Winter Trundlin
yeah ive done it as prob most have
Time and a place for everything
Seems to me the wasangles northern powder circuit or other frequently traveled areas isn't the place
and when instabilties are so obvious even someone who tweeted or instagramed through their entire avvy 1 class should still be able to identify prob aint the time
when you damn well know it'll rip why do it?
discuss
^^^^^^cuz it's fun/stimulating.
rog
bustin caps is fun and stimulating
but best done in a shooting range
or places were friendly fire aint gonna fuck somebody up
true, but if folks choose to tour in lands of shitshow, they should expect anything and everything from all sides, up, and down, yeah?
rog
i expect anything and everythin but my point is if every swinging dick in the wasatch wants to get his yippie keah yea yeah avvy cowboy on somebody is gonna get whacked.
Which is why most people think trundlers are fucktards.
my pet peeve aint so much look out below vrs. you are denying the snowpack the chance to heal and robbing it of the depth that promotes stability
I hear that too. i'm all about letting the snowpack, here, or there get deep enough to actually enjoy without the silly risk of hitting shit that lurks below. I mean if shits gonna climax from nature, so be it, but why take her to the ground on purpose with so many other spots more suited for skier use/compaction in low tide time. patience.
rog
Next best thing to a 5# bomb
Washing it out to the ground is a great way to push the reset and minimize depth hoar/ PWLs from early season snowfalls. Depends on your snowpack.
ya and just create another early season snowpack on the line, potentially. better to let the shit get buried deep and give it time. imo.Quote:
Originally Posted by ULLRismyco-pilot
rog
Classic rogQuote:
Originally Posted by icelanticskier
Great tool sometimes, bad tool other times. Like everything in snow... It depends.
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why don't you just skin straight up eventual avalanche area and put signs down saying that in approximately 2 hours this will all be coming down.
i've never been in the backcountry on snow, but it always seemed a little odd to be standing basically right on top of what you're trying to get to let go.
can you link to this incident report?Quote:
Originally Posted by flowing alpy
sick bastard^^^^^^^^^^
rog
Happy to have tipped a glass with her if who I'm thinking. It was referenced here years ago but names were left out as far as I read so I did not ask. Sorry for your loss.Quote:
Originally Posted by flowing alpy
Found an example of what SFB is referring to, Cornice whomping on purpose without any intent to ski the line. said cornice whomping is good for the spansers and the instant instagram but does nothing to heal the snowpack. in fact this act is a measly showboating gopro way to keep the snowpack effed up. I agree it is a tool. point is that it is a tool to use to see if a slope is safe. going out of your way to stomp a cornice on a set of known facets/ TG snow/ depth hoar is just showboating.
on the flip side...some heavily trafficked slops are getting relatively safer with all the mixing of the layers from all the traffic in the wasangles. think upper days - cardiff - silver fork. not letting out any secrets here.
link here to the most nortious stomper white et all. http://utahavalanchecenter.org/avala...est-monitor-12
and http://utahavalanchecenter.org/avala...est-monitor-12
could not find the viddy of the cleanest mouth in the wasatch MSB. as she watched white stomp out one that cleaned out all of west monitor. maybe one of you internets pros can pull her up.
I get the verbiage most of the time. its like shakespeare or something only cool and relevant.Quote:
Originally Posted by cmcrawfo
Might be that the flip side is that wiping it to ground can allow the ground to cool below freezing and maybe set the snowpack to stick to steeper faces (by reducing snowpack temperature gradients). Could be how stuff gets so steep and gnar in AK without having to be in a couliour. Perhaps one of those Euros working on the SNOWPACK or CROCUS can break out the g-translate and chime in. Or klar, of course.
if your using a tool to provide a safe bed surface out, plan on skiing a similiar aspect, are wondering
if a certain layer will react to a cornice cut or block fine.
sent a few up on the ruth but pretty sure we were the only ones in the park at that time and damn sure the only ones on the glacier
if you just out in a fragile snowpack creating slides on terrain you have no plans on skiing just to start avvies, be it to report them, install fear, or like the roj says ya think it's fun and stimulating
i think it's whack
even more whack in a extremely crowded area with a shit load of don't know much but just bought the gearers
got a feeling when it dumps here it's gonna get real interesting and everybody stompin around trying to reset the snowpack is gonna suck
Yea thats lame for sure. I shoulda mentioned in my previous post.Quote:
Originally Posted by skifishbum
It might be part of the learning curve for some though. I've wanted to cut cornices just to see what happens on occasion too. Just haven't found the right one.
wait, what?Quote:
Originally Posted by theshredder
Ground will warm up again to close to zero once there is snow on it for a little while. very cold ground would be better than 5°C plus ground but IMO if you want to reduce the temperature gradient it would be a much more effective to have a really deep pack. I'm not really understanding how you figure the snow would stick better if the ground is colder?
