Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
After my first 4 day course, the message was very clear:
"You are now the least knowledgeable people that should be in the back country".
I kept thinking "I know just enough to know I know nothing".
Reading this article it was very hard not to angry. Severe lack of training and practice caused deaths.
* 16 people is a huge no-no.
* The fact that someone in the group (a Liftie!) didn't even have a beacon should be a HUGE warning sign.
* Hitting the slope at 11:45 seems wrong to me - the day had warmed by then allowing the snow to consolidate.
* No clear route identification or plan
* The didn't dig a snow pit to assess avalanche conditions on the slope they were about to hit - my personal number 1
* Multiple people dropped in at once - the biggest no-no of all!
* They saw evidence of big slides on the way down, but kept going anyway!
* Waiting for those above by just standing around waiting in the potential slide path.
* Calling 911 immediately shows a lack of experience and understanding. Those buried have ~13 minutes before their chances of survival drop to essentially zero - help is not coming to save them. YOU MUST SAVE THEM.
* Calling 911 to report a body is a freaking waste of time and could cost others' buried their lives. KEEP SEARCHING AND DIGGING!
I hate to say it: They were asking for it, and a lot of them knew better.
Please, please, please, never go into the back country without training. Even a weekend course will be great. Don't let your friends or those more experienced than you convince you it's not needed - anyone that says that is not worth going with, because you are risking your life with people that don't know what they're talking about.
EDIT: If you want the first-person avalanche experience, watch this video. I go snowboarding here all the time. Turn the sound way up to really feel it. This person was saved by well trained back country ski partners. http://vimeo.com/6581009
I think that the main reason that Mrs. Saugstad is doing so many interviews is to spread the word about avalanche and snow safety education. Snow is a counterintuitive medium. If you're headed into the backcountry, you owe it to your friends and family to take a class and learn. (Snow science is super fun, too.)
I think the bigger problem is ski resorts. They are so "safe" and controlled (we call them Disneyland) that anyone going skiing doesn't have to engage their brain.
It's then very easy to continue to behave in that manner when you are not at a resort.
Often in the back country we say out loud to each other "This is the real deal", "This is not a joke", "No ski patrol has been here" to constantly remind us to be alert to danger signs
Back country skiing is akin to skydiving. Significant experience and training is required. From avalanche awareness training, to avalanche rescue training, to tools and devices that a back country team needs to have to safely participate in the back country snow experience.
You've got to be very experienced and educated before you venture out of bounds...
> Back country skiing is akin to skydiving
That is not what I got from reading that. Certainly, anything they did after the avalanche hit wouldn't have made a difference. At least that is the impression I got from the description of the injuries.
and a lot of them knew better.
And I think you somewhat agree. Or do you think they knew, but weren't trained well enough?
Thinking about how this could happen, I thought of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster#Proba..., in particular the part where it says
The flight engineer's apparent hesitation to challenge Veldhuyzen van Zanten further, possibly because Captain Veldhuyzen van Zanten was not only senior in rank, but also one of the most able and experienced pilots working for the airline
In this case, each of them seems to have felt safe because there were so many other experts around.
Also, no amount of training can fully prepare you for disaster. Even if you have been taught exactly what to do, you may not be able to do it in a situation of severe stress. That might explain the 911 calls. It could just be another 'program', that of 'call 911 for help' took over.
That statement shows you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about and clearly have no place commenting here.
The reality is that how you react after an avalanche will absolutely impact the lives of those buried.
> Or do you think they knew
They seemed to know, but went against their gut.
> Also, no amount of training can fully prepare you for disaster.
Agree, that's why a big part of training is simulated avalanches where people are yelling at you, it's cold, and people are 'dying' every minute you choose to use your damn cell phone.
The reality of that avalanche is that there was none: according to the doc' report, all three deceased were dead on arrival from blunt force trauma.
Making calls on your cell phone to report dead bodies is not included in that.
Sure, but that still makes your disagreement with the assertion that:
> anything they did after the avalanche hit wouldn't have made a difference.
wrong, especially when it was followed (and clarified) by:
> At least that is the impression I got from the description of the injuries.
