American Mountaineering Center

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Required Equipment

Glacier Gear Rack

Here is an outline of the glacier rack needed for Glacier travel. This is the minimum gear we would recommend to use in a crevasse rescue scenario, so you and your team can be safe on a glacier. Also note that during a rescue, you will get to pillage the gear off of the harness of all team members who didn’t fall into the crevasse. Please mark all your gear with some form of color tape or nail polish. 

A lot of items come with personal preference. We will try to give recommendations where we can and state when you need exactly the item. This list is just the crevasse rescue gear needed.

Harness

• 1 Mountaineering Axe

• Personal preference: I recently got the C.A.M.P. Corsa Nanotec Ice Axe  and will probably never go back to my big heavy mountaineering axe. Axes aren’t cheap so talk to other people before purchasing something new.

• 1 Snow Picket with 2 carabiners and a sling

• 24-inch SMC or 22-inch Yates. Yates includes a steel plate on top which prevents damaging the aluminum picket body when placing a vertical picket.

• 12-18 feet of 6 mm cordelette (AKA accessory cord) 

• Used for building anchors  
• You will be given this in class

• 1 pulley

• Recommended: Petzl Oscillante

• 4 prusiks

• 1 or 2 prusiks for tying in - end vs mid position, 2 for building the rescue system
• Examples:: 19-inch Sterling Hollow Block, 50cm/60cm Beal Jammy

• 6 locking carabiners

• 2 lockers for how you tie into the rope, 4 for crevasse rescue 
• Personal preference: it is nice to use ones that are slightly larger as not much weight is added and they can be easier to manipulate with large gloves on. Example: CAMP Large Locker
• It never hurts to have an extra carabiner or two, locker or non-locker. These can be useful if you find yourself needing to extend an anchor.

• 4 non-locking carabiners

• Any will do. As above, it’s always useful to have an extra or two.

• 1 double/triple length sling or 1” tubular webbing equivalent

• This will be used as a chest harness in the event that you fall into a crevasse and need to be hauled out. Make sure it is large enough to wrap around you as seen in this video. Be sure to account for additional bulk from layers as well.

• Optional: Petzl Micro Traxion or other Progress-Capture Pulley (see gear list)

• This can be a very useful piece of gear as it takes the place of a pulley and prusik used for progress capture while hauling. However, we will be teaching the rescue system without the use of this device and you will be expected to test out without it. If you have one, we can go over its use in a rescue system when we have extra time.