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

By Patrick Armstrong

Snow surveyors throughout the world get to see what most of us only dream about: stunning terrain, birdlife and animals rarely seen in lower elevations, and stars that seem close enough to grab.

Patrick Armstrong reveals the little-known world of a snow surveyor in this fascinating account, transporting readers into the remote winter world of the Sierra Nevada in California.

High in the mountains, Armstrong and his companions must cross twelve-thousand-foot passes and dig through snow to gain entrance to rock or log cabins for shelter at night. Traveling on skis, they often traverse more than a hundred miles each month during the winter and in the process climb and descend twenty or thirty thousand feet.

This account also provides important and practical information on topics such as safe winter travel on skis, avalanche prediction and avoidance, cabin life, cooking on and maintaining wood-burning stoves, wildlife, and birdlife.

Whether youre involved in snow surveying and snowmelt water management or youre just someone who enjoys the winter, wilderness, and the mountains, prepare yourself to enter a beautiful and remarkable winter world that has its dangers and sublime beauties.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abbott Press
• Release date: Dec 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781458217998

Patrick Armstrong

Patrick Armstrong has three grown children and lives with his wife Merry in Bishop California.  He was on the U.S. Biathlon team in 1972, and has enjoyed skiing his entire life.  He has been a chemistry and electronics instructor at the College of Idaho; a wilderness supervisor for the Forest Service, a trail building contractor, an Alaska commercial fisherman, and a rancher in Idaho. He began doing snow surveys in 1972.

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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

Introduction

Dedication

Chapter 1: Into the Mountains

Chapter 2: Of Ravens and Coyotes

Chapter 3: Storm-Bound Days

Chapter 4: The Work of Snow Surveying

Chapter 5: The Snow Survey Cabins

Chapter 6: A Brief History of Snow Surveys

Chapter 7: Avalanches and X15 Pilots

Chapter 8: White Birds, White Rabbits and Bonsai Trees

Chapter 9: Wood-burning Cook Stoves

Chapter 10: Territorial Imperative

Chapter 11: Skiing Big Tall Country

Chapter 12: Exact Snow Measurements and Good Fried Rice

Chapter 13: The Packrat’s Ancient Treasures

Chapter 14: Dennis and the Super Cub

Chapter 15: Working Partners

Chapter16: Kinglets, Marmots and Wildlife Humor

Chapter 17: The Pass Surveys

Chapter 18: Piute Pass

Chapter 19: Bishop Pass

Chapter 20: Kearsarge Pass

Chapter 21: Forgotten Canyon

Chapter 22: Ghosts of the Little Whitney Cow Camp

Chapter 23: Tunnel Guard Station

Chapter 24: Hot Lips Houlihan

Chapter 25: The Mountain Phone Line

Chapter 26: Butterflies, Pachyderms, Tomcats and Bureaucrats

Chapter 26: Discord in the Field

Chapter 27: Golden Trout Creek, the

Chapter 29: Clark’s Nutcrackers and American Martens

Chapter 30: The Beasts at Peace

Chapter 31: Endings and Beginnings

Epilogue

About the Author

Introduction

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 Pleistocene’s 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.¹

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.

Dedication

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. Church’s 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 meadow’s upper end. A forest of large one-to-four-foot diameter lodgepole pine trees and some glacial moraines shelter the cabin. The wind can’t 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 Nevada’s 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.

Looking out the sawmill cabin’s door is a striking view of the Great Basin, with Telescope Peak above Death Valley prominent on the skyline. Range after range can be seen, like purple waves disappearing into the distance. On most days the view from the cabin door shows a myriad of these ranges extending well over 150 miles to the east out into Nevada: waves and crests, each wave fainter and more purple as the distance increases until the earth’s curvature meets the sky. The colors are remarkable.

In her classic book, The Land of Little Rain, written in 1902, Mary Austin describes this land as the land of lost borders. It is the southern Great Basin and, indeed, there are no natural borders out there. The land is dry and hauntingly beautiful with desolate basins and ranges; entire valleys of dunes and alkaline lake playas cover many thousand square miles between the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California and the Wasatch Mountains in Utah. The eye and mind cannot grasp the vastness. It has changed little since 1902. The names fit the geography: Saline Valley, Searles Dry Lake, Devil’s Playground, Bad Water, Furnace Creek, Soda Dry Lake, Sarcobatis Flats, Death Valley. The basins and ranges go on and on and on until they merge into the horizon.

