Snow

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I really liked the previous version, where you could video call friends and post on stories. In one of the newer updates, that was take out. Overall, I really do love the app, and I will continue to use it! I liked the old version better than the current one: I also miss being able to see peoples stories and what they do during their day.

That is why I rated it so low I understand it may be similar to snapchat I have both snow and snapchat but it is very unique in many ways!! It has much more filters than snapchat and i just personally think it is so much better. If only the messages and stories etc. Right now, I am considering deleting the app because of the missing features. I really really really miss being able to chat with friends on snow!!!

But please, bring back the old calling and stories thing, it was really fun to do that! Within seconds, the avalanche was the size of more than a thousand cars barreling down the mountain and weighed millions of pounds. Moving about 7o miles per hour, it crashed through the sturdy old-growth trees, snapping their limbs and shredding bark from their trunks. Others it captured and added to its violent load.

The slope of the terrain, shaped like a funnel, squeezed the growing swell of churning snow into a steep, twisting gorge. It moved in surges, like a roller coaster on a series of drops and high-banked turns. It accelerated as the slope steepened and the weight of the slide pushed from behind. It slithered through shallower pitches. The energy raised the temperature of the snow a couple of degrees, and the friction carved striations high in the icy sides of the canyon walls.

Elyse Saugstad, a professional skier, wore a backpack equipped with an air bag, a relatively new and expensive part of the arsenal that backcountry users increasingly carry to ease their minds and increase survival odds in case of an avalanche. About to be overtaken, she pulled a cord near her chest.

She was knocked down before she knew if the canister of compressed air inflated winged pillows behind her head. She had no control of her body as she tumbled downhill. She did not know up from down. It was not unlike being cartwheeled in a relentlessly crashing wave. But snow does not recede. It swallows its victims. It does not spit them out. Snow filled her mouth. She caromed off things she never saw, tumbling through a cluttered canyon like a steel marble falling through pins in a pachinko machine.

At first she thought she would be embarrassed that she had deployed her air bag, that the other expert skiers she was with, more than a dozen of them, would have a good laugh at her panicked overreaction. Seconds later, tumbling uncontrollably inside a ribbon of speeding snow, she was sure this was how she was going to die. Moving, roiling snow turns into something closer to liquid, thick like lava.

But when it stops, it instantly freezes solid. The laws of physics and chemistry transform a meadow of fine powder into a wreckage of icy chunks. After about a minute, the creek bed vomited the debris into a gently sloped meadow. Saugstad felt the snow slow and tried to keep her hands in front of her. She knew from avalanche safety courses that outstretched hands might puncture the ice surface and alert rescuers.

She knew that if victims ended up buried under the snow, cupped hands in front of the face could provide a small pocket of air for the mouth and nose. Without it, the first breaths could create a suffocating ice mask. The avalanche spread and stopped, locking everything it carried into an icy cocoon. It was now a jagged, virtually impenetrable pile of ice, longer than a football field and nearly as wide.

As if newly plowed, it rose in rugged contrast to the surrounding fields of undisturbed snow, 20 feet tall in spots. She was on her back, her head pointed downhill. Her goggles were off. Her nose ring had been ripped away. She felt the crushing weight of snow on her chest. She could not move her legs. One boot still had a ski attached to it.

She could not lift her head because it was locked into the ice. But she could see the sky. Her face was covered only with loose snow. Her hands, too, stuck out of the snow, one still covered by a pink mitten. Using her hands like windshield wipers, she tried to flick snow away from her mouth.

Iceberg Alley

When she clawed at her chest and neck, the crumbs maddeningly slid back onto her face. Breathe easy, she told herself. She stared at the low, gray clouds. She had not noticed the noise as she hurtled down the mountain. Now, she was suddenly struck by the silence. The Cascades are among the craggiest of American mountain ranges, roughly cut, as if carved with a chain saw. In summer, the gray peaks are sprinkled with glaciers. The top of Cowboy Mountain, about 75 miles east of Seattle, rises to 5, feet — about half the height of the tallest Cascades, but higher than its nearest neighbors, enough to provide degree views.

