and it was clear that it was going to take a while.  I was making all my usual observations, taking in the snowpack, pole tests, hand pits, switchback cutting, noting the wind, etc etc etc.  This is obviously a great way to get a lot of small points of data as you climb.

The other data which I almost always collect is a few quick pits.  Quick compression and shear tests, then on we go.  But I didn't, and neither did Roger -- he told me yesterday that he typically digs for the same reasons, especially when he's been away from the region for a bit.

Now, I won't pretend that we would've gotten the shear or compression results that Andy posted above (STE, CT10, both Q1), though I will say that any of those results would have kept me down in the trees, no question.  I think the results themselves aren't as important to my point, which is that I was trying to make my usual risk assessment decisions with only, say, 80% of the info I usually have. 

Another way to look at it is this:  I was trying to make a good choice using a risk assessment model I was not as familiar with -- not as good at.  For the sake of expedience, mostly.  The silly part here is that the trailbreaking was so deep that I could have easily stepped out, dug a quick pit, stepped back in and been back with the group in a few minutes...  but I was already sucking wind trying to keep up.  It just didn't occur to me to stop.

The last, and probably most important, side effect of digging a pit?  I'm betting everyone would have gathered up in a safe spot, waited to see what was found, and we would have had a quick pow-wow to discuss the results.

Would they have swayed the decision to continue?  It's impossible to say.  But the lines of communication would have been open and I think that would have made a big difference.  At the very least, it would have given all of us a feel for how the others balanced their risk and choices, which is the most important piece of info we were lacking.

I should add that there are plenty of other things that we might have done a little bit differently, but I think that none of them affect the overall outcome anywhere near as much as what's above.

Wow. Thanks for the excellent write up Marcus, lots of food for thought. I was waiting to hear about the rescue, glad it all worked out in the end, get well soon guys.

I haven't posted here before but the candid recount of the decision making dynamics that Marcus wrote about reminded me of an excellent essay by Ian McCammon on heuristic traps when making decisions in avalanche terrain. This essay shines an objective light on specific 'traps' that skew our personal risk tolerances and/or cause us to defer our own risk assessment and acceptance to others. I've found it to be a nice reminder to vocalize opinions and open up discussion with partners when exposed to objective hazards.

Hope you all find it insightful:

avtrainingadmin.org/pubs/McCammonHTraps.pdf

Cheers,
Peter D.