No more lectures, no more books, no more field trips. Climbing students just need to get out there and start climbing. But climbing safely means continuing to learn as long as we continue to climb (so, we are all still climbing students, really). We can continue to learn from publications such as Accidents in North American Mountaineering (ANAM), and from our own experiences - both good and bad. Hopefully, we will learn from our successes as well as our mistakes, but it is far less painful to learn from other peoples' mistakes and the lessons they have learned. Realistically, the information that will have the most impact on us, and from which we can learn most indelibly, will come from our own trips and our own eyes, ears, and brains.

Over the course of 34 years of alpine mountaineering, I have witnessed a fair number of "near misses", incidents, minor injuries, and several major injuries. None of these incidents ever appeared in ANAM. In reviewing these incidents, I conclude that the most common risk of injury, or costly error, to people doing basic-level alpine mountaineering in Washington involves sliding on snow, either intentionally or unintentionally, i.e. glissading and/or self-arrest. The immediate reasons for the sliding incidents and injuries that I have witnessed run the gamut of the possibilities.

For glissading:

• Braking with the forearm, rather than the spike, resulting in abrasions
• Inadequate axe position, leading to excessive speed, resulting in tumbling out of control
• Using a walking stick, rather than an axe, resulting in excessive speed and lack of control
• Glissading straight-legged, hitting a rock and spraining ankle (and bivying)
• Lack of skill and control, resulting in collisions with other climbers
• Glissading straight-legged, hitting a rock and spraining ankle (and bivying)
• Glissading with crampons and catching a point
• Hitting barely submerged object, causing trauma to the butt or crotch
• Glissading over a blind hump, resulting in a fall over a drop-off
• Following a more skilled glissader down a slope that was too steep and/or too icy for the follower, resulting in excessive speed and loss of control

For self-arrest:

• Using a walking stick, rather than an ice axe, to self-arrest
• Failure to hold the axe in a useful position
• Failure to turn the body in a useful position
• Inadequate glissade followed by inadequate self-arrest
• Failure to apply adequate force, with the pick and/or the toes, to arrest the slide
• Freezing-up and not acting

For me, there was a unifying theme across all of these incidents: I felt every single one of these incidents or injuries was preventable, one way or another. First, if the person involved had been better practiced, better trained (or trained at all) in the correct use of an ice axe, most of these events would have ended without incident. Second, there was often a point at which a judgment call, either on the part of the victim or someone else, or the right communication between them, could have altered the outcome. Of course, sometimes the dynamics are much more complicated than this, and events are much easier to manipulate in hindsight. But I find it very encouraging to conclude that risks can be greatly reduced through skill, practice, communication, and good judgment.