It feels more like a long fin than a summit, a few feet wide in parts. Locals call it Cowboy Ridge. To one side, down steep chutes, is Stevens Pass ski area, which receives about , visitors each winter. It is a term with broad meaning. The name is derived from the Cascade Tunnel, originally a 2. It killed 96 people.

Bodies were extricated and wrapped in blankets from the Great Northern Railway, then hauled away on sleds. Some were not found until the snow melted many months later. To skiers and snowboarders today, Tunnel Creek is a serendipitous junction of place and powder. It features nearly 3, vertical feet — a rarely matched descent — of open meadows framed by thick stands of trees. The area has all of the alluring qualities of the backcountry — fresh snow, expert terrain and relative solitude — but few of the customary inconveniences.

Reaching Tunnel Creek from Stevens Pass ski area requires a ride of just more than five minutes up SkyLine Express, a high-speed four-person chairlift, followed by a shorter ride up Seventh Heaven, a steep two-person lift. When snow conditions are right, the preferred method of descent used by those experienced in Tunnel Creek, based on the shared wisdom passed over generations, is to hopscotch down the mountain through a series of long meadows.

Weave down the first meadow, maybe punctuate the run with a jump off a rock outcropping near the bottom, then veer hard left, up and out of the narrowing gully and into the next open glade. Another powder-filled drop ends with another hard left, into another meadow that leads to the valley floor. Despite trends toward extreme skiing now called freeskiing , with improbable descents over cliffs and down chutes that test the guile of even the fiercest daredevils, the ageless lure of fresh, smooth powder endures.

But powder and people are key ingredients for avalanches. And the worry among avalanche forecasters, snow-science experts and search-and-rescue leaders is that the number of fatalities — roughly around the world each year — will keep rising as the rush to the backcountry continues among skiers, snowboarders, climbers and snowmobilers. The backcountry represents the fastest-growing segment of the ski industry.

More than ever, people are looking for fresh descents accessible by helicopters, hiking or even the simple ride up a chairlift. Before , it was unusual to have more than 10 avalanche deaths in the United States each winter. There were 34 last season, including 20 skiers and snowboarders. Eight victims were skiing out of bounds, legally, with a lift ticket. And many of the dead were backcountry experts intimate with the terrain that killed them. No one knows how many avalanches occur. Most naturally triggered slides are never seen.

Those set off by humans are rarely reported unless they cause fatalities or property damage. But avalanches occur in Tunnel Creek regularly. Its slopes, mostly from 40 to 45 degrees, are optimal for avalanches — flat enough to hold deep reservoirs of snow, yet steep enough for the snow to slide long distances when prompted. The long elevation drop means snow can be fluffy at the top and slushy at the bottom.

Temperatures, wind and precipitation change quickly, and something as welcome as a burst of sunshine can alter the crystallized bonds deep inside the snow. And because Tunnel Creek is outside the ski area, it is not patrolled or specifically assessed for danger. Having been carried into a stand of trees, he was unburied by friends within minutes and found dead. It has about 2, vertical feet. The snow changes a lot in that distance.

Even those who are not leery of Tunnel Creek on the best days heed the pass-it-on warning of the experienced: To head straight down to the bottom is to enter what experts call a terrain trap: Few go that way intentionally.

iPhone Screenshots

Chris Rudolph, the effervescent year-old marketing manager for Stevens Pass, knew the preferred route down. Tunnel Creek was his favorite at-work diversion. Earlier that weekend, he mentioned plans for a field trip to Tunnel Creek to a select group of high-powered guests and close friends. From the bottom of Tunnel Creek, it is about a half-mile trek through deep snow to U.

It was Saturday, Feb. Outside the Foggy Goggle, a bar at the base of the ski area, the snow continued to fall, roughly an inch an hour. By morning, there would be 32 inches of fresh snow at Stevens Pass, 21 of them in a hour period of Saturday and Saturday night. That was cause for celebration.

It had been more than two weeks since the last decent snowfall. Finally, the tired layer of hard, crusty snow was gone, buried deep under powder. Rudolph promoted Stevens Pass with restless zeal. In seven years there, he helped turn a relatively small, roadside ski area into a hip destination. He unabashedly courted ski journalists and filmmakers to take a look. The young family pulled a pop-up Coleman camper around the West and skied at the areas around Lake Tahoe.

