Ski Day 8: Dumping at the Bowl

Wednesday, I was back on duty as the Hill Captain at Ski Bowl. Most of the crew from Monday's extended patrol day were back, as well as a couple extra folks including one of the guys from my OEC class. It had snowed quite a bit overnight, and the drive up was on packed snow all the way from Sandy. I thought about chaining up, but the Sorento was handling things just fine at 35mph, which was about as fast as anyone in front of me dared to go.

We had a bigger crew today than on Monday, but the previous day's rain combined with all the new snow overnight made progressing through the opening assignments a slow task. Everything seemed pretty well stuck in place, and there was rime ice on every inch of rope on the hill. Things were further slowed by the dud explosive from the early avalanche control (AC) work, which kept us off the upper bowl.

Since things were moving slow and I couldn't get up top anyway, I went down to help the lower bowl opening assignment get their work done. I checked, cleared, and re-set quite a good amount of rope line. It wouldn't have been much work, but the height of all the rope needed to be adjusted for all the fresh snow. Tedious, but important.

We were light on bodies up top when the upper bowl chair was finally cleared to load, so I headed up to help out. I relieved one of my patrollers who was on outback gate duty, explaining to the anxious public that the outback was still closed, and that it wouldn't open until all the AC work had finished. It was pretty cold up top, but I managed to stay warm whilst chatting away with the folks who kept asking when we'd open up the outback. I saw a couple off-duty volunteer patrollers, as well as a couple off-duty paid patrollers - one of whom was the guy who helped us out of the woods on Monday night. He definitely earned his turns today.

I finally got word over the radio that I could open up the outback, and I damn near got trampled to death by the crowd that had amassed. I had told them I would need to pull the rope gate, but as soon as I said, "we're opening 'er up!", everyone started rushing me. I finally got the rope out of the way, and got clear of the Running of the Bulls. Crazy. I can understand it, though - all that fresh snow, untracked except for the 4 patrollers who were doing the blasting to make it safe.

I stayed out of the outback, though. I was going to head out there, but kept hearing that the snow wasn't that great in some spots and that the Log Road out of the outback was still pretty dicey. I guess there was plenty of break-thru crust out there that could kind of mess you up, and it was kind of wind-scoured in a lot of areas. I ended up finding a lot of nice little stashes of sweet pow in the upper bowl area, either around the trees or on certain faces of the bowl. Pretty much anywhere you skied was nice, though. There was enough fresh on top of the groom on Reynolds that I was getting face shots even over there.

My day was largely uneventful, but my patrollers sure got busy. We kept getting radio calls for all sorts of things - dropped ski poles, missing persons, and of course, injuries. The handful of cases we had were fairly routine in terms of the type and severity of injuries, but some of the circumstances of the involved folks made things kind of peculiar. Everyone was handling all the craziness very well, and I'm proud of the crew I had up there.

The missing snowboarders that KGW reported on yesterday was kind of a crazy story. I don't know how much I can really go into detail, but there was a bit more to the story than was reported. One of my guys got the initial call from the tickets booth at the east side of the area I think sometime after 2pm, and after a lot of radio and telephone conversations with the paid patrol staff, we had started to prepare to coordinate a search operation. Turns out the missing boarders' friends had already called 911 and thus already gotten the county sheriff's office involved. Since the missing people were out of bounds, that's ultimately who would be doing the SAR work anyhow.

I coordinated our sweep of the outback and had one of my experienced guys lead it while I manned the radio at Rescue Center and waited to be relieved by the night crew. The radio chatter about the missing 'boarders kept on going after we were relieved, but before we packed up and left the Palace for the evening, it sounded like things were fairly well in hand.

Traffic, on the other hand, was fucking terrible. Going over the bridge over US-26 to get back to Govy, I looked uphill towards the east, and it was a colossal parade of headlights. Good thing I'd been invited to have a beer with some friends staying in Govy. I left there about 7:30pm and while pulling out of Govy was easy, I quickly caught up to the tail of the parade creeping down the mountain at 20mph. It's nights like that one that I wish I had a place up there to stay.

