Mooney Mountain Guides teaching for New England college continued this past weekend. Earlier in the winter I ran a 2 day into to Ice Climbing course for the college that was a 1 credit course for Outdoor Leadership majors. This past weekend Alex and built upon that with a 1 credit Avalanche Awareness course. We spent the weekend talking about how to assess avalanche potential based on observations of terrain, past history and current weather patterns. We then got hands on with practicing beacon searches and digging pits to look at stability issues and snow layers up close and personal. The west side of Washington turned out to be a great venue for this course, as many on the east side got a far to close education in avalanche dangers with 6 avalanches, mostly human triggered, being set off in a day.
Erik Thatcher 