But up here in the Sierra Nevada, it is another world: a world of snow, forests, and meadows, shining peaks, deep glacial-cut valleys, clear icy streams and rivers with golden trout in them. And even now in winter, wildlife is out and about. Here there are visual boundaries and they are stunningly beautiful. The outlines of the 14,000-foot peaks are clear and crisp. Visual edges divide the land into cliffs and meadows, streams, forests and lakes.

This particular day started out with a beautiful blue sky and sparkling snow, but a line of lenticular wave clouds just east of the Sierra’s crest indicated a storm front was approaching. These clouds are often accompanied by 60 to 150 mile-an-hour jet-stream winds that buffet and scour the peaks and passes.

We skied up from the old sawmill cabin to Horseshoe Meadow in calm conditions shortly after dawn; our skis were running well with a thin layer of green hard wax on their bases. Few things are more satisfying than a well-waxed ski for traveling in the mountains. There have been huge technological advances in materials for making skis in the last 40 years. Yet for this work of skiing for weeks on end, some surveyors still prefer wood skis. They glide well, hold their wax, are very light, climb well, edge well, have high tips for breaking trail through deep snow, and don’t require big stiff boots. They are wonderful for telemarking down through powder or, later in the spring, skating or striding across meadows.

By using climbing wax on skis we are not continually putting on and taking off climbing skins. In rolling terrain, or when cresting a 12,000-foot pass in high winds, we can keep going, push on over the crest and descend into the trees away from the vicious winds.

I could go on and on concerning the virtue of wood skis and climbing wax, but in this case Murt Stewart and Dave Sharp are the only sets of human ears for likely more than 3,000 square miles. Since Murt is the Asnes wood ski sales representative for the west coast, it would be like the preacher talking to the choir here. I don’t think Murt has ever even sold any Asnes skis except to himself, but he gets a good deal on them. Dave skis on wooden Bonna 2400 mountain skis and has for years. I have a huge quiver of wood skis at home, acquired at yard sales. My wife is disgusted when I bring home a newly-purchased pair (costing around 10 or 20 dollars.) You couldn’t wear out all the ones you have if you live to be 200! she will say. I’ll admit, I do have an addiction. Wood skis are too beautiful to pass up; they are so pleasing to the eye and so practical. They are pieces of art. Each pair has its own soul; the life and soul taken from the hickory, ash or birch trees they were made from. Their design is the work of some ancient technological genius and artist.

Today we are headed to Big Whitney Meadow over Cottonwood Pass to measure the water in the snowpack in an area of the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains referred to as the Kern Plateau.

The name Cottonwood Pass conjures up visions of beautiful, colorful cottonwood trees with leaves fluttering in a breeze; this is not so. Cottonwood Pass is named for cottonwood trees at the mouth of its canyon 9,000-feet lower down in the Owens Valley. The pass itself is an 11,200-foot vortex, where we often need to wear our down parkas, wind parkas, wind pants, gloves, and anything else we have to keep warm, due to the vicious jet-stream winds that can funnel through the pass. This pass provides good access to the Southern Sierra’s wilderness and backcountry areas.

The Kern Plateau encompasses much of the Kern River’s watershed. It is more than 1,000 square miles of alpine, subalpine and forested terrain. As with the name Cottonwood Pass, the name Kern Plateau is also misleading, for there is no plateau as most people might picture it. The Kern Plateau is a land of 14,000-foot peaks and deep cut glacial valleys.

Splitting this plateau or watershed in half is a 3,000-foot deep gorge called Kern Canyon. If its depth is measured from the surrounding peaks, which loom over the canyon, the gorge is over 7,000 feet deep, as deep as any canyon in North America. This cleft was cut by a massive glacier during the Pleistocene epoch and runs almost perfectly straight north and south for 40 miles following the Kern Fault Line. This classic, glacially-cut gorge is large enough to be seen from space and so straight and deep we occasionally see military jets flying at treetop level down in the bottom of the canyon…upside down. The pilots are foolish and young, of the right stuff mettle, doing something dangerous and illegal. No radar could ever detect them in such a deep cleft, so they do it just because they can. We call this youth. We were all there once and, with a little envy, we excuse them for such escapades.

The Kern Canyon separates two main parallel ranges in the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains. The easternmost range features many peaks over 14,000 feet in elevation along the Sierra’s crest, including Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the continental United States at 14,495 feet. The second range, 10 to 15 miles to the west across Kern Canyon, is almost as high. Called the Great Western Divide, it has just as many spectacular peaks, lake basins and subranges. The few passes leading into this upper Kern Plateau area are all rugged and high. Forester Pass, the highest pass on the Pacific Crest Trail at 13,200 feet, exits this area to the north. The Kern Plateau is rugged country, so big and inaccessible we will measure snow here for years without seeing other skiers or even other ski tracks.