Ski Days 6 & 7: Routine at Timberline, Outback After Dark at Ski Bowl

Holidays got me slackin', y'all. I patrolled at Timberline back on the 18th, and aside from some confusion during sweep, it was largely unremarkable. Just a regular patrol day for me, no hill-captaining. The only thing out of the ordinary was that I got to give another one-off tryout. This time, one of our associate patrollers who wants to learn the art of toboggan-handling and become a hill patroller needed a ski test. I spent a shift in the first aid room early in the day, then took the associate out for some ski drills to see if she had the skills to make it in the hill training program. She skied pretty well, so there's one more candidate for toboggan training this season.

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After Christmas, I like to take the week off and patrol a couple of midweek days. The weather is usually better than on the weekends, so I figure the patrol days will be good ones. Yesterday was forecast to be snow showers all day, and that's pretty much what we got. I was hill captain, and my crew consisted of a good group of folks who I've patrolled with before, plus a couple newer faces - including one of my D-team guys from last season.

We were a little understaffed, but we made it work. We had one patroller pretty much camp out at the first aid room, but we made sure she wasn't stuck there all day. There was a lot of fresh snow, so opening assignments took a little longer than usual. I think it was close to 10:30 by the time we hit all the tower pads, rope lines, and other stuff.

One of the off-duty pro patrollers caught up to me in line at the bottom of the upper bowl lift and asked if I'd get someone to re-fill one of the 5-gallon water jugs up at Rescue Center. Seeing as everyone else was busy, I decided to do that myself. I strapped the empty jug to my pack, and set off down Skyline, since this was still early in the day and nobody had checked the rope lines down there. I should have had someone take a picture of me with that water jug on my back. I imagine it looked ridiculous.

I got it re-filled and headed back up. 5 gallons of water in one of those water-cooler type bottles is unwieldy at best, but I managed to get it back up to RC. Thankfully, I ran into another off-duty patroller - this time, one of our volunteers - at the bottom of the upper bowl chair, and he took my pack and poles to make it easier on me. We had a good chat about how things were going, and I pretty much ended up spending the bulk of the middle of the day manning the radio at RC. I snuck out for a couple runs in the fresh stuff once we had a couple more folks up there. The snow was really excellent in the upper bowl, and it felt good to finally make some turns for myself.

After getting in a little tree patrol in upper bowl, I went back in to RC to organize the Outback sweep. The original plan was that I'd stay in RC and man the radio until we were relieved by the night crew. That fell apart pretty rapidly, as we got a call literally in the same minute the sweep team started out the door. After a brief discussion, I decided that since we would need to take a Cascade 350 out there (one of the 4-handled toboggans), and I was the most experienced with the 350, that I would go. I took my D-teamer with me, and I took the tail of the sled, since running the 350 in the front isn't all that different from the regular 2-handled toboggans.

We got to the patient, who had a knee injury, just near the 5 Lakes Basin sign in the outback. I had my driver flatten out a spot for the toboggan, and decided I would keep it in place. One of the sweep team came by to help my driver splint the patient and load him into the toboggan. Once my driver was ready, we started off, with the goal of getting to the traverse we could see in front of us. I knew that if we could stay high enough, we could make the traverse, and it would empty us out onto Bob Strand's Downhill, which would likely be a much easier route than taking the toboggan all the way down to the Log Road. The Log Road sounded like it was a nasty trip down, so we wanted no part of that.

But we couldn't cut up high enough to make the traverse. I knew we could get down to Kelly's Cut, which empties out onto the bottom of Downhill, kind of on the low side of Powder Keg. We headed down Upper Cutoff, and onto Kelly's Cut.

Kelly's Cut isn't exactly a good trail to take a toboggan on. It's a really narrow traverse, and not really much of it is downhill. In fact, the parts that aren't flat are kind of uphill. We were making really slow progress, and I got to thinking we could use another patroller to help move things along. I had radioed for help, and the pro patroller I spoke with kept insisting that I was taking the wrong path, and that I would end up being stuck on the cliff band that separates the main part of upper bowl from the outback. I was pretty sure we were in fact on Kelly's Cut, but the seed of doubt had been planted.

Some poachers almost hit us as we were trying to figure out exactly where we were and how best to continue. Some of our sweep team managed to catch up to us, so we had them help out for a bit. One of them took the handles of the toboggan, and we sent the other one to scout ahead to make sure we were going to end up where I thought we would. I was really dreading having to figure out how to turn the toboggan around and get down the fall line and down to the Log Road. If we were where I thought we were, then doing so *would* have stranded us on that cliff band. I decided to press on, but progress was dreadfully slow.

