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Every winter settlers of the U.S. and Canadian Mountain West could expect to lose dozens of lives to deadly avalanches. This constant threat to trappers, miners, railway workers-and their families-forced individuals and communities to develop knowledge, share strategies, and band together as they tried to survive the extreme conditions of "avalanche country." The result of this convergence, author Diana Di Stefano argues, was a complex network of formal and informal cooperation that used disaster preparedness to engage legal action and instill a sense of regional identity among the many lives affected by these natural disasters. Encounters in Avalanche Country tells the story of mountain communities' responses to disaster over a century of social change and rapid industrialization. As mining and railway companies triggered new kinds of disasters, ideas about environmental risk and responsibility were increasingly negotiated by mountain laborers, at the elite levels among corporations, and in socially charged civil suits. Disasters became a dangerous crossroads where social spaces and ecological realities collided, illustrating how individuals, groups, communities, and corporate entities were all tangled in this web of connections between people and their environment. Written in a lively and engaging narrative style, Encounters in Avalanche Country uncovers authentic stories of survival struggles, frightening avalanches, and how local knowledge challenged legal traditions that defined avalanches as acts of god. Combining disaster, mining, railroad, and ski histories with the theme of severe winter weather, it provides a new and fascinating perspective on the settlement of the Mountain West.
In January 2003, Ken Jones, an adventurer and former British Special Forces soldier, was caught in a devastating avalanche as he climbed deep in the frozen wilderness of Romania's Carpathian Mountains. Swept over the edge of a 75-foot cliff, he plummeted to the rocks below. Against all odds, he survived the fall--regaining consciousness shrouded in darkness and sub-zero temperatures, separated from his supplies, and in excruciating pain from a broken leg and shattered pelvis. With frostbite and internal bleeding beginning to take their toll, Jones summoned his deepest will to live and began three agonizing days dragging himself over frozen terrain to safety--only to discover that his true ordeal was yet to begin. The doctors who initially treated him were astonished that any person could sustain such massive trauma and exposure and still be alive. Then, after an initial round of extensive surgeries and recoveries that equaled if not exceeded the pain of the injuries themselves, Jones was told he would almost certainly never walk again. Over the next two years he endured constant physical therapy and additional surgery, with latent effects from the fall still threatening his life. At one point, he slipped into unconsciousness under anesthesia just as he heard a doctor telling his mother he was going to die. But with a soldier's heart he made his way to recovery, regained full mobility, and has made his story known in this remarkable book. In the bestselling tradition of Into Thin Air and Touching the Void, Darkness Descending is a classic tale of triumph over adversity and what it means to never give up. Jones's remarkable feat has already been featured on Animal Planet's hit series I Shouldn't Be Alive, and stands tall as an unforgettable testament to the strength of the human spirit.
The present mortality as a result of snow avalanches exceeds the average mortality caused by earthquakes as well as all other forms of slope failure combined. Snow avalanches can range from small amounts of loose snow moving rapidly down a slope to slab avalanches, in which large chunks of snow break off and destroy everything in their path. Although considered a hazard in the United States since the westward expansion in the nineteenth century, in modern times snow avalanches are an increasing concern in recreational mountainous areas. However, programs for snow avalanche hazard mitigation in other countries are far ahead of those in the United States. The book identifies several steps that should be taken by the United States in order to establish guidelines for research, technology transfer, and avalanche legislation and zoning.
An environmental and cultural history of winter in the colonial Northeast, examining indigenous and settler knowledge of life in the cold.
An avalanche expert and predictor explores the often deadly nature of avalanches, sharing dramatic rescue and escape stories, including those of a skier who was forced to make a life-and-death decision and the race to save a buried victim.
After an avalanche hits, a group of skiers in the Rocky Mountains must survive Mother Nature and a life-threatening injury to one of their members in order to make it out of the mountains and find help.
Winter recreation in the mountains has increased steadily over the past few years, and so has the number of deaths and injuries caused by avalanches. Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain covers everything you need to know to avoid trouble in avalanche terrain: what avalanches are and how they work, common myths, human activities that lead to avalanche trouble, what happens to victims when an avalanche occurs, and rescue techniques. Provides step- by-step instruction for determining avalanche hazards, using safe travel technique, and making effective rescues.
The Rising Tide of Color challenges familiar narratives of race in American history that all too often present the U.S. state as a benevolent force in struggles against white supremacy, especially in the South. Featuring a wide range of scholars specializing in American history and ethnic studies, this powerful collection of essays highlights historical moments and movements on the Pacific Coast and across the Pacific to reveal a different story of race and politics. From labor and anticolonial activists around World War I and multiracial campaigns by anarchists and communists in the 1930s to the policing of race and sexuality after World War II and transpacific movements against the Vietnam War, The Rising Tide of Color brings to light histories of race, state violence, and radical movements that continue to shape our world in the twenty-first century.
From beer labels to literary classics like A River Runs Through It, trout fishing is a beloved feature of the iconography of the American West. But as Jen Brown demonstrates in Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West, the popular conception of Rocky Mountain trout fishing as a quintessential experience of communion with nature belies the sport’s long history of environmental manipulation, engineering, and, ultimately, transformation. A fly-fishing enthusiast herself, Brown places the rise of recreational trout fishing in a local and global context. Globally, she shows how the European sport of fly-fishing came to be a defining, tourist-attracting feature of the expanding 19th-century American West. Locally, she traces the way that the burgeoning fly-fishing tourist industry shaped the environmental, economic, and social development of the Western United States: introducing and stocking favored fish species, eradicating the less favored native “trash fish,” changing the courses of waterways, and leading to conflicts with Native Americans’ fishing and territorial rights. Through this analysis, Brown demonstrates that the majestic trout streams often considered a timeless feature of the American West are in fact the product of countless human interventions adding up to a profound manipulation of the Rocky Mountain environment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKMwEkKj9jg