This past weekend I had the opportunity of joining Portland Mountain Rescue and other professional rescuers for a three day avalanche course. This course went beyond what I learned in my level one course a few years ago and there was a ton of useful information that I hope I can absorb from my notes over the next few weeks. Our instructor was Ian Tomm, the operations manager for the Canadian Avalanche Association, he was awesome!!!! If you are reading this post and you do any sort of backcountry skiing you need to check out their web-site and the new Avaluator trip planning system that they are introducing this year. This is a great tool to assess risk when going into the backcountry while you are in the planning phases of your trip. I can only hope that something like this will catch on the the U.S. and that we can have a similar database of BC ski routes. In addition to learning about the Avaluator trip planner we practiced a new search method for finding multiple beacons, terrain evaluation and route finding, snowpack analysis and a rescue scenario. It was non-stop from start to finish and I had a great time. PMR is a great organization and I am proud to be a part of it. It was a beautiful day on Sunday and here are some pictures I took. I also included some pictures of Saturday the Reuben took of us girlies trying to get the Rutschblock to fail. No such luck, we have an enormously stable snowpack right now.
Trying to get the Rutschblock to fail, unsuccessful
At least we had fun trying
Chris and I having fun doing compression tests
Cool clouds
Dome cloud at about the 9000' level
Mt. Jefferson
Our trusty PMR truck