It was starting to get a little dark, and after having my first driver dig out a little bit of the trail for us, I could see we weren't too far from the lights of the upper bowl, so my confidence grew a little bit. Once our scout radioed back that we were in fact on the right track, I was feeling a lot better about getting the patient out of the outback safely. In the meantime, one of the other pro patrollers was making his way to us to help out. We tried to signal him with whistles, but he couldn't hear us. I told him the path we had taken, and he finally saw the toboggan tracks and found us - on Kelly's Cut, exactly where I thought we were.

After more digging, pushing, and pulling, we reached the corner where we could see the lights and the chairlift in the upper bowl. Once we got around to Powder Keg, the pro patroller took the front handles, and I stayed on the back. We were literally and figuratively not out of the woods yet, but he and I quickly picked out a route through the trees on Powder Keg and then finally onto Dog Leg. We paused a bit to catch our breath, then headed on down. Some of the sweep team had waited at the bottom of Fire Hydrant, and I was very happy to finally be almost at the bottom.

We got down there, and the pro patrollers towed us in the rest of the way, up to the first aid room, via snowmobile. Thankfully, they took over the case from there, handling all the paperwork and stuff. The patient was a real trooper through it all, and was very appreciative of the effort to get him off the hill, even apologizing for getting hurt out there. We gave him the usual "no need to apologize, it's our job..." lines, and after a quick hand-off of the case to the pro patrol, we headed off to the Palace.

We started the case somewhere around 3:30, when sweep began, and I think it was about 6:15 by the time we arrived at the Palace. What a long day. Beers and cheers, then paperwork and getting all the radios and transceivers turned in and locked up.

And I'm going back up to patrol again tomorrow.

Ski Days 4 & 5: Waterlogged Tryouts, Damp Calibration

The first of (hopefully only) two back-to-back day weekends on the patrol started out with a nice wintry morning at Ski Bowl for the patrol's annual tryouts. I was one of many evaluators for the ski-test portion of the day's activities, and it was looking like it'd be a nice snowy day on the hill. But we knew it would switch to rain at some point in the day, so we weren't getting too excited about the new snow.

I got paired up to evaluate with one of my first coaches on the patrol, a guy we call "Tool Time" who patrolled at Smugglers' when he was going to school at St. Mike's in VT. After meeting some of the new candidates, we sat around for a bit waiting for the interviews to finish so we could take our first group over to Ski Bowl to put them through their paces. The snow changed over to rain before we even finished our first run, and our evaluation cards were soaked pretty quickly. We ended up having to improvise with our "Rite in Rain" notepads.

Tool Time and I were "lucky" enough to also have the last group of candidates for the day's tryouts. So, after we finished our first group, we went inside to try and dry off a little bit. This didn't really work. We got our eval cards for the group, and got back out on the hill. We tried to move things along a little quicker the second time around, and I think we managed to do that. After going over all the scores and making sure we had accounted for everything we did, we finally got back over to the patrol building in town and finished things up.

I got home, peeled off all my wet clothes, pulled everything out of all my pockets and tossed it all in the dryer. I had other pairs of gloves and goggles ready in case they didn't dry out (didn't want to over-'cook' the gloves, so was cautious with the dryer), but I didn't need 'em.

Sunday was the coaches' calibration clinic, where we get all the toboggan coaches together to get on the same page regarding everything from the paperwork aspect to the points of emphasis for the season. This year, we spent a little less time talking, and headed out to Meadows for the on-hill part. We expected rain and wind, and we got it, though not as bad as I figured. It was good to be out there, and aside from having to wipe off my goggles constantly, it wasn't a half-bad day after all.

We have a couple of PSIA instructors on the patrol, so we got them involved in our calibration clinic. They were able to provide a little more perspective on the teaching process as it relates to skiing fundamentals, as well as show us old dogs a few new tricks. As good a skier as I am, I picked up something I could work on, too. I can't wait to get out there and start coaching.

Ski Day 3: Dog Day Afternoon

Today ended up being one of the wackiest days I can recall in my relatively brief patrol career. But we'll get to that later. For anyone reading this who was there, the post title is probably enough.

I got an early start today, mostly because of a mild case of nerves, or more accurately a stronger than usual desire not to be even a tiny bit late. Today was my first day as a Hill Captain on the Mt. Hood Ski Patrol.

For the uninitiated, the Hill Captain's job is essentially to lead/coordinate the efforts of the usually dozen-plus volunteer ski patrollers for the day. It's a bit of paperwork, plus ensuring everyone has what they need to do their jobs (radios, working passes, transceivers if the avy danger warrants, etc.), plus making sure assignments and tasks are covered, and be the Shell Answer Man (or at least know where to find the answers). More or less. A great crew of patrollers makes the HC's job a walk in the park, and today we had a great crew. I needn't have worried about much.

My stellar crew included Barkernews and NoPoGirl, who were doing one of their split-shift days, where they each do a half-day patrolling and spend the other half with their adorable daughter, Hazel. They're both excellent patrollers, and I was also blessed to have a host of other very experienced patrollers, including 3 guys who I've worked for on countless occasions when they were Hill Captains, and even a former President of the patrol. I knew some of the rookies we had today from helping train some of them last season (and I had worked with some of them already this season), so I had confidence in them as well.

By and large, the day was pretty uneventful. Only 2 cases all day, which wasn't much of a surprise, given how few guests came to Ski Bowl today. The cold and the hard-pack probably kept people away, but with decently-tuned skis/boards, there were good turns to be had on the groom. We did some avalanche transceiver practice, which is always a good thing to do regularly.

But things got weird in the afternoon. The short version is that we added "Animal Control" to the list of tasks.

Apparently, today was a popular day for people to bring up their dogs and let them off their leash. We had one patroller basically chasing dogs for the bulk of the middle of the day. This one pooch must have been some kind of endurance champion, as it had covered a ridiculous amount of ground - almost the entire eastern half of the ski area. Once the first one had been corralled, it wasn't long after that a second loose dog was called in. The same patroller who had worked the first dog case got on the second one as well. On top of that, we had yet another off-leash pooch a little later on. This time it was a couple of cross-country skiers that had their dog with them, but at least this one didn't run all over half the area. Lots of 'guest education' happened this afternoon, with regards to dogs and leash policy.

Once the canine misadventures were behind us, things quieted down for the rest of the day. We had an unplanned early closure of one of the lifts (decision of the area, not mechanical), which we adapted to fairly quickly, and once relieved by the paid patrol night crew, we were done after sweeping the closed lift. Paperwork, check in radios, hand out vouchers, do a little de-brief, and call it a day. Great work from everyone.

Dusting Off The Blog, Ski Days 1 and 2

Wow. Again, Twitter and Facebook (and a host of other things) have kept me from updating here. With the ski season well underway for me, it's past time to start posting again.

The summer and fall have been busy, with kitchen remodeling and preparing for another season on the Mt. Hood Ski Patrol. I got all my refresher stuff out of the way fairly early, and started my season back on November 21st at Timberline. I would have preferred to get a free-ski day in before starting patrolling, but I just didn't get around to it.

Sadly, I've let my physical conditioning slide. Big time. Close followers will probably recall that I had lost about 22 pounds during my apprentice year with the patrol. I'd say I've put almost all of that back on since. The easy excuses are the shoulder and knee injuries/surgeries/rehab, but the bottom line is that I got lazy. I paid the price for that on my first ski day (no, I didn't get hurt). I decided that since the doc said I could go without the brace this season, I'd give it a shot.

Day 1 began with snowy conditions. I carpooled with NoPoGirl, and we picked up another patroller in Sandy on the way up. The coverage at Timberline was about average for early-season, with some bare spots here and there, but overall not too bad. I drew the Floodo opening with a patroller who was one of the apprentices I trained last season. Off we went, into the blowing snow and flat light that would pretty much be what we would deal with the whole day. Tower pads were what we started with, and when we got up top, we found that there was a good bit of equipment missing from the top shack. I sent my apprentice off to finish the tower pads while another patroller and I went to go get the equipment we needed. It was shortly afterward that I made a huge mistake.

I decided to drag the toboggan full of equipment (mostly just 2 backboards with their packs) down West Leg Road instead of down Uncle John's Band. This was incalculably foolish, since WLR is so damned flat. I did it because I had heard the bottom pitch of UJB was kinda sketchy, and I didn't want to hog up a good line. I had to skate to pull the sled, and basically wore myself out doing it. I think even if I had been in decent shape, I'd have been pretty wiped after pulling that sled over those flats. That sucked. The next run I skied after that, I felt my quads almost cramping up. Never felt that on the hill before.

