The month of March kicked off at Crested Butte Mountain Guides with our third sold-out, and final AIARE Avalanche Level 1 Hut Course of the season.

This 3-day backcountry immersion course is small (1:6 max ratio) and allows for maximum time in the winter envrionment with great ski touring and a world-reknown avalanche classroom right outside of the hut doors in the beautiful townsite of Gothic, CO. 

 This course brought particpants from all over the country. With “High Crimes” best-selling author Michael Kodas coming all the way from the high mountain state of Connecticut, to a strong contingent of folks from the Colorado Front Range, Telluride, CO and someone from right here at home in the Gunnison Valley.

The course started off with stormy weather and began at the tail end of our last major natural avalanche cycle, so the environment and conditions were prime for a great introduction into the avalanche education world, and for which students would have a good venue for learning decision-making skills in regards to travelling in avalanche terrain.

Overall, it was an incredibly succesful course, with an enthusiastic and highly motivated group of people.  We were able to get in some good long field days travelling through the mountains and everyone got a strong experiential learning opportunity. There was opportunity for lots of hands-on moments and by the end of the course everyone had gained a solid understanding of tour planning, route selection, snowpack tests, companion rescue, terrain analysis, mountain weather, and of course….we had some great Crested Butte backcountry skiing !

Thanks everyone for a great course…ski hard, stay safe, and have fun

—Jayson Simons-Jones (Instructor / Guide)

cbguides

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Avalanche, General, Skiing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.