Avalanche Awareness @ Crawford Notch 1/13-1/14

SummaryAIARE Avy I Course w/MITOCers
OwnerIan Gray
Creation Date2010-02-26 22:09:10 UTC-0500
DescriptionParticipants: Yeuhi Abe, Marta Fernandez Suarez, Kathrin Sophie Herbst, Eddie Huo, Victor Grau Serrat, Ian Gray, Andrew McDonnell, Jim Mediatore, Shivin Misra, Eric Munsing, Monika Schleier-Smith, Cimmaron Wortham


A group of 12 MITOCers (and two dedicated key-holders!) participated in a two day AIARE Avalanche I training January 13-14th, 2010, at the Highland Center in Crawford Notch.

MITOC ran a similar session in 2009, but this year we were lucky enough to be taught by John Tierney, mountaineering guide, instructor and founder of Acadia Mountain Guides in Maine and his colleague and fellow guide, Silas Rossi.

Avalanche awareness training has become an essential ingredient for safe travel in the winter backcountry. The American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education (AIARE) provides the most comprehensive avalanche awareness and training curriculum in the country. The two day course focused on the basics of decision making in avalanche country: how do you interpret the shifting signs of snow accumulation, slope, weather and group dynamics to make competent choices about when, and when not, to travel in certain terrain.

The class lays a good foundation for understanding how to avoid causing avalanches, what their major triggers are, and what to do if you or someone in your party gets caught in an avalanche. There was lots of hands-on practice with avalanche beacons (PIEPS and Trackers), snow shovels and probes (my little Osprey backpack spent a few hours getting buried with a beacon and rescued multiple times!). We also practiced reading forecasts and avalanche report, route planning (always have contingency routes in the winter!), digging snow pits, and even had some brief refreshers on wilderness rescue in the winter.

The AMC was kind enough to donate a room in their Highland Center for us to use for the class time (about 3/5ths of the course is classroom time), where John and Silas ran through modules including many hair-raising anecdotes and footage of actual avalanches. The MITOC crew stayed at Intervale sprawled between the Yurt and the main cabin.

I'd highly recommend conducting this course in the future and continue building a relationship with Acadia Mountain Guides. A perk of taking the course through them (besides that both instructors brought phenomenal experience, humor and humility to the classroom) is that afterwards, all students can receive 10% off of equipment purchased at Alpine Logic near Bangor, ME.

Entire cost for the trip, per student, was $240 (which included some good breakfasts and a dinner cooking extravaganza at Intervale that had everyone chopping some type of vegetable or tuber). Only thing not included was costs of gas.

Many thanks to Stas Markman for being the mastermind coordinator for the MITOC crew, and for Yeuhi and Monika for taking care of logistics and leading!