3 Easy Ways to Change Lead While Climbing a Glacier

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In the list of hazards that bring me the most concern, there is the top tier: avalanches and lightning. Both can be mitigated in the field, but I tend to simply avoid avalanche terrain during avalanche season, and I tend to not go out up high when lightening is in the forecast. For both, I find avoidance of the risk to be my go-to strategy, rather than mitigation.

(Keep in mind, I don’t backcountry ski due to three ACL reconstructions on my right knee, so there isn’t really any payoff for me to be on mountain faces that are at avalanche slope angles the way skiers get a payoff.)

Then there are all sorts of other, more persistent risks: seracs, rock fall, and crevasses. They are dissimilar to the above that they can be harder to avoid (if you are after a specific route in which those dangers exist; you could always choose another route). They are similar to the above in that they feel (they aren’t, but it feels that way) rather random. Sure, it comes down to freeze/thaw and temperature and snow-line altitude, and, and, and… but the feeling is: be under the serac for as short of time as possible, or don’t be in the fall line in case a rock comes down, or maintain rope management diligence to reduce the consequences of a crevasse fall (amongst other mitigating tactics).

Of the three I just mentioned, and there are others I could put in the same category, crevasses are the ones that have a more prolonged exposure risk. You might be able to scoot across the fall line of a serac, but you are likely in a crevasse field for prolonged minutes or hours. When crossing a crevasse-pocked glacier, we need to stay diligent for a much longer period of time, and time exposed to a risk might be the single biggest impacting factor translating to the likelihood of a risk coming to fruition.

Think about spending half a day walking on ground you can’t trust. Can you maintain a level of focus, while expending the energy of moving uphill, for that long? The answer, for most of us, is, “yes.” This isn’t a “gotcha” rhetorical question. But rather, I’m making a point of emphasis: you really do have to maintain focus for long periods of time when crevasse danger is real. So, seemingly innocuous moments, like moving someone from the trailing end our our rope team to the leading end, still requires appropriate rope management and diligence.