CSAW Colorado Snow and Avalanche Workshop - The Report: Damned Good!

[summit]

CSAW, Colorado Ski and Avalanche Workshop, is a once a year one day all day conference for snow professional types. It was held Tuesday Oct 14 at Copper Mountain. Am I extremely glad I was able to attend through SCRG.

Here is the general story from one of our two dailies, The Summit County Independent: http://www.independentdaily.com/art....ate=2003-10-15

Here is my report:

There were about 150 people there… all sorts of professional types... NWS, CAIC, USFS, BLM, guides, pro patrollers, patrol directors, snow control directors, and operations personnel from many resorts. I saw the Berthoud guides there... Eldora, Silverton, Monarch, Keystone was even there. Summit County Rescue Group had a large showing, some law enforcement types, lots of others too (including BCA).

There were a series of presentations given and I will summarize them here from agenda:

Knox Williams of the CAIC (Colorado Avalanche Information Center for those who don’t know… our wonderful state avalanche forecasters) gave an introduction.

“Snow Rangering for the BLM (aka, What was I thinking?)
The BLM Snow Ranger Denny Hogan spoke at length about snow control plans and the Silverton expansion. He spoke about the great challenges that would be involved.

“The French Connection”
Scott Toepfer from CAIC spoke about patrol exchange, French avvy control and forecasting, some high French villages, and had some great travel pictures.

“How We Make A Forecast”
The CAIC presentation on their avalanche forecasting was very interesting and informative. The computerized forecasting tools in their arsenal are fantastic. The graphics we saw were really cool including real time weather data from resort weather station. This was some really cool stuff but its hard to describe without the graphics.

“Decision Traps and Avalanche Accidents”
Ian McCammon of NOLS is as brilliant as he is charismatic. He really knows his stuff and is a leader in his field. I was privileged to hear him speak. His presentation on decision traps in avalanche accidents was just awesome. I won't even try to explain it here but it had some amazing information, statistics, and conclusions about human factors, group dynamics, and how backcountry experience and education factor into accidents. The most surprising fact was that something like 90% of accidents had at least one obvious warning signs and most had more.
Here are two great articles he wrote on it.
“The Role of Training in Recreational Accidents in the United States”
http://www.snowpit.com/articles/training.pdf
“Evidence of Heuristic Traps in Recreational Avalanche Accidents” http://www.snowpit.com/articles/traps%20reprint.pdf

“An Intrepid Weather Forecast for 2003-04”
Mike Baker of the National Weather Service really seems to know his stuff. The guy gave a very interesting talk on the long range forecast. Here is a post on the long range forecast. http://www.tetongravity.com/forums/s...&threadid=1297 I think some of the San Juan types were corner him on the way out and... uh... convince him that the long range forecast should be changed. The NWS presenter also covered some basic and advanced meteorology and forecasting topics that I found very interesting but it put some people to sleep. He did say the next two weeks would be dry and probably warmish.


“Emerging Definitions of Stability”
Ian McCaffran's lectures on emerging definitions of snow stability was truly cool (especially since I had only limited background (people with a lot of background had heard some of it before a those who hadn’t taken avvy 1 didn’t know what he was talking about). It made me realize that I had only bee looking at one half of the stability equation (stress v strain) and not at the structure and energy factors of snowpack failure. His presentation was a great discussion of engineering fracture mechanics. He discussed some stability tests, mentioning the bridge block test which would test the elastic modulus and youngs modulus of the snow (damned exciting stuff if you ever took some engineering courses) I wish he had explained that test. The Q-factor test he explained seemed like an awesome way to gauge the potential energy release in the snowpack and whether the releasable energy would be enough to propagate a fracture. The lemon factor test was very cool for figuring out where a failure was likely to occur if one did occur. Here is his article on it: “A field method for identifying structural weaknesses in the snowpack” http://www.snowpit.com/articles/lemo...int%20copy.pdf

The scariest part of his lecture for me dealt with the work of a research named Fröhm. This researcher found that the Rutchblock Test can be highly unreliable because of spatial variance (aka weak spots*). His trained Swiss troops were able to avalanche something like 18% of R-6 and 13% of R-7 rated slopes! (those percentages might be off by a few points due to my memory) That is facking SCARY! The test I and so many others rely on as a major determining factor in determining whether or not to ski a slope can be a 1 in 8 or almost 1 in 5 chance of the slope being able to slide even though it seems bombproof from the test! Nobody believed that the Rutchblock was 100% reliable especially with people who do not do it often, but I certainly had no idea that it was so unreliable even in the hands of highly trained professionals who knew exactly what they were doing. Ian called the results frightening. He said that amazingly, none of the Swiss troops died though several were hurt in the experiment.

“CAIC’s Online Data Entry and Database” Dale Atkins, CAIC & Brian Gardel, Sidetrips
Their second presentation on their new databasing system was probably a lot more interesting for people who are CAIC observers, which I am not. The interesting part is that the observers could query the online database for a particular avalanche path with certain weather conditions in mind and it would display the avalanche history. There was a great multitude of search parameters that could be used.


“How Accurate is your inclinometer?”
Ian came back to demonstrate that everybody sucks at using inclinometers. He used the test we had all tried during a break for his data. Even though the room was full of people with good education and experience in the backcountry, that we couldn't reliable read our inclinometers except with a massive 10 degree range of accuracy. +-5 degrees is only the 90th percentile too! He showed that even a group of experienced backcountry guide only had +-4 or 3 degrees where 90% fell within that range. This demonstrates that we should always be suspicious of our inclinometer readings and consider the possibility that the slop may be steeper or shallower than we thought and plan accordingly.

That was the conference… it was truly worth it. What else can I say???





*It made me think of how I dug 3 pits in the late spring on Grizzly while I was resting up after the hike there… the first two were totally consolidated to the ground… the third was consolidated except for a full six inches of depth hoar at the bottom. Spatial variation sucks! Two more pits showed consolidation to the ground. It was an incredible run.

[shera]

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing...