Snow slides or avalanches are restricted in summer to more definite danger-zones than are the errant stones. But when they come they are less evitable and more overwhelming in action. Snow falls not only according to the accident of its position, which is ascertainable, but also according to the chance of its condition; and this is susceptible to influences more numerous and more volatile than the comparatively better delimited and more violent forces that produce the loosening and fall of stones.
Again, if we are forced to cross danger-areas of stones or snow, we have the better chance in the case of stones. Each falling stone only occupies in its fall a fraction of the area of danger, and may be eluded; but every inch of snow in an area of avalanche risk is alike pregnant with danger. It is no longer a question of artful dodging individually, but of an escape in time by the whole party, possibly over a considerable extent of slope, all of it equally treacherous.
But snow makes these concessions to the skilful leader: its presence can be located; its condition can be tested in advance. Experienced reconnoitring beforehand may advise us to avoid a snow passage altogether: precaution on the spot, a thorough testing of its holding quality, gives us a second chance of eluding an unpleasing surprise. But these safeguards are precautionary rather than corrective, and belong properly to the province of prevention, that is of snow craft.
Correction becomes needful when we have been deceived in our craft, and find ourselves by error, or perhaps by chance, on a risky snow passage. The snow threatens to slide or to avalanche, because it is either powdery and superficially slithery, or water-logged, or crusted and detached below, or bedded deceitfully upon ice. Now, to continue to trough horizontally across suspicious snow is equivalent to sawing through a high branch, on which you are seated, between yourself and the trunk. We must turn vertically up, or down, or follow as steep a diagonal as we may. We make steps as far as possible apart, and we tread exactly and lightly in each other’s. If there is firmer snow below, we drive the axe to the head at each step, and loop the rope. In extreme cases we may turn face inward, as the toe is less disturbing than the heel or side-boot. Or we may have to clear away the snow and make steps in the ice below. All as our craft dictates. On positively dangerous snow there is much to be said for unroping, should we have to continue long in equal insecurity. The rope can be little protection; concerted action once a slide starts is impossible, and if the slide embraces the footing of all the party, the individual chances of survival are greater without it. But while admitting that there is a case for unroping, I have never known a party do it.
If, in spite of all our discretion, the snow slide or avalanche starts, any further chance of corrective action passes out of our hands with the loss of our footing. A good deal has been written about what we ought to do in an avalanche: cut the rope, adopt a swimming attitude, roll sideways and so on. To anyone who has ever bathed in broken surf, or felt the weight of even a thin film of snow sliding about his ankles or on to his shoulders, all such nostrums will seem about as practical as that delightful recommendation that we should all wear a red appendage of trailing string, as a signal to those who search for us in an avalanche. The vision of a line of sturdy mountaineers tripping intricately across a snowfield like embarrassed macaws in pursuit of each other’s scarlet tails may give us some pleasurable moments. Possibly coloured air-balloons, to keep the string-tails floating archly above our heads, might add to their picturesque efficacy.
A man in an avalanche can only act by instinct; and he will instinctively struggle. If he keeps, or ends, upon the surface, it will be due to the shallowness of the slide or the depth of his good fortune. It is well to remember that a man, by an accident of compression, may live for some time although overwhelmed and out of sight under the snow; the survivors therefore must take the risk of further snow falling and attempt the rescue work at once. The chances of survival will always be greater in a slide of powdery snow than in one of wet snow.
Ice Fragments.
Ice falls in fashions more fathomable than snow, over more limited areas and by more discoverable rules. We may find ourselves forced to pass below séracs on glaciers. A sérac may fall; but séracs are very obvious as well as beautiful, and the really capable eye is at fault if it cannot foretell when one is likely to fall, within an hour or two, and hurry out of its track. Even if it is too far above us for inspection, there is plenty to guide us in the condition of the ice near us and in the feel of the atmosphere. Séracs are usually safer than they look; and it is wiser, if we find ourselves unwittingly under fire, to glide out of it quietly and competently than to rush into the real frying-pan of a panicky flight. If there is opportunity, we get rid of the rope; a man on claws, without the rope, has a much better chance of dodging the sérac that topples. Heavy step-cutting just below a poised column had better be avoided; but I am half sorry to record that the hallowed myth that it is dangerous to talk or breathe loudly on such passages is not borne out by latter-day séracs. I have shouted very loudly and clearly into the ear of a number of very promising ones—of course from safe positions on their shoulders, and not, like Lauener, from their ‘dangerous’ heads—without eliciting even a nod of response.
Only one other case suggests itself where falling ice might be classed as an external or objective risk; and that more because the extent of its danger-zone is undiscoverable than because its position, or the probability of its fall, is concealed from ordinary foresight. In a snowy season, with alternates of melting sun and freezing wind, the day comes when the rocks of a peak or ridge are armoured with ice plates or ice spears. If we traverse unsuspectingly below such walls, an hour’s sunlight may expose us, in the middle of our enjoyment of our postponed fine day, to a raking and dangerous fire. The missiles may come shooting over the edge of any innocent, black jut or buttress far above us. The only course is to watch, and dodge, and make carefully for open country. That what has fallen once cannot fall again in the same place is even more true of these ice plates than of stones. For our mischance, also, we may have to blame ourselves as much as the mountain. Rocks in such a state generally betray some gleam of their ice armour to a heedful examination, and as the chance of such a condition occurring should have been suggested to us by the kind of weather that produced it, we ought to have been able approximately to locate the peril beforehand, and avoid its zone.
Evil Weather.