Avalanche Sweeps Away Traffic In Colorado

Elaine Meinel Supkis

In order to make money, ski resorts in Colorado are staying open despite tremendous amounts of snow falling. Of course, an avalanche has now exploded across a major highway to a resort and unknown numbers of people have been killed. Time to talk about mountains and snow.

&hearts Unlike snow that piles up a little at a time, major snow storms are notoriously unstable when piled up on steep mountains.

DENVER -- A huge avalanche buried several cars and sent others over the edge Saturday on U.S. 40 near 11,307-foot-high Berthoud Pass, Colorado highway officials said.

"Our crews said it was the largest they have ever seen. It took three paths," said Stacey Stegman, spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Transportation.

Crews had rescued at least six people at the site some 60 miles west of Denver, she said. Rescuers were probing the area for other survivors.

St. Bernard dogs were bred by monks manning the dangerous passes in the Alps connecting northern Europe with Rome. Snow-bound mountains were always considered to be as dangerous as thunderstorms or tsunamis. Best to be avoided. We recently saw the discovery of a Stone Age man trapped in a blizzard or an avalanche, he was frozen and then 5,300 years later, the ice melted enough for us to find him. During the Little Ice Age, in Switzerland, a number of mountain communities were lost to creeping glaciers and destroyed by avalanches.

Today, we go off to these same places for fun. Also, thanks to the warm climate today, many ice-bound places are easier to live in. I grew up in mountains, some of them very tall, where the oxygen supply was so poor, it is amazing I still have a brain, heh. Anyway, several things about big mountains: due to said lack of oxygen, people don't think so clearly there. Most don't notice it but if one is a visitor rather than a native, it is noticeable to the natives.

Many people live in the lowlands and go off into the wilderness to party. Lots of people make money off of people doing this. Therefore, we see increasingly reckless behavior, a near-total refusal to take in account, Mother Nature and her dangerous moods.

There is no way Colorado or any other place depending on skiers, will close roads. They keep them open no matter what. In steep mountain country, this means taking huge chances. As we see today.

Avalanches are as dangerous as tsunamis. One might call them 'frozen water tsunamis.' They tend to happen when there is a tremendous amount of snow falling. This builds up huge snow banks that become easily destabilized. &hearts Here is a little film clip showing how reckless snowboarders create avalanches.

If you look closely, in some of the clips, the snowboarders don't make it out of the avalanche. There is a growing movement for doing dangerous stunts in the outback during winter. Indeed, since the advent of cell-phones, all sorts of people wander around in the winter in extremely dangerous places. We see them in the news an awful lot. And lots and lots of people have to endanger themselves to save these people.

In the Victorian era, people didn't go into the Rockies in winter. Indeed, it could lead to cannibalism and other ugliness. People would have to wait until the snows melted before venturing over these great mountains. Today, we expect to pass up and over and through no matter what.

&hearts Here is the Denver Post telling people to go enjoy themselves in this fatal place:

Berthoud Pass' fine trails
By Dave Cooper
Special to
The Denver Post
Article Last Updated: 12/30/2006 11:03:28 PM MST

The area around Berthoud Pass always seems to be favored with more than its fair share of early-season snow. This year is no exception.

There are several excellent ski/snowshoe tours on both sides of the pass. Three prominent drainages on the north side of the pass offer short but fun half-day tours in the shadow of the Continental Divide.
As you drive north on U.S. 40 from the top of Berthoud Pass, the first of these drainages is Current Creek, followed by Second Creek and finally First Creek. Second Creek offers perhaps the most moderate terrain of the three, and also provides access, when conditions permit, to the Continental Divide itself. Friends and I have enjoyed extended tours all the way to Parsenn Bowl at Winter Park.

When I was a child living at the observatory in Texas, the road going to the top where I lived wound around and had many hairpin turns. A truck carrying supplies was swept off of the road and lay in a ravine down below and as we passed it, I would lean over to take a good look at it. This was in 1955. In 1965, we went there again and the truck was still lying there in the ravine. At Kitt Peak, the first road went straight up the south side. A lot of fun. When they built the main road on the north face, a big boulder came bouncing down the mountainside and crushed the big Caterpillar grader. We scrambled all over the path the boulder carved in the mountainside.

One thing we all learned at a fairly young age was to avoid going up or down the ravines. The safest place was the ridges. This is because sudden floods and avalanches invariably follow the ravines. I have witnessed these things, the roaring is like a thousand angry lions, the ground literally quakes.

&hearts We still don't know all the dynamics of avalanches.

At present, few measurements of avalanche velocity, dynamic pressures, densities, flow dimensions or length of travel (runout distance) have been made. Such data are difficult to obtain for obvious reasons, but are gradually being accumulated through efforts of the U. S. Forest Service, the National Research Council of Canada, and the Center of Snow Studies in France. Because of this paucity of data, the present discussion does not advocate a particular model of avalanche flow. Rather, it summarizes existing information and presents some basic ideas about the forces operating within avalanche as related to snow type. Further research and data collection is necessary for understanding of the basic principals because any theoretical treatment of the phenomenon, regardless of its complexity, can produce misleading results if the analytical manipulations are based on unrealistic assumptions.