Is there actually someone on here who works with crocus? Ican't get my version to run properly bc the instructions are in french fortran slang. Could use some assistance.
higher h20 count snow found in maritime climates will stick better to steeps as it stacks and clings better. better/more support/stronger structure
rog
Well, she wasn't really kickin' cornice. Stopped at the top of Red, broad flat summit, got too close to the steep, east face and broke through the cornice. Took a big fall. Skis and pack were sitting unattended on the summit.Quote:
Originally Posted by Summit
http://www.nwac.us/media/filer_publi...t-2-1-2011.pdf
Right. The ground surface would warm up fairly rapidly again after more fresh snow. And over permafrost/glacier wiping out the early season snowpack will still increase ground-snow temperature gradients so it makes no difference even there.Quote:
Originally Posted by klar
But doesn't snow stick to steeper faces easier in colder climates? I would think it does because you might not get that basal melt layer at the surface as often.
Also, it might not be too hard to set up crocus or something similar with a fortran based atmosphere model if crocus is a 1 spacial dimension, time-dependent model. The source of weather data and the method of downscaling you want to use could make a huge difference in how much work you'll end up doing though. (It might not take me long to do it with MM5, but I should add that with any mesoscale model you're always facing issues of areal coverage vs. spatial resolution, and which physical parameterizations will produce the best output for a given area/resolution. If the atmosphere model does everything reasonably well except for one critical day in the early season, it would likely mess up the entire snowpack model.)
I don't think so. As rog said, warmer (=wetter) snow will stick better. The type of snow you can make good snowballs with. If you throw a nice, solid snowball against a wall it will at least partially stick. A snow ball of fairly dry snow that barly holds together wont stick. The quality of the snowball is more important than the temperature of the wall. Of course, if you throw the snowball at a metal roof that has been in the sun all day, it will melt and slide off, but I don't see a lot of scenarios where that would happen with a snowstorm and a steep slope.Quote:
Originally Posted by theshredder
If I am understanding you correctly, by basal melt layer you mean depth hoar, rather than an actual melt layer? Very cold climates tend to also be dry climates and facilitate the formation of depth hoar. You have less of that in warmer, wet climates. (Typical spiny places like Haines are on the wet & warm-ish coast, no?) In more continental areas snow can obviously also stick if it gets warm enough, which is why around here steep ice faces traditionally come in season in late spring/early summer, when you tend to have warm storms with a high snow line. (People seem to be ignoring this tradition with increasing frequency.)
well yes, that is more or less what crocus and afaik also snowpack were set up for. my basik crocus version runs on a simple text file input with a bunch of meteorological parameters (hourly values), which you can either measure or pull from a model. You can specify an initial snowpack or start with bare ground. I haven't seen SNOWPACK in a long time but as far as I remember it does more or less the same thing. There are operational versions that have a kind of interface where you can input measured meteorological data as the season progresses. Both crocus and snowpack are stratigraphic, 1D models, although at least for SNOWPACK some sort of spatial coverage versions also exist (used e.g. for modelling permafrost areas). You could of course simply loop the 1D model for all the gridpoints where you have appropriate model data, but I'm not sure if you would gain much insight from that in terms of snowpack development beyond what you would figure out without the model. If you want I can let you know once I get it running and play with your input.Quote:
Originally Posted by theshredder
Couldn't that also be because the snow had the entire winter to cool the ground it's sitting on? i.e. there'd be less melt of the snow that is in contact with the ground by spring time because the ground temperature (surface, and at depth) would be a lot lower by then, which might be effectively a lot like reducing snowpack temp gradients.Quote:
Originally Posted by klar
I'd be interested in using the model for an entire grid of meteorological values as the season progresses. The idea is to provide some kind of real time map, which could reduce the need for observations. You are right though, it may not provide very useful data, at least not initially. All weather models (even the high resolution ones) use a kind of 'smoothed' terrain as part of their lower boundary condition, which creates a mismatch between model elevations and real world elevations). I guess you could also use a statistical downscaling technique as well though...Quote:
Originally Posted by klar
Unfortunately I haven't got a full season worth of hourly data but I'd like to look into a snowpack model. You essentially just turn your snowpack model into a subroutine and call it form the main atmosphere model and you've got a nice tool to look at the snowpack where there are no observations. You could even make it a 2-way coupling and improve the output of the atmosphere model, although that probably wouldn't be worth it for the computational resources required.Quote:
Originally Posted by klar
A lot of things are possible but I continue to remain doubtful in this case. How would the snow "cool" the ground? I was talking about ice faces, which are already rather cold, but in any case, snow isolates the ground and prevents it from cooling as much as it would if it were bare. I also still don't understand what exactly you mean when you say "melt". You keep mentioning temperature gradients, which suggests you mean facetting/depth hoar, rather than actual melt. (Spring snow packs start melting at the top, not the ground. Melt water may travel down to the ground in spring , causing glide cracks and subsequent slides. Glidecracks also occur when the ground is very wet and warm at the first snowfall, but this does not seem to be what you are describing and has little to do with temperature gradients through the snowpack.)Quote:
Originally Posted by theshredder
I very much doubt that this would ever be good enough to replace observations. You could probably manage the radiation components reasonably well if you have a high resolution digital elevation model and do some downscaling but all things wind related would be extremely difficult. IMO you would need a full boundary layer model between the snow and the atmosphere model.Quote:
Originally Posted by theshredder
Most research does not use the super detailed snowpack models to couple with other stuff but people have been doing things like what you describe, e.g.:
http://www.the-cryosphere-discuss.ne...2191-2013.html
Soil temperature modeling also often uses some sort of snow model.
I believe we have completey derailed this thread.
maybe the reason it seems sort of stupid to a stupid is that virtually every time i see it on gopro the people doing it sound and act like assholes.
This tool kicks cornices. Not everywhere and not all the time though.
I get the objections to it: thin snow = weak snow. So, continually triggering slides on a given slope can keep it thin/faceted & weak, as opposed to waiting for the snowpack to strengthen over time.
It does make for a heck of a stability test and if you do it enough you'll get to see some really cool shit. One of the best ways to learn about something is to see it. Nothing like seeing avalanches from up close, as long as you don't get in their way!
I hear stories of people who have been riding the "backcountry" for several seasons and the first slide they see is the one they get caught in! This is unbelievable to me. So yeah, kick those cornices, cut that convex rollover & thrash around on test slopes. Carefully!
Make sure the coast is clear. Really CLEAR. Eventually one will run full track & you will be standing there thinking "Fuck, what have I done?!!". It goes without mentioning you can get spanked doing this sort of thing.
Also, if you are in cell-covered area, it is a good Idea to have Sheriff Dispatch or Ski Patrol's # handy so you can call in a "stand down". You don't want anyone getting into a helicopter on your account....
I sure seen a lot of patrollers using it in closed zones. Then ski it after it runs.
I am not sure if this incident is an argument for or against cornice kicking.
http://www.tetonat.com/2012/01/24/ta...ain-avalanche/
Here is the uncensored link to the Mark White West Monitor cornice kicking in foul-mouthed audio splendor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1WYcQf7yyM
Hey SFB, just found a use for the 10# weight I never get to use.
Look out below MoFo's!!!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ilttmWzkw
Attachment 150514
The snow on West Monitor was killed today by ignorant cornice whompers who had no intention of skiing it. The cornice may have eventually fallen naturally and it may have been the same result or maybe not. West Monitor is back to an early season snow pack. There is a lot of moisture in our recent snow. Some cold temps will lock things up and greatly strengthen our snowpack. Please leave the cornices be, on the big slopes we share, when you have no intent to ski it.
funny that Mark White made the observation and submitted it to UAC.
what is with his love affair with West Monitor cornices.
gotta love that old video of MSB and her clean mouth.:wink: shhh no cussin I'm videoing. cracks me up every time
I do not know this mark white fellow and I do appreciate his obs on uac but some body really needs to tell him stop bringing down the monitors, I'd really like to ski it one day.Quote:
Originally Posted by F#*k You Cat
http://utahavalanchecenter.org/avalanches/20348
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There was a whole lot of excitement in that viddy. Boarderline orgasmic? The things people do for kicks...Quote:
Originally Posted by Hey Diddle Diddle
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Anyone spoken to him about the thought process?Quote:
Originally Posted by TheFugitive
knocked off a human-sized chunk of cornice on a ridge today. the pocket it landed on broke, but only slid about 10 ft.. deeep up there.
its kind of like a snow pit.. certainly not required to ride safely, but it can give you bullseye information regarding stability..
monitors? yer not missing much. short shots fer sure.Quote:
Originally Posted by TheFugitive
rog