Avalanche
Not long ago, I was invited to give a talk on any subject of my choice to a Level 3 avalanche class with the American Avalanche Institute. The owners of AAI and I have known each other for 15-20 years. They should have known better. So. The night before, I
Meditations
Salvation We were camped a few hundred yards beyond the perimeter of the Timber Carnival fairgrounds near Albany, Oregon. Lumberjacks competed in various events: speed climbing up a 50’ limbed spruce, hacking apart a 25” diameter fir, flinging a single-bit axe onto a target, and my favorite, log-rolling. Log-rolling pits
Avalanche
Some of the following is true. It was late January. Overcast and lightly snowing. No hint of wind. Temperatures in the low twenties and dropping in the late afternoon. Silent, but not serene. I sat half-buried in the avalanche debris with two broken legs. Blood had already filled my ski
Avalanche
What is your Level of Acceptable Risk? How did you determine this? Some will center-punch Superior on a CONSIDERABLE danger while others feel happy going to Powder Park everyday. It's insulting at worst and a waste of time at best to look askance at others who are on
Avalanche
Not long ago, I found that I was running late to a talk I was to give at Black Diamond in Salt Lake City. I stepped on the gas, running through traffic, stop-signs and lights to get there on time and soon saw the unmistakable red, white, and blue lights
Avalanche
Summer's eve, how can falling ice have broken my favorite walking stick? Utah Avalanche Center forecaster Tom Kimbrough's tribute to colleague Seth Shaw who was killed in an ice fall in Alaska May 2000. It was around Memorial Day. March 2016 An open letter to Barbara
Avalanche
Scene 1. The Room. Jean Paul Sartre's 1944 play No Exit depicts an afterlife where three people sentenced to Hell find themselves locked in a room together. Each of them wait and wonder how they will be tortured...until after some great length of time, they come to
Avalanche
(A Companion Piece to #nothingbadhappened) All too often, we find ourselves unable to predict what will happen; yet after the fact we explain what did happen with a great deal of confidence. This “ability” to explain that which we cannot predict, even in the absence of additional information, represents an
Avalanche
(photo credit: Mark White) I cribbed the name from an essay by Iain Stewart-Patterson, a mountain guide and faculty staff member of Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia. His dissertation: The Role of Intuition in the Decision Process of Canadian Ski Guides. You can find his essay in a recent
Meditations
I’ve been thinking a great deal about the Judge lately. He’s the one who keeps us from reaching – what? - fulfillment, potential, Nirvana, whatever we aspire to. “Who are you,” he asks, “to be something in this world?” In some translations of the Old Testament, he is sometimes
Meditations
So there are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One is an atheist, the other, shall we say, a God-fearing man, and they're arguing about the existence of God, with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And
Avalanche
In his novel, The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy describes a scene where the two boys, having just crossed the border into Mexico, come into the company of an old man and ask him directions to the ranch of which they seek.The old man proceeded to sketch in the dust streams