I used to do search and rescue. No one had to look for me in the mountains because I am a mountain person. But we had to do many a search for flatlanders. Even if someone visits many mountains and does various tricks there, this isn't the same as being a mountain person. One has to grow up in the steep mountains like the people in Nepal, for example. You become aware of many hidden clues and signals if one grows up in the midst of these beautiful but deadly deities.

&hearts Here is one story I remember about a Swiss avalanche.

Winter of 1999: Avalanche buries houses in Alps, killing 4 people. The 660-foot-wide avalanche, which hit shortly after 2:30 p.m. (8:30 a.m. EST) was the largest to strike the Mont Blanc region since 1908, a local government official told Reuters new agency.

Peter Borgaard, owner of the Hotel les Becs Rouges in Montroc, saw a giant wall of snow descend on the village.

The force of the avalanche in Montroc loosened boulders and ripped out trees. Many workers inside the hotel were injured after the avalanche slammed into the building.

Once, when I was a child and we were in Phoenix on business, I yelled to my mother, 'Mom, there goes a lady in an avalanche!' which she thought was very funny since it was hot there that day. But of course, the concept of an 'ambulance' is connected with the Alps for the need to use litters to save people there meant the Swiss had to develop many systems such as early search and rescue teams with dogs. These techniques are now being used today to save the unfortunate people who so trustingly used a dangerous highway that should have been shut down until after professionals checked out the mountainside for possible avalanches.

&hearts Here is a more recent event where snowboarders caused an avalanche which killed them.

Aired January 21, 2003 - 19:23 ETNIDENTIFIED MALE: ... the accident happened shortly before 11:00 yesterday afternoon. A group of 21 backcountry ski mountaineers, part of tour conducted by Selkirk Mountain Experienced Skiing, left the remote mountain lodge for a day of skiing. Three clients elected to stay at the lodge.

The skiers had split into two groups, an upper and a lower group, and were traversing a 30 to 35 degree slope when the avalanche occurred. Part of the upper group, 14, and all of the lower group, seven, were struck by the avalanche, which initially buried 11 people and partially covered two. Rescue operations were started immediately by the owner and the participants, who were not struck by the avalanche.

All of the skiers -- and there were three snowboarders -- had extensive backcountry experience, including professional avalanche awareness, search and rescue, and medical expertise. Helicopters, as I said earlier, were dispatched from Revelstoke to the accident scene, where rescue operations were already in process and several victims had already been recovered.

Back country skiers are a menace. They not only put themselves in danger, they cause the danger! And then have to be rescued. I think they should pay a fee first, one to cover realistic costs of damage and rescue which they cause. People want to live with danger while really not living with danger.

When I was a child wandering about all those mountains, I had no one to protect me. Nor did my parents know where I was 90% of the time even when I was only 5 years old. I learned the lore of the mountain lion, the wild pigs, vultures, snakes and insects. If I failed to negotiate the dangers, my little skeleton would be bleached bones in some cave. Somehow, I evaded this fate. Sometimes, I had to climb a tree really, really fast or fool a mountain lion by screaming like a mother defending her cubs (seriously, this works!) or laying super-silent while some predator snuffed nearby.

People want this life of adventure. They just must understand, death is circling overhead and has a strong interest in corpses. Probably this is why I am so cold blooded today. Having slithered rapidly down ravines with a first aid kit in hand, holding broken limbs of frightened people together, people who minutes before, thought they were gods, gay and happy, zooming along recklessly...I just wish the State Troopers of Colorado had closed that damned highway just for a few days.

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Comments

[DeVaul]

Wow! I did not know there were idiots out there actually causing avalanches. We cannot pay for everything. They deserve to die if they think they can do that and then have a fleet of helicopters and dogsleds come look for them.

We have no money for rendering aid to people who really need it, like disabled veterans, but we have money to launch search and rescue efforts for rich people?

I am flabbergasted from watching this movie, and I have not even considered the environmental impact of this kind of behavior. How many hibernating animals died in these "avalances for fun"?

[blues]

They just don't give a damn. None of us do. We just pretend all the time.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

Thrill seeking: people who refuse to sign up to fight in wars we start are quite happy to die in autos or skiing or skydiving or whatever.

[JSmith]

"In order to make money, ski resorts in Colorado are staying open despite tremendous amounts of snow falling."

I'm reliably informed that the very best time to ski is when there's snow on the ground (as opposed to, say, August.) As one who only wants to experience ice if it's in his drink, I have no firsthand knowledge.

"I grew up in mountains, some of them very tall, where the oxygen supply was so poor, it is amazing I still have a brain, heh."

That explains a great deal. :)

"Back country skiers are a menace."

Perhaps skiing should be banned entirely. I see no reason for it.

"How many hibernating animals died in these "avalances for fun"?"

I would think: none. High mountainsides are pretty much the last choice if you're a hibernating animal.