No, I think it's more insidious. These people knew what to do but social pressure and group dynamics kept all but one from opting out. The best decision they could have made was to abandon the run entirely. More training would not really have helped, as it would just confer more confidence.
Maybe the real training that people need for these kinds of high risk sports is to watch their friends die.
http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/snow-sports/T...
I just wrote about this from 3 days ago, an inbounds slide at Crystal which is about 40 miles away from the Pass, as the crow flies
http://www.reddit.com/r/skiing/comments/154319/inbounds_slid...
And truthfully, this thread is very similar to the discussion when Craig Kelly's group was caught out in Revelstoke (2003). We have better beacons and airbags but not much has changed (and funding for a lot of avalanche forecasters has been cut
http://www.staynehoff.net/craig_kelly_death7.htm
I used to not think about slides but one day i was skinning around Kirkwood by myself (there are a few areas like K, Alta and Mammoth, that I used to know like the back of my hand) and the snow was whumphing and i was thinking it was textbook snow. A little crown broke off, maybe 2 inches high, 8 feet wide, and I was shocked at how hard it hit my boots, almost knocked me over
Those caught in the avalanche didn't see any signs, 3 locals splintered from the group at the top and did, on a separate route.
> Waiting for those above by just standing around waiting in the potential slide path.
It's fairly clearly noted that even those in the path stopped in an old-growth bunch of trees, that's usually expected to be safe[0] (in fact, one of the 4 wedged himself in a tree and didn't get carried away)
> Calling 911 immediately shows a lack of experience and understanding. Those buried have ~13 minutes before their chances of survival drop to essentially zero - help is not coming to save them. YOU MUST SAVE THEM.
There were multiple people in search mode, and the first 911 call mentioned was 7mn after the avalanche, not "immediately" by a long shot.
[0] of course not as safe — or smart — as not being in the path at all to start with
We have become used to the concept that no matter what, help is just a phone call away. The mountains are a force of nature that we as backcountry users must have the most profound respect for. Conditions can change on a dime, and even the most skilled and resourceful SAR technicians may not be able to reach you for days. Some areas, like Canada's Rocky Mountain Parks, are blessed with numerous highly trained and fearless professional SAR personnel. Most are not. In rapidly changing mountain weather, any trip can become an overnight trip, perhaps in the harshest of conditions.
Mistakes happen. Even the best among us have been killed in freak accidents that could not have been anticipated or mitigated (I am reminded of this tragic and unpreventable incident this summer: http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/progs/np-pn/sp-ps/sec7/08-2012.aspx#...). But tragically, it is often the so-called "second mistake" that kills - the failure to take appropriate actions when things started to go wrong, or worse, the failure to appropriately assess situational risks.
For many feats of ski touring or mountaineering, less than 10% of days in a given season may be suitable for a successful attempt. More likely than not, today is not the day. Know when to turn back, and understand that help will come when it can, not when you need it.
When only two lift trips and a warning sign are the barrier to a backcountry run, we should not be surprised that people who might be reluctant to spend several hours working hard to get to the top of a risky run choose to accept a risk that they might not fully understand.
There may be significant pressure to "Go" if it takes a while to get to the destination, and you have misgivings only at the destination. I.e. sunk-cost fallacy -- we hiked for days to get here, and it looks a bit iffy, but we're not turning back now...
The survivability rate ranged from 2 years (or was it even 2 months?) for those without knowledge, to 100 years.
Avalanches are scary. The mountains are scary. And yet there's no place I feel more at home. I wish I could do this more often, but right now I can't. In any case, I respect nature and want to learn as much about it as I can.
The primary take-aways I found were to pay more attention to the human factor, keep group size down and route/hazard discussions happening, even (especially?) when skiing with pros or people you really respect and don't ski with all the time.
