Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Scheduled programming

Thanks for the response to my last post. It set high water marks in terms of traffic to this blog, and the dialogue in the comments was of course interesting. I was particularly moved by Troy & Gina's comment. Troy is a good friend of mine from Boise who went through the same thing about the same time I did. Unfortunately, many of his loved ones have reacted poorly.

We'll now get back to our regularly scheduled programming, which this time of year means skiing.

Jon finished the feature film from the yurt trip. He does fine work, don't you think?



On a more sober note, I (intentionally) triggered a slide in Scotties this morning. And while it's nice to know that you can recognize the circumstances in which a slide is likely and take appropriate measures to trigger it safely (ski cut to island of safety), it's still unnerving to watch the slope you just skied across collapse and run down the mountain.

It was about 20 meters wide, just over 100 cm deep at the deepest part of the crown (see photo with ski pole below for perspective) and ran maybe 60 meters down slope. Interestingly, the stauchwall was our skin track. Hmm.

March is a great time of year because when it snows, it really snows, and when it doesn't, it's usually warm enough to ride a bike outside. Just remember to be safe.

4 comments:

  1. When you were jumping on that slope, I kept thinking "why isn't this sliding?" I think we were all pretty confident that it was ready to go, but it didn't budge until your ski cut. I guess it was a good example of why ski cuts can be effective stability indicators.

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  2. I think the ski cut spread the load across more of the snowpack, plus it cuts away the bond with the snow above. Where I was jumping failed when the rest of the slope went.

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  3. Forgive my ignorance, but where is Scotties? I think I've skied somewhere close recently.

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