Ice Climbing/Crevasse Rescue - 16 & 17 September 2006
Location: Ruapehu Hut
Organised and lead by Boon-Li Ong
Participants: Ben Lee, James Scarfe, Rebecca James, Marcus Bai (CNI section), Chris Fritz (CNI section), Boon-Li Ong
The concept behind this trip was to get first hand experience of arresting a climber’s fall into a crevasse and then initiate a crevasse rescue on the assumption that the fallen climber is incapable of assisting with the rescue. If only the weather complied. The walk up to the hut on Friday night was almost perfect – not a cloud or climber in sight. But that bitterly cold wind. Worked quite well as an incentive to make double time towards the warmth and comfort of the hut.
Saturday morning started with indecision about what to do – to summit or not to summit, that is the question. By the time a decision was made to head up to the summit, the clouds from the west blew in and reduced visibility down to 100m.
Then it cleared up. Then it clouded in. And rinse and repeat five times. Then the cloud stayed for good. But all was not lost! We headed out to Delta Corner for a bit of ice climbing. Yes, there was ice mixed with snow and other white crusty stuff. Marcus had fun playing with his brand spanking new ice screws. Chris had fun playing with Marcus’ formerly brand spanking new ice screws. Ben got to play with his new ice screws too. And I got to clean Ben’s ice screw. Rebecca got to try some steeper stuff that would normally be outside her comfort zone. And James pranced around the rock at Delta Corner. After some fun in the ice, snow, rock, wind and clouds, we headed back to the hut for lunch and some rope work in the hope that the weather would miraculously clear up later in the day. And we did more rope work in the hope that the weather would somehow clear up. Eventually, we decided to brave the weather and headed outdoors for the crevasse rescue exercise.
Not all of us lasted very long outdoors. By the end of it, there were only four of us playing in the snow. The others retreated indoors.
Evening entertainment included bench and table traverse, the phonebook game (“I wanted to go down but I wasn’t allowed to!” – Chris) and the chapstick game (won by Rebecca, naturally). There was the occasional trivia such as working out a strategy for four blokes to cross a bridge in less than 60 minutes and whether it was possible to cross a some bridges on a couple of islands without crossing them twice (trivia courtesy of Greg Virtue).
Sunday morning and the weather hadn’t improved. Time to bail out.
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