Fairly strongly disagree on hitting the slope at 11:45 and no snow pit being problems though. Totally depends on the day, and I wasn't there, but this thing slid on depth hoar 3 feet down - that's not caused by a little bit of february sun in Washington. As for digging pits, while I think they can be a good tool to get a look at the snowpack, I also think it's easy to rely on them too much. Spatial variability in a snow pack is HUGE, and all a pit does is tell you how the snow is behaving at one little, somewhat random point. Especially if you're a local and ski in the BC all the time, you should have a pretty good sense of what the snow pack is doing without doing any digging at all. In my home range (the Wasatch), I typically use snow pits mostly to test SPECIFIC questions like "how energetic is this known weak layer that I've been watching for days?." Far more useful are small little "hand pits" and pole probes as you go along, feeling the snow pack in a lot of different places to gather more data points. In this particular case, however, everyone already knew it was touchy, a snow pit wouldn't have changed much. The problem was that they didn't plan or ski accordingly.
I am sure group rides are lots of fun, but I would be mindful of being extra cautious.
riding in a group for a long time also gives you tunnel vision as you follow the guy in front of you all the time. if he goes down, target fixation kicks in and you hit him.
a good group has the rookies in front, to set the pace. rookies at the end mean the worst riders need to go the fastest.
"All of the people in the group were experienced backcountry skiers and were carrying avalanche rescue gear, Michelson said. They were skiing the line in sections, one by one, in accordance with standard safety protocol."
I hope this trend of story telling with rich media content continues. Total immersion could be just around the corner.
More details on how it was made here: http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/198970/how-th...
I'm in Interactive News, on the news side (for a few more days, at least ;) Special features like this one are usually done by Multimedia (recently merged with the Graphics team), and there are also many detailed individual graphics, photos, and videos that are a part of it.
Things like article templates are more in the Design department -- but they also collaborated on this. Really, everyone pitches in as best they can.
It's kind of a reflection of how deeply the web is (and will continue to be) integrated into organisations like NYT.
Graphics and design by Hannah Fairfield, Xaquín G.V., Jon Huang, Wayne Kamidoi, Sam Manchester, Alan McLean, Jacky Myint, Graham Roberts, Joe Ward, Jeremy White and Josh Williams. Photography by Ruth Fremson. Video by Catherine Spangler.
Additional video by Eric Miller and Shane Wilder.
Kristen Millares Young contributed research. The reporting for this article on the Feb. 19 avalanche at Tunnel Creek was done over six months. It involved interviews with every survivor, the families of the deceased, first responders at Tunnel Creek, officials at Stevens Pass and snow-science experts. It also included the examination of reports by the police, the medical examiner and the Stevens Pass Ski Patrol, as well as 40 calls to 911 made in the aftermath of the avalanche. The Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research provided a computer-generated simulation of the avalanche, based on data accumulated from the Stevens Pass accident report and witness accounts. Additional sources are: LIDAR data from King County GIS Center; Iowa Environmental Mesonet, Iowa State University; Mark Moore, U.S. Forest Service; National Avalanche Center.
There was a link yesterday on HN that used a similar technique, but the breaks were static images that didn't really add anything to the content of the article [1]. Sure, they're pretty and novel, but I thought the breaks did more harm then good for somebody actually reading the interview. They were more distracting than anything.
I have a feeling that we'll see a lot more of this technique in the future. I personally hope that it doesn't just get slapped on for its visual appeal, but rather as a medium to present value-added content (like this NY Times article did).
The use was so fantastic here precisely because this sort of story cried out for exactly these tools to provide a deeper understanding.
I think it’s fundamentally wrong to make font size dependent on viewport width. What you want is to make it dependent on ppi and typical viewing distances (a phone can get aways with a smaller font because compared to a laptop, viewing distances are shorter) you can expect on the device that is used to display the content. Sadly, there is no straightforward way to access this information and we are currently limited to educated guesses.
call me crazy, but the way your arrange your windows is not really a use case we design for at pitchfork.
i agree that there may be a better way to do this, though, but we made the choice to scale fonts to viewport because we want a certain amount of information to look a certain way per page.
Its mobile-unfriendly and breaks the UI of NYT.com.
The animations started playing right as soon as I scrolled on to them, meaning they were partially obscured until I scrolled to a certain point. If I accidentally passed that super special point, they were abruptly obscured on the opposite side by the rest of the article.
90s multimedia rarely had it.
