Scheduled for yesterday was a one-on-one half-day mountaineering skills course. In this course we teach students the ins and out of using mountaineering crampons, from selecting them to sizing them, all the way to their simple but specific choreography using them with the ice axe in the more advanced pied français (as we call it), hybrid/international, and German/front pointing techniques. We also teach various flavors of self arrest among other things like employing and using a rope to aid descent. All standard fare. Of these teachings, most rely on the presence of angled snow. Steeply angled snow being ideal. But that’s where things were getting tricky. To provide a half day class, the snow has to be fairly local. But even in the usually-reliable avalanche debris fields at lower elevations, there was very little to look at, let along walk on. The snow line is up there somewhere, in the mists, out of reach for our needs.
This is where Cranmore Mountain Resort really bailed us out. We often work with the awesome Black Mountain in Jackson in the spring (with permission, of course), but at this time of year it would be a different story over there, reasonably so. That said, inspired by others in the Valley who’ve taught “snow pile mountaineering” as we’ll call it, Redline Guide Mike Cherim did have an idea and knew of some snow at Cranmore that might be usable and was located in a way that kept us and their customers and visitors safe and well separated. As it turned out we got to conduct our training on what passes as good terrain in late December of 2023, and the various walkers-by got to see us having some fun, doing our mountain thing.
To Cranmore: Thank you so much for letting us use some of your snow! We will hope for nature’s contribution for all!
