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Show hazard problem. They also knew that hazard had not prevented the Swiss from developing their great winter playgrounds. Their report stated that recreational use of Alta was feasible under the supervision of competent observers armed with power to close any part or all of the area whenever dangerous conditions prevailed. In this manner avalanche study began in the United States, for the protection of a winter playground. It may seem inappropriate that it took a ski area to get a snow safety program going in this country. There is no simple explanation. Lacking any means of combatting it, the miners endured avalanches as one more hazard in a hazardous occupation. The railroads, another possible starting point, retired into their tunnels and snowsheds. Until recent years, the law of averages has been a defender of the highways. The odds against a car and an avalanche arriving at the same point at the same moment are good. But the odds are getting poorer every year with increasing winter travel by bus, trucks and private automobile. Colorado tentatively established its own highway avalanche protection service in 1951* Another state has started building snowsheds. The Forest Service inherited the avalanche hazard problem because practically all of the most desirable alpine skiing terrain was on national forest land. Demand for the development of these areas was irresistible, but the cost in lives and damage the gold miners were willing to pay was not acceptable for public recreation. Thus the Forest Service in the interests of public safety found itself in the business of combatting avalanches. Actually it is remarkable that the study of avalanches did not begin some 30 years earlier, after the disastrous winter of 1909- 10. Two official reports were published. These are extremely interesting documents. While neither of the writers was a trained observer of snow conditions, the analyses are excellent, as shown by the following quotation from " Avalanches in the Cascades and Northern Rocky Mountains During Winter of 1909- 10" by Edward A. Beals, District Weather Forecaster: " It was not the quantity of snow alone which fell this year that caused so many avalanches, but it was the manner in which it fell, and many of the people most familiar with these phenomena knew a day or two before they occurred that slides were inevitable, and had they not sought places of safety more lives would have been lost than were under the existing conditions. " During the first 12 days of January the weather was unusually cold and the snowfall was rather heavy, especially on the windward slopes of the mountains. This spell of cold weather was followed by milder conditions and on the 22nd of the month thawing weather set in that extended nearly to the summits of the mountains having altitudes of about 7* 000 feet. Following this short spell of thawing weather it became much colder, the old snow crusted over and it almost reached the consistency of ice on nearly all the high mountain slopes. The snowfall during the forepart of February was quite heavy, but on account - 10 - |