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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Topic Author's Original Post - Feb 13, 2008 - 10:24am PT
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The yearly Sierra snow fall fluctuates around 10.28 m (33.7 ft) at Donner Summit for the years from 1879 to the present (2007) with a 3 meter (10 ft) standard deviation. The obvious lull in climbing threads here is indicative of the seasonality of climbing... the Valley is certainly climbable in the winter, but not generally climbed during snow storms, or the week after, or even weeks after depending on the weather.
The years of large variance (say 2 standard deviations) are less usual, but may have had an effect on climbers and climbing in those years. Those years, extracted from the plot included below are:
1934 low
1935 high
1936 high
1938 high
1952 high
1956 high
1958 high
1969 high
1976 low
1977 low
1982 high
1983 high
1987 low
1988 low
1992 low
1994 low
1995 high
I remember 1995 as a high snow year as it was my first time back in the Valley after 20 years and the first climb we did was Braille Book which was still snowy in March. That was an adventure I wouldn't necessarily recommend... but it was a wonderful "welcome to the Valley" wakeup.
The 76, 77 low years and the 82, 83 high years might be part of people's memories who post here the "back in the day" stories. Anyone care to give memories of how the weather effected climbing history?
I had talked to Bachar about some routes he put up with Cashner on Reed's, Fasten Your Seat Belts* 5.10b R/X Free Ride* 5.10a R/X dated the "mid 80s" and Cashner's Magic Carpet* 5.11d put up in 88 with Ron Skelton. John didn't recall these climbs right away so I refreshed his memory from photos I had shot... "oh yah, Cashner took me up there one winter saying it was nice and in the sun and we did those routes." I had asked him about the start of Fasten Your Seat Belts which is a bit stiffer than the 5.9 the pitch gets in Don Reid's guide. "Maybe something broke off. Sorry about that, I was climbing hard those years." The start of that climb is a difficult boulder move to an unbelievably dynamic traverse... more on this in some other, later thread.
My guess is that those routes were put up in the low or normal years of 84-88...
...any other stories of low or high snow years in the Valley?
thanks O.D.
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O.D.
Trad climber
LA LA Land
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Feb 13, 2008 - 10:54am PT
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Interesting stuff, Ed. It's always cool to see what can be done with statistics.
You could add one anecdotal out-lier to your data set: the Winter of 1846-1847. It was a winter of early and heavy snow in the Sierra, the consequences of which gave Donner Summit its name.
EDIT: One more thing Ed -- there appears to be a typo in the first paragraph -- a 3m standard deviation would be about 9.8ft
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mtnyoung
Trad climber
Twain Harte, California
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Feb 13, 2008 - 11:01am PT
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Ed, at the risk of some thread drift, could I ask you to explain a phrase? I haven't studied the sciences since college (25 years). I could look it up online, but you seem to translate "science" into English well. What is the concept of "a standard deviation?"
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Prod
Social climber
Charlevoix, MI
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Feb 13, 2008 - 11:05am PT
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Where does this year fit in?
Prod.
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scuffy b
climber
Stump with a backrest
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Feb 13, 2008 - 11:38am PT
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Jan 1, 1977. Ran into several climbers including Tom Carter at
the base of El Cap. Had great climbing, got sunburned.
I wasn't living there but visited a lot that year.
People were climbing everywhere.
I remember watching Vandiver and Rowell climb the DNB in late
March.
Saw Jardine and Lakey running around with binoculars by the
Cascade Creek bridge (Crane Flat road). They must have just
spotted Phoenix judging by their air of excitement. Also March
or April.
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Domingo
Trad climber
El Portal, CA
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Feb 13, 2008 - 11:40am PT
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Mtn:
For a "normally distributed population" (think the typical bell curve distribution), ~70% of the values will always be within one standard deviation from the average value.
It's always hard to say whether data like this is really 'normal' though.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Feb 13, 2008 - 02:49pm PT
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Here's another view of more or less the same history -- April snow depth at Donner Summit, 1915-2007.
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Double D
climber
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Feb 15, 2008 - 12:57am PT
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Ed, this is way cool. I remember in ’77 being on the Whitney glacier on Mt. Shasta. The drought was so severe that the ice was this transparent, deep blue stuff. No matter how hard you swung your axe it wouldn’t penetrate more than 1/8th inch or so. It was beautiful but was scary!
The prior year, Bill Price and I did a "winter ascent" of the Prow during a weekend in early January. As young high school kids we were armed with wool pants, an ice hammer (remember those wicked Chouinard deals?) and greeted by an 80 degree heatwave. We ran out of water on the last day and poured some nasty-tasting brewers yeast in our remaining water to keep us from drinking too much. It was the worst heat-exhaustion I've ever experienced!
I also remember ’83. I lived in Tahoe, and it snowed so much that we started jumping off our roof into the big drifts. Then we made a saucer run off the roof into the drifts on the front yard. Within a week, it was a solid track without any drop from the roof, and then it was eventually just flat with the yard. Roofs were caving in on homes if you didn’t keep the load off. It would snow 4’ in a night, and then do the same the next day, then the next…on and on. This went on for a couple of weeks. Getting into your home and into the stores just became a tunnel. For a few weeks, grocery trucks couldn’t get in. When the storms finally let up, they brought in semi-trucks to truck out the snow because it was piled up to the power lines and there was literally nowhere else to put it.
I visited Bear Valley that winter and the same deal, just tunnels going everywhere. The skiing that year wasn’t that good either. The snow was just really wet and sloppy. If memory serves me right, Squaw got over 70 feet up on the mountain and there were big corridors when you got on the chairs.
Scott Grafton, a friend that was in med school at UCLA, wanted to go on our yearly trans-Sierra ski trip during spring break. I wouldn’t have any of that and talked him into doing a Death Valley trip instead. Cabin fever had the best of me and I longed for the vast openness of the desert!
In early May of that same year I was in Brighton UT above Snowbird/Alta. There was about 10-12’ of snow still and the temperature was around 70 degrees. While I was eating lunch in the general store, I bumped into a USGS hydrologist and talked about the impending doom. A couple of day’s later Provo got hit with a disastrous flood.
Anyway, your charts bring back many H2O memories!
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#310
Social climber
Telluride, CO
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Feb 15, 2008 - 08:12am PT
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I was an "evil" Valley Ranger from Dec. 1975 to Nov. 1977. I never saw Yosemite during a normal winter. I was impressed by the waterfalls size in spring run off but everyone told me those spring run off falls were "nothing" compared to normal. It was hard to live in some of the NPS housing during spring runoff.
I also recall a rush by climbers and hikers to do winter ascents in fall-like conditions of many backcounty peaks. You could build an impressive list of winter ascents easily. I also recall that in one of those two Aprils, we had a sudden storm and had to do 3 rescues (fairly minor) on one Sunday - a lot of local climbers had gone up without wet and cold gear.
The lack of snow played a big role in the whole "Airplane" episode at Lower Merced Pass. Had it been a normal or heavy winter snowfall, the wreck might not have been discovered until summer. Had walking in and out from the Lake been a lot more challenging...? All the Feds did not understand how easy backcountry access was that year.
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