Back when we were in college, we'd help SAR up there thru the AMC club. I still follow the incident reports from time to time, although my SAR years are behind me. The MT Washington Avalanche Center publishes select incident reports for each winter season. The things people do are worthy of Darwin awards at times. There is usually a "lessons learned" section at the end that's interesting.
For anyone who's read similar incident reports, you know that the language is very dry and unemotional, just the facts. It can be instructive to review though. Sometimes it's rather blunt:
"According to the party, they were in the lower section of the Escape Hatch when one of them lost his footing and began a sliding fall. Unable to self arrest, he slid approximately 150 feet before slamming into a tree and stopping. The fall resulted in injuries to his back and legs. [more on getting him to a mountain shelter] The patient was reassessed, immobilized on a backboard and transported to Pinkham Notch via snowcat where he was transferred to an ambulance and brought to the hospital. We later learned that the patient fractured two vertebrae in his lower back and had numerous sprains and contusions
Lessons Learned: This was the third sliding fall injury in three days that may have been prevented with a quick self arrest. The surface that all of these occurred on is a very hard icy snowpack from the January thaw, which is difficult to stop on. If you don't arrest your fall immediately you will get out of control fast."
Yeah, sliding 150ft down ice covered mountain into a tree would be painful.
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Sometimes, people aren't so lucky:
"01-18-2008: At 9:20 pm on January 18 the USFS Snow Rangers were informed that a solo climber was overdue from his climb in Huntington Ravine. The overdue climber had signed into the winter climbers register at Pinkham Notch with the plan of climbing Central Gully in Huntington Ravine. According to his friends who reported him overdue, he had experience in many gullies in Huntington Ravine and had talked about Odell Gully as another option for his day.
A team searched the access routes into Huntington Ravine between 10:00 pm and midnight on the 18th. Due to snow stability concerns, search teams didn’t enter avalanche terrain until first light the next day to begin searching Huntington Ravine. Shortly after sunrise, the missing climber’s body was found in avalanche debris below Odell Gully. The climber was on top of the debris and died as a result of being avalanched out of Odell Gully. He was put in a technical litter, lowered 500 ft to the floor of the Ravine and transported to Pinkham Notch by the USFS snowcat."
Interesting phrasing: "died as a result of being
avalanched out of Odell Gully" You don't often here that as a verb, but, it's common in these incident reports... of course, solo hiking under gale force winds and snow in avalanche conditions is probably not going to win a lot of sympathy.
For your reading pleasure:
http://www.tuckerman.org/accident/accident.htm
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