Shop Talk: The Skills I Learned To Love on The Pika Glacier

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Recently, I dove into some of the key gear for a spring ski mountaineering trip to Alaska’s Pika Glacier , a bucket list trip if I've ever heard of one! While having the right gear is critical for a successful trip, you also have to know how to use t, along with some other mountain and communication skills in your back pocket.

Most people don’t live in a place that offers complex and extremely technical terrain like the Alaska Range, indeed there is not much else like it in North America. And that’s okay! What matters is that you know what you’re getting yourself into and prepare accordingly using the resources you have at hand. This is by no means intended to be comprehensive skills guide, but it does offer a place to start learning techniques that were pretty key to a safe and successful Pika Glacier trip I took this past spring.

Glacier Travel and Crevasse Rescue

A glacier is essentially a slowly flowing river of ice. Like really slowly, ever heard of the term "glacial pace?" As the glacier moves, pockets of stress develop in different places as the glacier stretches and can lead to cracks in the surface of the glacier known as crevasses.

Crevasses are a serious mountain hazard and glacier travel and crevasse rescue are highly technical skills. While these skills can, of course, be learned by anyone, they require a lot of time familiarizing yourself with ropes and gear, practice building anchors and pulley systems, and knowing how to use various systems in different types of terrain. It might be tempting watch a few YouTube videos and call it good, but these are skills that you should learn from experts, practice repeatedly, and strive to have competence and confidence in before your trip.

Avalanche Safety and Hazard Assessment Skills

Part of the fun of going on a ski trip in a new zone is that the terrain and conditions are less familiar. This offers a high potential for reward when you nail it, but the uncertainty also brings a certain amount of risk.

A remote ski destination like the Pika Glacier doesn’t have an avalanche forecasting team or any sort of mitigation. It’s up to you to assess and manage terrain and respond to conditions, especially as they constantly shift around you. The conditions you have on your particular trip won’t reveal themselves until you’re actually experiencing them, so you can’t specifically prepare for them. What you can do, however, is develop snow science skills in your local ranges and then work with your group to translate these skills to new terrain.

Leading up to our trip, we were watching the weather in the Pika area to get a sense of how snow layers were stacking up over the season. Additionally, we all brought experience identifying snow layers, feeling snow densities, digging pits, and translating information from the field into decisions around what terrain we felt comfortable skiing.

Once we were on the glacier, we used a Garmin inReach satellite communicator to receive weather updates from a friend in the front country. Thanks to this technology, we received daily weather updates taken from the National Weather Service forecast and other sources. This helped us have a general sense of what conditions to look for in the near-term.

Patience

An oft-mentioned saying on our Pika trip was “hurry up and wait.” Part of going on a big ski trip is just waiting. Getting a bush plane into the Alaska Range is contingent upon fair weather for flying. It's not uncommon for skiers and climbers to be stuck in Talkeetna for multiple days waiting for a clear flying window. Being able to roll with the punches, make the most out of the situation, and getting psyched to hit the Fairview bar if you do get stuck in Talkeetna is pretty key to any Alaska Range trip.

Similarly, once you’re on the glacier there’s no guarantee that you’re going to have good weather. So, being armed with movies, books, games, good conversation topics, and an infinite supply of patience should you end up needing to sit in your tent for a while (read: days) waiting for a weather window is a key skill to an expedition-style ski trip.

These seem like different skills than the hard snow and rescue tools, but patience is key to just about any ski tour, but especially so when you’re in glaciated mountains and at the mercy of big mountain weather.

Trust Your Team

Heading onto the Pika Glacier is a great way to spend time with a group of friends and ski partners. But it’s also a high stakes environment that requires a lot of group decision-making and trust, not to mention that you also have to live in close proximity for the duration of your trip.

Having good ski partners can make or break a trip like this. Everyone is going to have their own highs and lows and you want to be with people who can pick up slack when needed, problem solve unpredictable situations, communicate openly and effectively, and make the most of whatever you encounter on the glacier.

One of the best ways to build trust with ski partners before a trip like this is to just ski together a lot and get to know how individuals make decisions, figure out the right speed of travel for everyone, make sure you all have similar objectives for the trip, and develop open lines of communication.

Backcountry Cooking and Camping

Let’s be real: on a glacier trip you may spend a lot of time in your tent. So, having a good camp set up and knowing how to take care of your basic needs in a remote mountain environment is pretty important. You don’t need to get fancy with building your camp or planning your meals, but you do want to trust your ability to build a cozy place to live.

When snow is your medium, your camp is really only limited by your creativity. Once we set up our gigantic communal dome tent, we spent half a day digging out chairs to sit on, a counter for our WhisperLite stoves to sit on, and a central table for meals. We also each spent time making sure our personal sleeping tents were solidly anchored to the glacier (using mini snow anchors to stake them out) and dug some walls around them to protect them from wind.

Variable temperatures throughout the day meant that we were constantly maintaining our camp set up to accommodate changes in snow texture. After a storm, we had to shovel around the outside of our tents. After a sunny day, we had to restore structural integrity to pockets of snow that had melted inside our dome tent. We also learned early on in the trip that we needed to dig a small snow cave inside our dome to protect some of our perishable food.

When it comes to backcountry cooking, there are infinite menu options, but the big priority is getting enough calories to sustain your metabolic needs. We went on a big Costco shopping excursion in Anchorage, AK to stock up before flying onto the glacier. Some of our favorite menu items included cheesy bagels, pesto tortellini, homemade pizza, and chicken curry.