Mountaineering experience

[pozorvlak]

"What you need is combat experience. That's what keeps you alive in real combat."
"OK, but how can you tell the difference between combat experience and real combat?"
"Simple. If you're alive at the end, it was combat experience."
(From The Ballad of Halo Jones)
Saturday's trip to the hills started inauspiciously: I slept through all my alarms, and

Comments

Re: Mountaineering

[pozorvlak]

Thanks a lot, that's really helpful.

I'm not sure what the nurse was getting at: I think he meant that, as the leader of the party, I was responsible for the safety of my less experienced friend, even if I wasn't directly to blame for her injury. If so, I can see his point.

Not bringing helmets was definitely a mistake, and I don't think I'll be making it again. They're a bit awkward to carry, but they're pretty light, so there's not much excuse if you've got one. Persuading the people I go walking with to shell out for crampons and axes might be tricky, but it's worth a go.

Névé - thanks, I knew there was a proper word for it :-) That sounds exactly like the stuff we encountered. "Crud" isn't quite right, anyway - I think crud's meant to be névé that's been cut up by skis (and ideally refrozen again, for maximum horribleness).

In hindsight, I'm not sure why we made the decision to glissade. It was a big smooth snow slope, and I think it looked like a tempting way of losing some height quickly. I think you're right about me judging that I could do it and assuming she could too. There's actually a picture of the slope we did arrest practice on here - we practiced a bit to the right of the footprints (scroll down a bit). A nice length for practicing on, and the névé meant we had to engage the axe to stop, but it wasn't as steep as some of the slopes we encountered later.

Yes, we both had head torches :-) Jo had a survival bag, and I had a space blanket thing - I think I'll get a survival bag as well. Good tip on the dry bag, thanks. Losing the car keys would have been a big problem - there's a spare set, but it was back in Glasgow, and by the time we'd got down the last train had gone.