The grown siblings continued to vacation with their parents, climbing peaks like Mount Whitney in California and Mount Rainier in Washington. He was an Eagle Scout with a marketing degree. When he applied at Stevens Pass years earlier, he sent a video of himself speaking, skiing and mountain biking. He included a bag of popcorn for the viewer. He got the job. Children knew Rudolph because he kept his pockets full of Stevens Pass stickers.

He starred in self-deprecating Webcasts promoting Stevens Pass. He wrote poetry on his blog and strummed a guitar. He drank Pabst Blue Ribbon, the unofficial beer of irony and the hipster generation. Tunnel Creek was where he took special guests. And it is where he wanted to take the tangled assortment of high-caliber skiers and industry insiders who, as if carried by the latest storm, had blown into Stevens Pass that weekend.

Among them were professional skiers like Saugstad , 33, a former champion of the Freeride World Tour. There were executives from ski equipment and apparel companies. There were Stevens Pass regulars, some with broad reputations in the niche world of skiing, glad to spend time with the assortment of guests. Rudolph was the connecting thread.

Some visitors, like Saugstad, were at Stevens Pass for a promotional event aimed at expert female skiers, sponsored by Salomon, the ski equipment maker. Rudolph skied with the group all day Saturday. He organized and hosted a catered dinner for the women later that night in Leavenworth, a serious outdoors town dressed as a Bavarian village, 35 miles downhill to the east. Powder had come to spotlight Stevens Pass for a feature article on night skiing. Inside were keys to the car, keys to a slope-side cabin and two Pabst Blue Ribbons in the cup holders.

Snow (Hey Oh)

At the bar, Rudolph mentioned an idea to a few people: Tunnel Creek on Sunday. Invitations traveled in whispers and text messages, through a knot of friendships and slight acquaintances. Meet at the fire pit, on the stone deck at Granite Peaks Lodge, at Rudolph thought his Sunday morning staff meeting would end by then. As darkness enveloped Stevens Pass on Saturday night, stadium-style lights flooded the slopes in white light, and snowflakes fell in cotton-ball clumps. Rudolph and those with the Salomon event left for dinner in Leavenworth.

Stifter, 29, and Carlsen, 38, headed outside to work on their article for Powder. There was so much new snow.

With the daytime crowds gone, the nighttime atmosphere was festive and the faces were familiar. Families played in the deepening snow. More serious skiers and snowboarders sought the freshest powder. There are no public accommodations at Stevens Pass, only a parking lot available to a few dozen campers and recreational vehicles. As the evening wound down, several of those with loose plans to ski Tunnel Creek the next morning huddled in the R. Carlsen continued taking photographs. Stifter and others ducked inside one camper to watch homemade videos of others skiing Tunnel Creek over the past couple of decades.

The flames in the fire died to orange embers. The last beers were sipped empty, and people slipped into the night. The campers were blanketed with snow. Beyond the lights glowing from the ski area, snow still fell over the ridge, too, in the vast darkness of steep meadows and narrow gullies just past the western edge of Stevens Pass. Each snowflake added to the depth, and each snowflake added to the weight.

It might take a million snowflakes for a skier to notice the difference. It might take just one for a mountain to move. D awn cracked with the intermittent sound of explosives near the top of Cowboy Mountain. Chairlifts rumbled to life, ferrying the crews up the dark mountain. Three two-person teams assigned to Cowboy Ridge removed their skis and filed through the boundary gate.

They took turns plowing a path through the fresh snow with their bodies. Their boots forged an icy stairway to the top of the skinny ridge. Back on their skis, facing down into the ski area and with their backs to Tunnel Creek, they spread across the ridge to stamp and destroy wind-swept cornices, small balconies of crusty snow. They removed the charges from their packs.

Like party poppers that spew confetti, charges have a pull-wire, an ignition that lights a second fuse.

