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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 24, 2009 - 12:32am PT
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Not sure if they post here or not. Does anyone know how to contact them?
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Peter Haan
Trad climber
San Francisco, CA
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Oct 24, 2009 - 12:38am PT
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Jan,
Guido, myself and others have been appealing to these characters for quite some time here for to post up or make contact. It has not been working so far but we still hold some hope that we will see them join in, for god's sake. Emails aren't working either.
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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Oct 25, 2009 - 01:39pm PT
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I know that Hennek at least lurks. He told me on the phone that guido had posted the photo from the Mustafa Hotel in Kabul.
A notable feature of the photo is that the two college professors, Cohen and Dozier, are a bit pudgy at the start of the trip. After six weeks in the mountains, however, we were toned! In contrast, Boche and McLean, who started the expedition in pretty good shape, were emaciated. Hennek was just Hennek, strong enough to carry any of us at the beginning and at the end.
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guido
Trad climber
Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific
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Oct 25, 2009 - 03:19pm PT
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I am going to visit Hennek sometime in the next two weeks, make him go through ALL his slides, scan a number of them and "urge" make him to start Posting.
We have methods that leave few scars.
Of course, he will force me to consume prodigious amounts of beer, red wine and perhaps a little of the kind so that we may slave through this noble effort.
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TomKimbrough
Social climber
Salt Lake City
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Oct 25, 2009 - 05:03pm PT
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Congratulations Jeff!
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Oct 25, 2009 - 05:26pm PT
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Congratulations Jeff. Way to go!
Looked on your UCSB webpage, but... Where can we see a summary of how your satellite spying on the snowpack has affected our knowledge of it? Any of your work bear on avalanche forecasting? It's one of those things I think about from time to time while skiing out there.
Guido -- glad you're going to personally tweak Dennis. Give him a hug for me. And, remember... you can't partake of any of the indicated chemicals with a stiff upper lip!
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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Oct 25, 2009 - 08:50pm PT
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Doug,
My wife always asks whether what I do is useful, so it’s OK for my friends to ask the same question! My earliest field work on backcountry snow science was on those 3-pin Hexcels you sold me, for $50 I recall. I snapped one high on Shepherd Pass and, after a long walk out, decided I needed a beefier ski.
Most of my work has addressed water resources more than avalanches, mainly because of funding (recent papers and some old ones are available on the UCSB website). Water forecasting in the Sierra Nevada now is, as you know, based on the data from the snow courses and snow pillows. These have several shortcomings, and in some years the forecasts are off by 25% or more, sometimes as high as 40%: (i) For operational reasons, they are all on flat or nearly flat ground, because a telemetry tower on a slope would get bent over in its first season; also the sites have to be free from avalanche danger. (ii) Snow cover is heterogeneous because, unlike rain, snow gets moved around after it falls; therefore snow pillows especially may not represent the square km around them. (iii) Because of climate change, the statistical relationships developed over the past 70 years may not apply well to the future because patterns of snow cover appear to be changing (mainly less snow at the lower elevations with not much change yet at higher elevations).
Remote sensing combined with surface measurements can really help, because we can get daily data on the fraction of snow cover in each grid cell (about 500 m) over the whole mountain range and we can also estimate the reflectivity (also called albedo) so we can tell how much of the incoming sunlight the snow absorbs (mainly see the papers with Tom Painter).
We can therefore estimate rates of melt more accurately, and especially we can consider the effects of topography. I don’t need to tell you that snow is interesting in many ways, but perhaps in more ways than even you have thought. In the visible spectrum (up to about 0.7 micrometers) snow is mostly white except when contaminated by dust, soot, or red algae. The reason is that ice is highly transparent throughout the visible wavelengths, just like water. In clear water, you can see a long way; similarly, if you were frozen in bubble-free ice, you would be able to see a long way. Beyond the visible, in what we call the near-infrared (the energy source is still the Sun, and about half the Sun’s energy is beyond the visible), ice becomes more absorptive, with the result that the reflectivity in these wavelengths decreases as the grains grow -- during the season because of sintering and densification, and especially when we have melt-freeze cycles. Thus snow gets a little darker during the time of year when we have increasing solar radiation, and the effect is spatially variable, hence the need to measure it everywhere. In summary, snow is one of the most “colorful” substances in nature. If our eyes were sensitive out to about 1.5 micrometers, the spring snow landscape would be as vivid as a New England autumn.