Anyway, I did my dispatch shift, talked with the Hill Captain about Hill Captain-y stuff, since this is my first season as a HC, and went in for lunch. I don't remember if I helped out on a case before or after I ate, but I got to do one later in the afternoon. For those of you unfamiliar with Timberline, there's a run called Cruzer, that's well, a cruiser - really long intermediate run on the west side of the area. I don't know the linear distance, but it's long. Probably somewhere around a mile and change. I had to take a toboggan down Cruzer to transport a young skier with a knee injury. Most of the trip on Cruzer was with an empty toboggan, so it wasn't too bad. The brutal part was coming up.

Timberline is what I call an "upside-down" ski area, in that the base lodge area is above most of the skiable terrain. In years past, we used to run the toboggan down to the nearest lift, pull the handles off of it, put a special bracket on the chair, put the toboggan on the chair and take it up the hill. This is pretty time-consuming, and probably irritating to the public, since it takes maybe 5 minutes to load the chair, and another 5 or so to unload, so there are two lift stoppages. What we do now is get a snowmobile to pick us up and pull us up West Leg Road. Basically, you wrap a rope around the toboggan handle and the snow-mo pulls you and the toboggan up. It's like water skiing, but a lot more work.

The trip up was just brutal. I would guess it took somewhere on the order of 15 minutes, maybe longer. I was absolutely wiped at the end, and had to stretch my quads out while other patrollers unloaded the patient, as my quads had started to cramp up again. All of this caused me to miss sweep, but I would have been skiing so slowly on sweep that it was probably for the good of everyone else that I was inside.

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Ski Day 2 was over at Ski Bowl on November 27th, and was a much better day. Still cloudy and flat light, but the recent snows had things in great shape. It wasn't too far into my day that I got a case. I had finally finished up my assignment on Lower Bowl, and went up to do my shift at Rescue Center.

When I got to the bottom of the Upper Bowl lift, I was approached by the liftie and a couple boarders, who told me they had a friend who had hurt his leg up on Calamity. I radioed it in, and they sent one of the newer patrollers to respond. By the time I got up top, another patroller was right there with a toboggan for me to take. I headed on down, helped the rookie get the patient's leg splinted, loaded him in, and let the rookie drive. He did well, from what I could see from the tail-rope position. We got him down the hill, and I headed back up top.

We had a guy come up for a one-on-one tryout, since he couldn't make the tryout date because of prior plans. Several folks really wanted to make sure we gave the guy a shot at getting into the training program, since he was one of the rare folks who was interested in both nordic and alpine patrolling. Over the course of a couple runs, I'd seen enough - the guy could ski and did it pretty well. With some minor tweaks, he'll be a good sled-driver.

I let him shadow me on my afternoon assignment over on the Multorpor lift, and it didn't take long before he got to see just what we do. I got a call that there was an injured boarder in the terrain park. We had just been talking about how the parks are case-generators, too. We were one run over from the park, but I found a nice little cut through the trees and we found the injury. The boarder had broken his arm, so into a splint/sling/swathe he went, and I took him down to the bottom in the toboggan that another patroller brought us. A quick snow-mo tow across the Lake Road to the west-side aid room, and that was pretty much that. I re-packed the sled, and took it back over to Multorpor.

The rest of the day was pretty mellow, more or less uneventful. So far, through two ski days without the brace, the knee is feeling just fine. Still gets a little sore by the end of the day, but I think that'll fade as the season goes. Even if it doesn't, I can live with that.

Back to Ski Bowl tomorrow, for my debut as a Hill Captain. Should be fun!

PS - forgot to post about Nuts & Bolts back in June. First day was crappy weather for the toboggan instructors' shop-talk session, but the second day was freakin' EPIC. I got to really crank and bank out on the west side of the glacier, and learned a bunch of stuff from the PSIA guy - not only about skiing better, but being better at watching people ski and picking out things they need to work on. Nuts & Bolts is a great weekend for patrollers to get together and work on honing ski & toboggan skills. Usually always the first full weekend in June, and we get patrollers from all over. I skied with some guys from Michigan at the one this year.