TR & Avi Report - Wedgemount Lake, Rethel Couloir - Feb 16-17, 2013

[Axelerate]

Hmmm. Some advice a friend gave me after a recent incident was, "Your comfort level is not always representative of the actual risk".
I find it's a balance between confidence and "smart" decision making. It seems the steeper it gets, the grayer the decision making becomes. You need to be confident to summit and get the objective, as there's usually difficult terrain, but then you need to know when it's too much, aka risk management. It gets grayer because even in good conditions, there's a certain amount of risk in steep terrain.
I had 2 close calls this past year (1 avi, 1 fall) & it's forced me to keep my confidence in check, which dims down the objectives, but hopefully I'll learn more in the long run.
We were on Cook on your 2nd day (we kept looking for you on Parkhurst - I took a picture thinking it was your group, but I found out it was the summit cairn). As the fog rolled in we turned around from our North facing objective and skied psuedo corn on the south side of Cook.
After reading this, I'm glad we turned around, since we hadn't climbed our intended line off of cook. Although I was planning to boot pack down a short distance first, I'm not sure if I'd have found this instability.

The back up line wasn't half bad, so I feel like I'm learning to make lemonade out of lemons.