I do work on avalanches though. Walter Rosenthal was one of the Mammoth patrollers who died in the accident in the fumarole in April 2006 (see the SuperTopo thread). His emerging work on sintering in snow was addressing fundamental questions about how snow sinters (sticks together) and why it sometimes does not – why does depth hoar persist? His observations with an electron microscope seem to show that the vapor diffusion mechanism that so many avalanche texts describe does not account for the geometry we see at bonds between grains. Although vapor diffusion causes grain growth and depth-hoar formation, it does not appear to cause sintering. As the photo below shows, the bonds are angular whereas vapor diffusion would result in a smoother interface. Walter was planning to start a PhD program at UCSB in the fall of 2006, and this photo is from his last paper published posthumously. He was looking at grain boundary diffusion as the right mechanism, and he used to say that “snow is HOT” (i.e. near the melting point of ice). I am continuing this work with Ned Bair, whom I recruited out of the Mammoth Ski Patrol. Ned is especially working on the issue of spatial variability of snow accumulation and strength. This winter, we plan to focus on frequent sampling and measurement right after storms, and also on tracking deep layers.
As is common in science and in life, some of these observations raise questions that cause us to be less sure about what we know. Goethe said the same thing more than 200 years ago, something like “We are never so certain as when we are ignorant. With knowledge comes doubt.”
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BooDawg
Social climber
Paradise Island
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The visioning and planning began years before when Jeff Dozier returned from previous trips to the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan with stories of good weather, many virgin peaks, friendly local people, low costs for nearly everything, and other attractive features of the region.
The real journey of The Low Budget Boys or the 1974 Santa Cruz Hindu Kush Expedition, as it was officially named in our endorsement by the American Alpine Club, began at Joe McKeown’s house in Santa Cruz with three of us leaving Joe who would meet us in NYC about a week later. Dennis Hennek, Russ Mclean, and I packed ourselves and most of our gear into Dennis’ GMC Truck and headed north to Stockton where we had dinner with Jeff’s uncle Bill and father, Jack who would also meet us in NYC. After dinner, we saw a slide show of previous Afghanistan expeditions before piling back into the GMC for the first of three all-nighters as we drove essentially non-stop for 3 days and nights all the way to New York, picking up Mike Cohen in Salt Lake City… Now THAT was an overland trip… How did we stay awake??? Well, we did bivie in the back of the GMC.
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TomKimbrough
Social climber
Salt Lake City
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Sorry, no photos but congratulations Dozier!
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Roger Breedlove
climber
Cleveland Heights, Ohio
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Is that you posting for the first time on ST, Ken?
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guido
Trad climber
Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific
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Boche
Wow-yah finally made it on to ST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Welcome mate.
cheers
Guido
PS Hennek-get that scanner now.
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Peter Haan
Trad climber
San Francisco, CA
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Christ, great to see your post Ken. Hope you are doing well!!
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Hawkeye
climber
State of Mine
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very cool topic and congratulations!
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BooDawg
Social climber
Paradise Island
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Thanks for the welcome guys! I'll be back soon with more pix. BTW, I just posted pix of Kor, Lauria, Hennek, Yvon, me working at Yvon's SkunkWorks in Burbank in 1965 and another of Dennis, Yvon, and Malinda at Yvon's first Ventura Beach house. Are we having fun yet??
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Roger Breedlove
climber
Cleveland Heights, Ohio
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Hey Ken,
You should put those pictures you uploaded into a thread so everyone can see them and comment on how great everyone used to look.
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BooDawg
Social climber
Paradise Island
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Roger that, Roger. I'll be back in a few hours and submit some ideas. Thanks.
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John Morton
climber
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So to pull us back on topic ... I'll add my congratulations to Jeff for this award, for his many years of work in science, and some personal gratitude for a few good years of companionship and entertainment.
To add a little to the list of Dozier attributes, I'll mention his phenomenal memory. Jeff seems to have an archival mind which stores mountains of information for quick recall. The worlds of academia and physical science have benefited from this, but so have many besotted climbers around the campfire. He's good with limericks, quotes from Winston Churchill and others (there was the curse attributed to Rabelais, "May the fiends of hell fly up thy fundament!"), as well as the climbing lore which in the old days lived only as oral history.
During the Podunk Invasion of Europe Jeff reminded us that his family has its own contract bridge system, called The Polish Club. I never saw the rules but I think it was several pages, written out. He took a side trip to rendezvous with an uncle in Warsaw and they teamed to win money in tournaments. In bridge, I think memory wins.
John
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