Learning about glacier travel in the PNW

Hi all - ive been living in the great PNW 5 years now and this is my 4th year touring on my splitboard. I've been loving every minute of it. I love the endless options for touring in our area.

Given we have so much ski terrain on and around glaciers here, I'm trying to learn more about glacier travel. I've considered taking the glacier/crevasse rescue courses offered by The Mountaineers, but right now I don't have the money and I'm still exploring plenty of non-glaciated terrain so I'm not in a big hurry. But that said, there are a lot of tours in guidebooks and online descriptions that tour in or around glaciated terrain that I'm interested in exploring eventually.

I have 2-ish questions:

1) I imagine this will draw a variety of opinions but what are people's thoughts about glacier travel and safety in general? There seems to me to be a range of glaciated terrain from big, steep, heavily crevassed glaciers to small, relatively benign glaciers with little to no crevasse hazard. I don't quite understand how to tell the difference when reading a tour description, and I don't want to mislead myself into thinking that the "more benign" glaciers (think heliotrope ridge or paradise glacier) present no more danger than touring through non-glaciated terrain. That last part being said, it hasn't appeared to me just from observation that a glacier travel/crevasse rescue course seems to be a pre-requisite for traveling in glaciated terrain the way that that an AIARE course is considered (by most anyway) a pre-req for anyone entering the BC in the winter. Should it be? If not, how do you decide when and where you ski/ride on glaciated terrain if you haven't had formal training?

2) Besides formal courses, are there any resources out there for learning about more safely touring around glaciated terrain? I'm thinking less here about the rescue aspects which require proper training and equipment, and more just about how to identify, avoid, and mitigate crevasse hazard both before and while in the field.

I suppose at the end of the day that I'm wondering when I read all these spring and summer trip reports from a place like the paradise glacier if nearly everyone writing those reports has formal training on glacier travel or if people feel comfortable riding less exposed glaciers without training under the appropriate conditions. Then there's also what people actually do vs. what should be done to be as safe as possible. I'm sure this is a bit of a pandoras box but I'm going for it.

Thanks for all the info kids - I've learned a ton from this website!

O:

Great topic. My thoughts:

1. The focus on glacier safety should be in situation awareness/reading glaciers/understanding where and what the hazards are and how to avoid them, not techniques for rescue. i think you mentioned this. Much agreed. I think the way you learning this is by consciously observing when you're out and building your bank of examples and intuition as to how snow hazards work/look like.

2. Classes don't teach squat W/R/T situation awareness. Ok, they teach the basics, but not insightful knowledge. They focus on rescue techniques. Even further than this, they only teach these techniques once. To really get it, I think you have to practice it on your own, and figure out the tweaks/preparations you need for the best system for you. I learned x2 as much goin out with a friend after a course and just doing it ove rand over and talking about how to improve. I also think taking a good look at decision making is important. Avy courses seem to incorporate a lot of this, but glacier class I haven't really heard much. I think it's very important to be conscious to be thinking about how realistic you're being about assessing/mitigating dangers, not just following a guide/cook book method.

3. Resources: read accident reports and look for what the real hazards are. Everybody talks about falling in crevasses, but (at least on my local mt baker), the last two or three fatalities have been falling in bergshrunds/moats above falls ("The hogsback"), not falling in cravasses. I think looking at accident reports helps understand what the real hazards are.

4. Growth over time, surviving the learning expereince itself long enough to know how to survive the experience. The old climber dilemma in a nutshell.

Dave