On these survey trips, which are 10 to 14 days in length, we measure the density and the water content of the snowpack at 22 specific snow courses, and often cover 100 or more miles on skis each month from January to May. Forty to 60 percent of the water in California comes from the Sierra’s snowpack. As with many rich agricultural valleys throughout the world, snowmelt from nearby mountains provides water for irrigation. In the southern Central Valley of California, water is gold. As mentioned in the introduction, three of the counties we measure snowmelt water for, Kings, Kern and Tulare counties, taken together, grow more produce than any one country in the entire world. ²

At the old Horseshoe Meadow cow camp cabin, I re-examine my right ski. I flex it and allow it to snap back. No buzzing sound comes from the ski and there is no visible crack. It seems okay, but I am concerned: a broken ski can be a major problem.

Murt leads off breaking trail towards Cottonwood Pass. The lodgepole pine forest above the cabin gives way to foxtail pine at the upper elevations. We’re sheltered from the wind in the dense forest and slide along the headwaters of Cottonwood Creek in a real winter wonderland. The chickaree squirrels are out, bouncing from limb to limb, and scolding us as we pass. Pine marten tracks in the fresh snow indicate a chickaree hunter is on the prowl. We call them pine martens, but they are actually the American marten, cousins to the European pine marten. The chickaree squirrel (Douglas squirrel) is an athletic bundle of energy; a little gymnast. The jumps they make from tree to tree are remarkably long. These little guys need to know what jumps they can make in their territory to elude the larger, but equally gymnastic, American marten which dines on the little chickaree. The chickaree practices his longest jumps when the snow is

01chickaree.tif

The little Chickaree Squirrel

deep and powdery; if he doesn’t make his mark he simply falls into the soft powder. By the number of marten tracks in the snow, the chickarees need to have their wits about them today. Martens are in the weasel family, a family of energetic, persistent predators that include the weasels, martens, fishers, river otters, and wolverines. These American martens are ever on the move. A chickaree for breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner or a midnight snack is what martens were built for, what their dreams must be made of; no deep snoring sleep for the little chickaree squirrel.

The name chickaree is fitting for their Oui-ro, qui-ro, qui, qui, qui, qui, qui, qui-ro scolding call is loud, persistent and often just over one’s head. They don’t like anything in their territory and sound off with their scolding to deer, coyotes, mountain lions, owls, hawks, bears, snow surveyors and, of course, martens. Their scolding is a warning call to

02americanmarten.tif

American Martin

other chickarees but it also gives away the presence and position of other things moving through the forest. Chickarees are little newspapers; little loud shouters. Native Americans used them to locate larger game. If you are sitting somewhere eating lunch and you hear a chickaree some distance away, giving his scolding call, you can bet there is something else moving through the forest nearby.

Climbing the last 1500 feet to reach Cottonwood Pass’s east side is often best negotiated up an avalanche path that is a tangle of willows in the summer or on low-snow years. Today, due to an average snowpack, it is a beautiful white rolling open slash in the mountain side. There is little avalanche danger where we stand since it hasn’t snowed for two weeks and the weather has been calm and mild, but the spindrift snow blowing over the pass today is a concern. It could build quickly on the lee side in this wind and the surface layer could become unstable.

We decide to ascend the avalanche path’s north side among large gnarled foxtail pines. These are remarkable trees, closely related to the bristlecone pine, one of the oldest known living things on earth. Some trees here on Cottonwood Pass must be over 2000 years old.

Just under the pass we are forced to traverse an area that often avalanches. We could ski a mile north and climb another 400 feet in elevation to a notch above the main pass that never slides, but today we assess the situation and feel it is safe. There is little spindrift where we must traverse and the underlying snow is stable. We put on parkas, wind pants, and overmitts and cinch our parka hoods tight in the lee of a cliff. I am breaking trail and look back at Murt and Dave. Murt is wearing two colorful but well-blackened oven mitts for gloves. I cock my head in a questioning manner. Quaint, I say.

He shrugs, I forgot my gloves so I borrowed these from the Sawmill Cabin.

Well, why not. I suppose oven mitts for skiing high in the mountains the next two weeks will work just fine.

The wind has not deposited appreciable snow where we stand, but 50 feet south is a large snow pillow. Spindrift, two feet thick, has accumulated in the past few hours in a steep area under the pass. This needs to be avoided for it looks unstable and could avalanche if we were to traverse across it. Where we are standing is protected from the wind, so no loose pillow has formed.

