Mountain Travel and Rescue

Backcountry Ski Patrol Training

As an alumni member of Bryan Mountain Nordic Ski Patrol I’m still on the email list. When I saw the reminder that the Mountain Travel and Rescue (MTR) course was next weekend, it sent a shiver down my spine.

This is a National Ski Patrol course that teaches how to go snow camping for a night or two, get along with a group of old (mostly cranky) and new (overly enthusiastic) backcountry patrollers, and the basics of search and rescue.

Before I explain why I shivered, let me offer a little background information. When we started patrolling for the Forest Service in the Boulder Ranger District we had three distinct thoughts in mind for running the program.

• No dead patrollers.

• On the job training, by the, “Shadow, Learn, Do, Teach” model.

• Do laps and have a good time.

Backcountry ski patrollers are out there to help in any way needed, but as an overall mission, backcountry ski patrollers try to keep people safe by helping them avoid doing stupid stuff. Hiking into a blizzard in blue jeans and a hoody is a good example. Following the line of thinking, we were very clear that we did not want patrollers going in harm’s way, e.g., we wanted them to avoid avalanche terrain, stay out of the trees when the wind is gusting above 40MPH, in short, not do stupid stuff themselves.

We learned to work the backcountry by patrolling. And then we taught what we learned by taking new patrollers with us. This is called shadowing. But we also asked new patrollers to take the basic MTR and avalanche courses in their first couple of years of volunteer patrolling.

There is no sense to doing a difficult volunteer job, or any volunteer job for that matter, unless the work is rewarding in one way or another. For backcountry patrollers the reward is simply doing laps on beautiful trails with trusted friends.

The first year we put out a limited number of patrols for the Forest Service and learned much more than we expected to learn. One realization was that if we had to bivouac overnight, because we were involved in a search, it might be a good idea to know something about winter camping. He said.

We started the backcountry operation and trained for it at the same time. So after a couple evening lectures in Boulder, there we were in early April, climbing uphill on skis at Brainard Lake Recreation Area. At 10,000 feet, early April snow can be frozen, rutted crud that turns to mashed potatoes when the sun hits it and then re-freezes around sundown. We had either climbing skins or goopy wax on our skis so that we could climb uphill. And we had heavier than usual packs, because we were carrying extra food, water, and down bags for the overnight.

We reached a preselected campsite and set to work. One old hand started digging out a snow cave, and another cut blocks of snow to build an igloo. My patrol partner John Pope and I looked at each other and said, “Nope, we are not doing any of that.” And trundled off into the woods.

A number of good subjects are taught at the MTR lectures and in the field but, the shiver up my spine came from the memory of extraordinarily bad food, a cold night in a hole in the snow, and a BM in the woods.

Toward the end of my camping days, Blue Eyes bought me a Jetboil that is a self contained burner and coffee-pot-like device. My idea was to buy something dehydrated like, hard to believe, Stroganoff, dump it into boiling water and call it good by eating it all right out of the pot. That’s what I did without reading the instructions on the Stroganoff package.

Glop. I made semi-warm glop that tasted like chicken delight made with a very old and grumpy chicken who died violently tumbling off the roof of the coop. Hey, it was calories and I was burning calories quickly after the sun went down.

John and I had spent the afternoon digging out our shelter with avalanche shovels. It was an eight foot long trench in the snow, about four feet wide and three feet deep. We knew there was no snow in the forecast so we stretched our skis across the pit, tied our poles together to make a cross beam and then covered it all with a light tarp made out of rip-stop nylon. We tied down the tarp and put down ensolite pads for insulation, then rolled out the down bags.

Cozy huh?

Not.

First, it’s hard to get to sleep at 10,000 feet, having just come up from the flatlands. While we had patrolled up there all winter, we live and sleep in the flatland. We weren’t acclimated enough to the altitude to be able to sleep. Second, sleeping next to a friend who is about my size, and equally uncomfortable and who moves every 10 or 15 minutes is not conducive to sleep. Third, several cups of tea before bedtime leads to predictable results.

Second, getting out of a warm sleeping bag with the ceiling less than a foot and half away and crawling up a snow bank to arrive outside on hands and knees, and then having to stand in the dark without tripping over the paracord that held down the tarp, in short, was a pain in the ass. To have to do it two times in one cold night was moronic.

Dawn came with the temperature a balmy, for that altitude, 25 degrees. I was grumpy. John told me so. I had slept with my boots in the sleeping bag but they were still cold. The glop was asserting itself with some vigor in the lower part of my digestive system and I needed to take a dump.

There have been books written on how to precisely take a dump in the woods. I’ll try to handle this as delicately as I can. First, I needed to find a spot where I wasn’t exposed to the world. Second, once I found the spot I needed to unbuckle snow pants, drop the long johns, hold up base, mid-layer, and patrol jacket, while squatting down, and with the other hand hang onto a tree so as not to fall and then take a dump.

Delicately done? Right? With ski patrol, everything is done by the book, until of course, it is not. But in this case, the book says to pickup the product, package the product, and pack it out. The thought of doing this instead of just kicking a pile of snow on the product was one of the additional things that kept me awake most of the night.

But surprise. The product was frozen solid by the time I had my gear back on, proving to me that picking up frozen turds in a zip lock isn’t such a horrible thing.

So I wanted to wish all you new backcountry patrollers good luck with MTR. You’ll be glad you did it and shiver if you ever think of it again.

END

Writer’s Endnote. Never one to ignore facts (mostly) this is another ski patrol post. I thought that writing about ski patrol would be about as exiting to readers as a three-day-old turkey sandwich in the fridge. I was wrong. In mid-January I posted a piece called, “Ski Patrolling Ends” that got the most views of anything I’ve posted. Check it out at alanstark1@substack.com and then scroll down to Jan. 19.

We started with one subscription on October 13th, 2024 and that was Blue Eyes. Six months and thirty posts later we have 410 subscribers. Thank you. When we started, I thought Substack was all about just writing, but Substack is also a long-term marketing project. Which is annoying all the way around, but to succeed here on Substack, one of the measures is number of subscribers. This a long winded pitch for you to subscribe. A FREE subscription is available, just go all the way to the right on the subscription page and click on free subscription. Paid subscriptions are appreciated.

Not into subscribing to anything anymore? I understand. Buy me a cup of coffee, or maybe two.

I have zero influence over Substack. If I did, I’d allow anyone to comment on a post. Unfortunately, the only readers who can comment are paid subscribers. So if you want to comment, you can send me a note at alanbearstark@gmail.com In any event, thank you for reading Mountain Passages.

I am alanstark1@substack.com