There is always inherent danger while skiing and traveling in the backcountry. Bad things can happen and if it hinders your ability to walk and ski you can find yourself in a bit of a pickle. This is what sort of happen the day before we left for William Peak Yurt. That day we decided to keep thing easy and familiar and traveled up to The Cross on a beautifully sunny day. On the way down of the first run one of the people in our group fell and possibly dislocated their knee cap. It was hurting but we were confident that she could ski down given sometime.
After another run I came down to says hi and noticed there was a guy in a yellow jacket hiking up to us. Of course being in Stanley, Beth ran into one of the sawtooth mountain guides skiing with his friends and when he heard someone got kind of hurt he jumped on the opportunity to check them out. Actually, he jumped on the opportunity to test out his backcountry safety sled on a nice sunny day and an easy going pacient. The slad was one of the coolest things that each of the guides always carry and it was cool to see how it actually can be used.
What I loved was how simple and effective this fabric sled was. Using the Cascade River Toboggans once or twice I knew what this device was trying to mimic. The basic construction of the sled was two skis on the bottom that are tied on by some cord and then a bunch of backpacks for the bottom and the “head rest” which created an impressively rigid sled. We then used a long piece of paracord and a climbing sling to pull her down the mountain. It was really quite fun and I could see how effective this could really be if something real happened.