x15x15 wrote:i have limited experience here, thankfully, but i will still throw a wrench in this discussion. who here has really used pickets, deadmans and icescrews, etc... and i mean really used them? taken falls on them?
what happens when you have no real anchor point? ok, maybe a deadmans buried, but that aint much. there is a ton of stress being placed on your system as you raise the fallen...
just another thing that the dhude standing on top will have to figure out.
I've taken lead falls on ice screws.
I have been involved in three real life crevasse falls. At 13,500 on the Gibralter Ledges route in January I fell the entired distance between my partner and I into a poor bridged and hidden (by sastrugi) crevasse. I was able to prusik out, my partner had self arrested one foot from the crevasse edge.
My partner in Alaska fell all the way into a crevasse, was stopped by a butterfly knot in the rope. The snow was too soft for pickets so I picketed my skis for an anchor, hauled out his pack and skis, padded the lip, dropped the extra rope in anchored to the skis, and my partner was able to prusik out.
I responded to an incident in which two hikers were sledding down a gulley and fell into a deep moat. I equalized flukes for an anchor and lowered my partner in, and hauled, with help, both victims and my partner out.
Water and glacier ice take ice screws well. Hard neve take pickets well. But you are correct, there are snow conditions where nothing works well. Pickets in T slots, backpacks stuffed with snow and deeply buried, the heavy guy sitting in a deep hole, can all work as anchors. In my experience, in soft spring snow, flukes work best.