Description

The patrollers lobbed the lighted charges into the many steep chutes below them. The lines for the ski lifts began forming about 7, two hours before they were to open. When the gathering skiers and snowboarders heard the explosions echo down the mountain, they cheered. It signaled a powder day.

In Leavenworth, Chris Rudolph awoke in his two-bedroom house on Ash Street, the one that he and his girlfriend, Anne Hessburg, painted a rich blue and accented with a garden out front. It was where he wanted to show off for friends. They planned to marry in March. Michelson, 30, was the freeskiing editor for ESPN. Abrams, 34, was a founder and the president of Flylow, maker of apparel marketed to backcountry users. The couple lived in Seattle, but had come to Stevens Pass on Saturday for the Salomon promotional event.

Michelson and the other women stayed at a Leavenworth hotel. He and Michelson drove to Stevens Pass together. There were similar conversations elsewhere. A year-old with graying hair pulled into a short ponytail, Moore had a feeling it could be a busy weekend. The avalanche center, based in Seattle, is one of about 20 regional avalanche forecasting centers in the United States, most run by the Forest Service. During the winter, one of its three employees arrives in the middle of the night, analyzes weather maps and computer models, and examines data — snowfall, temperatures, wind, humidity and so on — from 47 remote weather stations scattered across the mountains, including five in the vicinity of Stevens Pass.

They take calls from ski patrollers and highway crews. The biggest storm of the season increased avalanche concerns. But it was not just the new snow that concerned Moore. It was what lay nearly three feet beneath — a thin layer of perfectly preserved frost called surface hoar. The frozen equivalent of dew, created on crisp, clear nights, it features fragile, featherlike crystals that grow skyward.

On the surface, they glimmer like a million tiny diamonds. When frosted and protected by soft blankets of fluffy snow, they are weak stilts supporting all that falls on top. When they finally give way, falling like microscopic dominoes on a steep slope, they provide an icy flume for the snow above. A shot of rain or above-freezing temperatures, both common in Cascade winters, usually destroy the fragile crystals, melding them into the snowpack.

But five days of dry, cold weather, from Feb. Sporadic light snow, never more than an inch or two a day, delicately shrouded it over the next 10 days. By the weekend, as snow fell heavily over the Cascades and powder-hungry hordes took to the slopes, the old layer was long out of sight, and mostly out of mind. Changes in temperatures, precipitation, humidity and wind can turn a benign snowpack into a deadly one, and vice versa. Sometimes weather is enough to start an avalanche. The top of Cowboy Mountain is nearly 6, feet. The Tunnel Creek terrain descends off its southwest side to roughly 3, feet.

The snow had stopped at Stevens Pass by the time the lifts opened Sunday morning. The runs were quickly doodled with curvy lines. And I read it out loud to Keith. And he listened, and I read it again — I read it twice — and looked at it. Stifter left Carlsen behind and headed to the lifts. He found Jim Jack. If anyone could judge terrain and snow in the backcountry, it was Jim Jack.

To most everyone else, he was Jim Jack, blended into one name, accent on the first syllable: Jack was the head judge and former president of the International Freeskiers Association, which oversaw a world tour of competitions. At 46, he was a sort of Peter Pan of the ski world, a charismatic, carefree boy who never grew up, beloved by like-minded skiers and snowboarders half his age.

He spent winters traveling the world, spreading the gospel of freeskiing, professing the beauty of finding improbable ways down precarious slopes with grace, nerve and flair. He had been a competitor on the tour, distinguishable from great distances by the silkiness of his loose form, until he landed hard and took his own knee to his face, shattering the bones around his right eye.

You could feel the screws when you touched his face. He was a party accelerator with a penchant for streaking. He did drama in high school and never declined the stage as an adult. On Halloween, his costumes played off his name: Wearing lederhosen, Jack starred in a cheeky promotional video for Leavenworth. Jack shared a bungalow off the highway, near the Howard Johnson, with his longtime girlfriend, Tiffany Abraham.