1) You need to always have a leader
2) The whole group needs to be aware of the plan at all times, you cannot over communicate
3) Listen to the nagging voice of intuition - if something feels wrong check that feeling out
4) Experts are not always on the top of their name, especially when tired or cold
Stay safe this winter people!
The people killed in Tunnel Creek and around our region on the same day were good friends, parents, and people.
This slide, in particular, has attracted so much attention because those involved are professionals and because the event resonated so strongly within the ski media community.
Missing from a lot of this accident's coverage is how very much life the slide victims had lived. We can honor them by living as well as they did.
Jim Jack, head judge for the Freeride World Tour, skiing with kids on the hometown hill: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sQ2gU0OJ30
Those of you at startups may find resonance here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuDR5_qbwPQ
Ditto that sentiment. Live passionately, look out for others.
For those of you more interested in the avalanche / snow-science side of things than that this doesn't render properly on your mobile device, check out http://nwac.us. Specifically, here is their initial analysis of the Tunnel Creek incident: http://www.nwac.us/media/uploads/documents/accidents/2011_20...
I don't like to speak authoritatively about most subjects, but I feel very strongly about this one thing. Vanity has no place in the back country. Gosh, in a group of 16 people, not all of whom are acquainted, if at least one doesn't think you're a sissy then it's plainly impossible that everyone is well informed of the risks being taken.
Getting users to think about the judgement and impact of the choices they make when they are seeking this rush is a very challenging. Breaking the mold to make a possibly more impactful presentation is exactly what Avalanche education needs.
And people, don't jump into tree runs to avoid anything. It's plenty fast in there and if you are too slow, you're dead.
It's OK to ask for a ride down from the lifties.
It won't let me zoom out or zoom in. The only way to read the article is by dragging back and forth repeatedly.
Technical/debugging note: everything was fine before the top header image fully loaded. I could zoom out and zoom in before that image showed up, so therefore that header image is somehow removing the ability to zoom for iPhone users (and is also causing the 200% zoom-in).
It's a shame because, from the sound of the other comments, it sounds like a really nice layout on the desktop. It's a shame they destroyed the mobile experience.
Such a nice design but it's a shame mobile is left out. Something like that is nice to read away from the desktop.
Tracking the people through the thumbnail images and seeing the different parts of the mountain matched up to the images the story had produced in my head.
It's a testament to the content and the medium that they chose.
Every part of this was precisely, beautifully and expertly planned to have a profound emotional pull to see the story through to the end. It worked. While I was reading, I felt the emotion from the words + the animations + video + audio.
I love the format, design and style. Simply brilliant.
Edit: the Flash content is the ad in the middle of the page, right after the following paragraph:
"To head straight down to the bottom is to enter what experts call a terrain trap: a funnel of trouble and clumsy skiing, clogged with trees and rocks and confined by high walls. Few go that way intentionally."
How saddening. They worked hard to make it HTML5 compliant, but the user experience for some is ruined by this ad crashing everything...
Not the case here, the "big" ones are <video> tags but the smaller videos embedded from linked from the text is flash (and that's apparently sufficient to make everything crawl to a halt, Chrome barely shows up in top but the flash process maxes out a core)
I thought it was already, for many subjects.
So not for everybody. From the comments here, you'd think its gods gift to journalism.
Also it hijacked my Back button on my browser, had to kill the page, lost my browse context so I resent it for that too.
Right-/long-click your back button (depending on your browser) to get the local history. Then choose one page before NYT.
But I wonder why reasonable people would ever write a page to hijack 'Back'. Annoys me every time.
It looks visually great, but aren't we basically looking at text with embedded videos? On Twitter the buzz about this made me this was a brand new way of presenting articles - you know what it reminds me of most? A book.
My point is; to characterise presenting an article in this interface as revolutionary strikes me as incorrect - it instead harks back to a format that we're all familiar with and which works very well. Which, as I wrote, is the book.
The quality of the journalism doesn't come into it; I'm sure it's very good.
Second thought: My fan's gone mad. Glad I'm on AC...
New York Times, stop hijacking my back button
All of which goes to naught when flash BSODs W7 on page 6.
The heck?