I edge out on the steep side slope and traverse above the spindrift snow pillow until I am on more level snow at the pass. For safety reasons, Dave and Murt wait in their protected spot and watch my traverse. When they see I am in a safe place they follow one by one. As we turn the corner out from behind the cliff face that has protected us from the wind, a 60 mile-per-hour blast hits us head on. With the wind chill it must be well below zero degrees Fahrenheit. We have a snow course at the pass, but it would be difficult to measure in this wind. We’ll measure it in two weeks on the way back out.

Dave leads off, heading west down the narrow meadow forming the pass’s notch. I am aware my right ski may have a crack and try to ski so as not to over-flex the tip. After fifteen minutes with heads down and skiing into the wind we are just above the sheltering trees when again my right ski tip buzzes as it breaks through the rock-hard wind slab snow. Damn, I was just beginning to think the buzzing had been my imagination. We reach the sheltering trees, and after a few hundred yards the wind slab turns to powder. Again, I take off the right ski and flex it. There is no sign of a crack, no buzzing when I bend it and let it snap back. Okay, I think, be coy with me.

We head down a north-facing slope from the pass in powder among foxtail pines. These trees are well-spaced, like a slalom course set up in the middle of nowhere. My mind skis the slope a good hundred feet ahead, it unconsciously analyzes the snow surface and sets up turns to avoid obstacles such as low limbs and any patches of hard wind slab snow. The mind is good at this; it almost always chooses a good line to ski. Occasionally, I will consciously override my mind’s auto-navigation and make a turn in a different place, and it will often get me in trouble.

In twenty minutes we descend to Stokes Stringer Meadow 2500 feet below the pass. Here the wind finds us again. We cross the stringer meadow in a whiteout and then head back into the trees and by late afternoon make it to the cabin. I notice the thermometer beside the door reads ten degrees Fahrenheit. I ask Murt how his new gloves performed. He says, Very well. I think I might write the oven mitt company and suggest I become the west coast distributor and combine it with my Asnes ski distributorship. You know, sell some oven mitts with each pair of wood skis. I can see big bucks in that. Dave and I laugh. Murt, he is a real businessman. We all fit this type of businessman category; it’s precisely why we’re out here pounding around through the mountains measuring snow rather than sitting at a desk as a CEO for some ski or oven mitt company.

The Big Whitney Cabin is located in a protected spot and has a covered porch so we don’t have to dig down to the door. Cabins without porches are a nuisance for we often have to dig down six to eighteen feet just to gain entrance. On a sunny day, digging out a door is a time consuming job, but during a blizzard or at night, it becomes most tedious. Here we simply dismount from our skis, kick steps down to the porch, shed our packs, unlock the door and walk in. We dig out the windows and stove pipe and get a fire going. I go out and fill two buckets with snow and bring them in to melt for water. Murt fills the white gas Coleman lanterns with fuel while Dave gets the sleeping bags out from the cabinet. As soon as the snow in the buckets is melted, we make some hot tea.

As the cabin warms up, we shed our damp parkas and wind pants and take off our boots to dry. Dave and I pull out muck-lucks from our packs for cabin boots. Murt puts on some old tennis shoes and dry socks. Murt has been doing these surveys for many years and has shoes and socks stashed in each cabin; in fact he has almost an entire wardrobe stashed in this cabin: extra T-shirts, wool jacket, etcetera, but, unfortunately, no gloves.

At this point we open the food cupboard and survey its contents. This can go on, this assessment of the food, for some time: Dinty Moore stew, spaghetti, canned beef, canned fruit, hot cocoa, coffee, flour, canned milk, granola, instant mashed potatoes, and so on. One look a season should be all we need to determine what is there, but this is not the case. At each cabin we open the cupboard and stare. All day long our choices have been simple: miss that snag, go around a rock, and watch that drop off, assess a slope’s stability, carve a turn, pick the route, and find the cabin. But here in the food cupboard we are faced with just too many choices; it’s the classic omnivore’s dilemma.

It does make us feel rather rich somehow, this assortment of food. Not that our cabins’ food supplies change from year to year; it’s the same Dinty Moore stew, mashed potatoes, rice, three bean salad, kipper snacks and much the same as what’s in all the other cabins, but for some incomprehensible reason, we all do the same thing: open the food cupboard and just stare in silence. IQ levels, experience levels don’t seem to matter. Murt has been doing these surveys for over 40 years and he will do the same as Dave and me: open the cupboard and stare for several minutes. Doug Powell, another survey partner, is a geography instructor at U.C. Berkeley and he does the