2 Person Alpine Crevasse rescue

Hello everyone, I'm Nico from Lunatic Adventures. I'm here in Kulusuk, our base in East Greenland. Today in this video I will show you Crobat's Rescue when the team is only two people. Hope you guys enjoy. The distance between the two people should be between 15 to 20 meters. In between this distance I'm gonna place three friction knots as well, which in this case are butterflies. As soon as the first person falls in, the steps to do are arresting the fall, build the snow anchor and transfer the load to the anchor. Building an anchor and holding the person's weight on your hips can be pretty tough, so try to do it as good as fast as possible. To do the snow anchor you need a shovel, a snow picket, a 120 cm sling and a locking carabiner. Depending the snow quality you might decide to put the picket in the snow vertically or horizontally. In this case I place it horizontally, with the sling coming out, with the T shape and a locking carabiner at the end of it ready to be transferred the load. It's a good habit to transfer to a prusik. In the system that I show here could be also placed directly on a microtraction, but as I said it's just a good habit. If my ratchet is not a microtraction but a Garda hitch or an ATC in guide mode, then it's definitely needed that prusik. Let's see what the next step is. Placing microtraction I'll make sure that it's sliding towards my friend, that I know is correctly placed. I'm gonna lock the carabiner and now I take my ice axe just ready for a self-arrest and monitoring the anchor that it's solid. Once I'm sure I'm just ready to be able to move. I take a prusik and make a tree wrap prusik around the rope coming out of the microtraction. Make a Y knot, take a strand and go it through my harness and close it off with the overhand on a bite. Right now I'm attached to the rope, we add the prusik and an overhand. So now I can remove the overhand on a bite and be able to move along the line. Right now we assume that my rope length is not enough to do a drop loop rescue so I'm just gonna stop here pretending that the end of the line is close to my backpack. The system starts with making a three-to-one mechanical advantage. I have a ratchet in place which is the microtraction and now I add a T block on the line but this could be also just a normal cordelet with a three-wrap prusik. Right now I have a three-to-one in place as I did before transfer the load to a prusik as soon as I pull a bit of the slack the load will be transferred to the microtraction which means I need to go to the anchor and remove that prusik before it jams into the microtraction. After that is just physical work three-to-one. Another challenge of doing direct pull system is that your friction knots, butterflies, are in the way or they cannot pass through your ratchet device. So right now I'm getting the knot closer and closer to microtraction by swapping the side of my T block or my prusik and I get it close as close as 10 centimeters. At this point I just want to stop and take more equipment to solve this problem. In this case I'm taking a two meter prusik, take one end of the cordelet and make a clove hitch attached to the same carabiner as the microtraction is. Making a clove hitch means I don't need to open the gate of the carabiner so that's quite convenient. I just need a stopper knot at the end making sure the clove hitch wouldn't move. To make things clean I just remove the main line from the T block carabiner and just go back and forth with my prusik cordelet between the anchor and the T block carabiner. As you see I add another carabiner just to make things clean or less friction for this cordelet to go back and forth. With this cordelet I just created a four to one mechanical advantage so it should be easy to pull your friend those 10 centimeters up with your cordelet and just lock the progress with just a mule and an overhand on a bite. Right now as you see the blue line, the main line is loose and I can just undo the knot, the butterfly and take the slack in the system. I can just remove the cordelet and put the load again on the microtraction. I keep this cordelet right there attached to the carabiner ready to be used for the next friction knot. If your friend can help you by walking up with his crampons this could be enough. With a three to one mechanical advantage. All right guys so in this part of the video you saw how to rescue somebody with a three to one mechanical advantage. Sometimes it's too heavy to do it this way so you might want to know how to make it five to one so let me show you this. It's very simple you actually keep your same cordelet that was there to go over the knots but this time you take the other end of it and you make overhand on a bite. To make the system finished you just need a carabiner clipping it to the t-block carabiner and at the end of this cordelet you're just gonna clip the main line. So you created a two to one with your cordelet that is applied into the three to one that you had before making it five. With five to one you can definitely pull up your friend even if he's struggling with an overhang crevasse let's say. A good point to remember is that you're working next to the anchor not knowing how your friend is doing as you're pulling him up and you might pull him on the overhang so be in contact vocally if you cannot see him. Perfect so now you know how to pull your friend up from a three to one into a five to one mechanical advantage. Hope you guys enjoyed this video and please don't fall in a crevasse but if your friend does it well then you know how to pull him up.