TheSnowpit.com News Blog

Two Crazy Incidents with Thankfully Good Outcomes

• John Griber survives serac fall on Everest
• Plane propeller saves two on Wester Ross Peak, Scotland

To begin, the stunning photographs and first hand account on TetonAT make John Griber's survival of a serac fall on Everest quite gut-clenching. Few of us have the opportunity to witness an avalanche of that size, much less be a speck upon the glacier immediately below the falling snow.

By chance, he was clipped in to a fixed line and behind a serac relative to the avalanche, and he believes this saved him. Thank goodness.

Then, two climbers were reported to have been saved by a propeller after being caught in an avalanche on Wester Ross Peak in Scotland. The plane providing the propeller wreckage had crashed into the mountain in 1951, killing the eight crew aboard.

The roped team crashed into and then hung from the propeller as the avalanche passed over them. They named their newly ascended route Bruised Violet in honor of the color that the propeller inflicted upon one of their arms.

Jane Candlish of The Press and Journal quotes the Scottish Avalanche Information Service co-ordinator, Mark Diggins:

It is astonishing to think that those men lost their lives on that plane and yet it saved someone’s life in the future.

A look at the current news sources available around the web...

Well, I'm not going to pretend any longer that I'm the only one out here. I suppose I never really did, but at the same time, I feel I should give credit to those sources who have been around (oftentimes) much longer than I have and also have interesting snow and avalanche-type news to report.

For obtaining the news I link to here, I use Google News, or other such news publishings that can be searched by keyword (mostly the Associated Press). Of course when I am trying to track certain information, I always check the real source on The Westwide Avalanche Network. Sometimes, folks are kind enough to send me articles that I otherwise wouldn't have found, and I link to them here. I usually try to keep to electronic sources even though I know they are a small subset of the available information...however, they hopefully make for an easier job of reading.

My news blog is sort of a mix, like other blogs out there. Probably the most famous of the blogs right now is Lou Dawson's Backcountry Blog, in which he also has a
section dedicated to avalanches. What a great writer. Speaking of great writers, the folks at Telemarktips.com also post newsworthy topics concerning avalanches every so often, and their avalanche community bulletin board is a great place to learn about current goings-on by word-of-mouth. Similar, but more cut-and-dry is an avalanche news listing from a Brighton ski patroller at BeaconReviews.com.

Of course, let's not limit ourselves to the States, after all Pistehors has a great avalanche news section for the Europeans in the crowd. Plus, CSAC.org posts international incidents on its news page, and the author Jim Frankenfield keeps his own brief blog.

And, as you may have noticed, not everything that gets included in this blog has to do directly with avalanches. For general snow-related news items, I'm not even going to pretend that I can include everything here, but again, there are a few places I find interesting stuff on. The folks at ScienceDaily have a Snow and Arctic section that has some basic stuff. Unexpectedly, another news source is Slashdot, which covers everything nerdy, mostly electronics, but also including snow. Some people live in snow and love it, and their blogs follow their snowy lives, such as this one in Alaska, and this one in New Mexico.

Heck, even the lovely nerds at MAKE magazine included a great run of how to build your own snow bike. Blogs on GIS systems such as Google Earth often include snow and ice in their data surveys. And of course such sources usually include cool GIS news too.

Hmmm...what else... Global warming seems to be such a provocative media topic that you have to take specific pains to avoid it. And if you keep your eyes open and your ears peeled, interesting snow nerds and their pursuits can come from just
about anywhere. Happy surfing!