One and one-half days were spent practicing use of crampons, self-arrest, constructing snow anchors, glacier movement in rope teams, and moving patients down and across a low-angle glacier. On the following day, we hiked the 700 m up to the Hotlum Glacier and along the way we observed hummingbirds at an altitude of 3400 m! We filled our water bottles from glacial melt and proceeded to climb, using crampons and ice axes, and then stopped to form rope teams as we encountered our first crevasse. Once reaching an area at about 3700 m, we began to practice crevasse rescue in a conveniently located shallow crevasse. The first step was to locate and mark all crevasses in the immediate area of our drills, to avoid a rescuer being swallowed by a bottomless crevasse. During the event, at least one rescuer fell into a covered crevasse while attempting to extricate a rope team member from a known crevasse. This, our most important day of the course, ended after descending the Hotlum Glacier back to the “Hilton” only to find the entire forested valley below our basecamp filled with the smoke from two rapidly expanding forest fires, either of which could have impeded our egress off the mountain and through the surrounding wilderness areas. After a discussion of the risks and benefits of continuing the alpine rescue course as planned and obtaining additional data from the US Forest Service and the Mount Shasta City Fire Department, we collectively reached the conclusion that the most reasonable course of action would be to descend the mountain in the morning, drive back to Mount Shasta City, and to continue the alpine rescue course, albeit on rock, in local parks and wilderness areas located away from the danger zone. The most proximal forest fire to us was the Lava Fire, which burned over 12,000 hectares on the northern slopes of Mount Shasta.