Armstrong - The Log of a Snow Survey: Skiing and Working in the Winter World of the Sierra Nevada

The Log
of a
Snow Survey

Skiing and working in the Winter World
o f the Sierra Nevada Mountains

PATRICK ARMSTRONG

Copyright 2013, 2014, 2016 Patrick M. Armstrong .

Illustrations by Nancy Overholtz

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4582-1798-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4582-1800-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4582-1799-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014918051

Abbott Press rev. date: 08/11/2016

Contents

W inter high in the mountains is a world of extremes. The violence of storms and winds on the passes is stunning to the senses. Conversely the calm, quiet beauty of a blue sky day while breaking trail through fresh snow and surrounded by high peaks is, likewise, stunning to the senses. The landscape appears too big, too grand. Skiing off a remote mountain pass in deep powder to a valley several thousand feet below can only be experienced. It could never be adequately described.

Snow is the greatest fresh water reservoir for the West and for much of the world. Measuring this resource in the Sierra Nevada Mountains requires snow surveyors to ski over high passes to access the remote basins where most snow accumulates. At night they must dig down through deep snow to gain entrance into rock or log cabins for shelter. Snow surveying requires many long days breaking trail through deep snow and traveling in difficult conditions but rarely does this diminish the fascination for this occupation. Some stay on this job their entire working lifetime, thirty or forty years or more. This is understandable, for high mountains in winter are a remarkable and captivating world, like no other place on earth; much richer and more varied than one would imagine.

The wildlife and bird life found in this high winter world are unique. They adapted to the harsh climate during the Pleistocene when escape from such conditions was not possible and are now at home in this realm of raging blizzards, peaks, alpine tundra and boreal forests. For the last 10,000 years high mountains have preserved the Pleistocenes climatic conditions. This ancient winter world is still mostly intact and is visited rarely for any length of time by modern man. Snow surveyors are an exception for they live and work in remote mountain ranges during the winter months.

Snow measurements are taken in almost all high mountain ranges around the world from the Alps of Europe to the Caucasus Mountains of Russia to the Alps of New Zealand, and from the Aconcagua of the Chilean and Argentine Andes of South America to the Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevada, Cascades, and Appalachians of North America. Mountain snow annually stores and slowly releases water that is utilized for power generation, irrigation and domestic use. To measure this snowmelt water resource and to predict and manage its annual runoff, requires a range of technologies from remote automated snow sensors that bounce radio busts off ionized vapor trails from meteorites, to satellite imaging, to the taking of manual measurements. Snowmelt water, transported by rivers to populated areas, is the underpinning of many countries economies and quality of life. Take for instance just three of the agricultural counties for which we measure this resource here in the Sierra Nevada Mountains: Kings County, Kern County, and Tulare County. Taken together, these three counties grow more produce than any single country in the entire world.

This book is written for people involved in snow surveying and snowmelt water management as well as for people who enjoy winter, wilderness, and the mountains. It is not presented as an authority on any one subject, for it simply is a description of our work, thoughts, and concerns while snow surveying in the field. Subjects include safe winter travel on skis, practical avalanche prediction and avoidance, cabin life, cooking on and maintaining wood-burning cook stoves, wildlife and bird life found high in the mountains in winter, and a brief history of these snow surveys. This Book describes many days traveling thorough some of the most stunning mountain terrain found anywhere in the world. Winter is a wild and beautiful season high in the mountains. It has obvious dangers and it has sublime beauties. This account attempts to transport the reader into that remote winter world.

T his manuscript is dedicated to Dr. James E. Church from the University of Nevada at Reno. From 1906-1909 he and his assistant Dr. Boardman developed a simple, elegant method to determine the amount of water held in snow, and a method for predicting the snowmelt runoff. These methods are still in use today. This dedication extends to past and present snow surveyors who have followed in Dr. Churchs ski and snowshoe tracks and to the support staff for the Department Of Water Resources in Sacramento, the Natural Resource Conservation Service in our other western states, and all other agencies worldwide who manage snowmelt water runoff.

I thank Nancy Overholtz for the use of her artwork. Her paintings capture the intelligence and spirit of animals and birds in their natural habitat.

This narrative is factual and includes many incidents taken from our snow survey trips. The comments and opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of the other snow surveyors or agencies mentioned in this book.

CHAPTER I
Into the Mountains

T here it is again, a faint, but distinct buzz. Every time my ski-tip snaps down over a bump in the snow it makes a high-pitched buzzing sound. I remove my right ski and examine it. Wooden cross country skis will break if stressed too much. They will break just behind the tip, where the ski is thin and supple, and just as in a fine stringed musical instrument, a buzz coming from the wood means a crack. I do not see any crack or break. This is a relief for the wind is howling across Horseshoe Meadow and to stop and make a repair would be difficult.

We ski on into the blowing snow of the whiteout. After half an hour skiing head-down-into-the-wind, we reach the old cow camp log cabin at the meadows upper end. A forest of large one-to-four-foot diameter lodgepole pine trees and some glacial moraines shelter the cabin. The wind cant get to us here, but it whistles through trees on the ridge tops above. Murt Stewart, Dave Sharp and I take a break.

We had spent the night before at the old sawmill snow survey cabin three miles below Horseshoe Meadow. This cabin is built on the site of an old sawmill that supplied timbers to the Cerro Gordo silver mines in the 1870s. Made of corrugated metal, the cabin is not picturesque in itself; its beauty is the view out the front door. It lies at 9,400 feet in elevation, perched in the cove of Cottonwood Creek, high on the Sierra Nevadas eastern escarpment. The escarpment in this area rises 6,000 to 11,000 feet from the Owens Valley floor in a horizontal distance of three to five miles; over 2,000 vertical feet for each horizontal mile. Murt, Dave and I had ascended this escarpment the day before, hiking and skiing up from the Owens Valley.