They danced late at night in the kitchen and built bonfires in the backyard. The covered front porch held a pile of ski gear and a futon couch, perfect for watching the world go by, beer in hand. Widely recognized on the highways and in ski area parking lots around the West, it was held together largely by duct tape and bungee cords. If it is too loud, Jack told passengers, just roll down the window. Jack and his camper rolled into the R. On weekends, when the snow was good, the lot filled with dozens of pickup campers and motor homes. I saw that Jim Jack was next to me. I thought, cool, I got a great neighbor this week.

Jack and Wangen had skied a couple of runs Sunday morning by the time Stifter caught up to them. Wangen knew Tunnel Creek as well as anyone, having skied it since he was a boy. Jack traveled the world, scouting courses for extreme skiing. He knew how to avoid danger. The fire pit sits at the center of the bustle on busy days. At the corner of the patio, in front of the lodge, it is a crossroads for people coming and going.

Some pull up chairs and relax, facing the bowl of ski runs strung before them. When the clouds lift, Cowboy Mountain dominates the view high to the right. It can feel close enough to reach and touch. By midmorning, the fire pit began attracting a growing but confused band of expert skiers. Some were local, some were visitors. Some knew others, some did not, but most knew either Chris Rudolph or Jim Jack. They traded nods and handshakes, unsure if others were headed to Tunnel Creek, too. He did not intend to ski Sunday until he awoke in Leavenworth and could not resist the lure of the fresh snow.

He drove to Stevens Pass and sent a text message to Rudolph, still in a staff meeting. Hammond told Jack that he had the latest model of skis in his truck, then left to retrieve a pair for him to try. Stifter bought coffee, a couple of Americanos, from the stand for himself and Jack.

Tim Carlson and Ron Pankey , both 37 and childhood friends from Vermont, had spent the morning on the inbounds side of Cowboy Mountain, navigating near-vertical chutes and rock outcroppings. During a break, they spotted familiar faces near the fire pit. Pankey was a former competitor on the Freeskiing World Tour, so he had known Jack since the mids.

Like Jack, he eventually worked competitions around the world, including the X Games. Carlson was a snowboarder, not a skier, and a regular at Stevens Pass. The three merged with those waiting for Rudolph. Skiing over the weekend without his wife and infant daughter, he hung around the Foggy Goggle and the R. He, too, sent a message to Rudolph on Sunday, confirming the plan. I went to the fire pit and I met the whole group. You could tell they were a different level of skier by how they acted and how they dressed.

Among the strangers he saw was Rob Castillo , a year-old father of two and former competitive skier. He had exchanged text messages with Jack. Castillo and Jack lived together in Alta, Utah, for several years in the s. They went helicopter skiing in Alaska and skied down mountains they had climbed in Washington. More than anything, Castillo wanted to ski for the first time all season with his two best friends at Stevens Pass — Jack and Johnny Brenan.

There Could Be Hundreds of Frozen Corpses Buried Beneath Antarctica's Snow and Ice | Mental Floss

Brenan, 41, grew up comfortably in the Seattle suburbs, not far from Jack. Antarctica's icy terrain is rugged and dangerous. Massive crevasses —some concealed by snow—measure hundreds of feet deep and pose a particularly serious threat for anyone crossing them on foot or by dogsled. Antarctica is the coldest , driest, and windiest place on Earth, yet scientists recently discovered hundreds of mummified penguins that they believe died centuries ago from unusually heavy snow and rain. One of the most famous cases of a left-behind body on Antarctica dates back to the British Antarctic Expedition also known as the Terra Nova Expedition of to British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his four-man team hoped to be the first ones to reach the South Pole in , but were bitterly disappointed when they arrived and learned that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them to it.

On the return trip, Scott and his companions died of exposure and starvation while trapped by a blizzard in their tent, just 11 miles from a food depot.

Members of the search party covered their bodies in the tent with snow and left them there. The bodies have since travelled miles from their original location, as the ice grows and shifts around them. No one yet knows how she got there. After coming close to completing the first solo, unaided traverse of Antarctica, British adventurer Henry Worsley died of organ failure following an airlift from the continent in Most modern-day polar visitors , however, have learned from past missteps. Sightseers traveling to Egypt have a new stop to add to their itineraries.

As CNN reports, the year-old tomb of a royal vizier has opened to the public for the first time since its discovery.

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