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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Topic Author's Original Post - Oct 21, 2009 - 09:16am PT
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Jeff Dozier was a climber in the Valley in the 1960's and lived in Berkeley in the "Great Pad" with Sacherer, Beck, Erb, and Steve Thompson.
Currently a professor at UC Santa Barbara, he has just won Microsoft's Jim Gray award. One of the articles describing him begins:
Jeff Dozier’s life’s work revealed itself in 1974, while he was 20,000 feet high in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush range. “I was climbing with some friends, and one of them asked if we thought the slope could avalanche. I had no clue, and I thought to myself, ‘I can deal with risk. What I can’t deal with is not knowing.’”
Not long afterward, Dozier – who then held a newly minted doctorate in geography from the University of Michigan – took a class about avalanches, and realized much of his academic work had application in the world of snow and ice. So he wrote a grant proposal to NASA for a study that would take the nascent worlds of computing and remote sensing via satellite and apply them to the study of mountain snowpack. “I’ve been working on those kinds of processes ever since,” he says.
For more info see:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/oct09/10-16jimgrayaward.mspx?rss_fdn=Custom
and
http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=2108
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TripL7
Trad climber
'dago'
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Oct 21, 2009 - 09:41am PT
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Three Cheers for Jeff Dozier!!!
Valley climber, Prof. of Environmental Studies, with many fine friends past and present, and still going strong at 65. Congratulations Jeff for a life well lived.
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Maysho
climber
Soda Springs, CA
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Oct 21, 2009 - 09:57am PT
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Thanks for posting this Jan!
In my program we take many students (middle and high school) to the Central Sierra Snow Lab at Donner Summit, run by UC. This is part of our lesson in "the Sierra snowpack is your water bank!" the students get some hands on experience measuring snow density at different layers and different exposures, it will be cool to teach a little about Prof. Dozier's work and the large scale view and application of his methods.
Peter
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hossjulia
Trad climber
Eastside
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Oct 21, 2009 - 10:04am PT
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This is great news, congrats Jeff!
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DonC
climber
CA
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Oct 21, 2009 - 10:28am PT
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congratulations to a fellow geographer
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Dick Erb
climber
June Lake, CA
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Oct 21, 2009 - 11:15am PT
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Way to go Jeff. I always knew you were no dummy.
I was with Jeff on a couple of trips to the Hindu Kush. There was one interesting sort of avalanche related incident that I remember. On an ascent of Kohi Tundi Jeff and I headed up from base camp one morning with two porters to scout the route and set up camp 1. Traversing under an ice cliff a few rocks sailed by and we kept moving. Higher up when the route traversed back over the ice cliff our porters started chucking rocks over the edge. Our first thought was, Wow these guys are into trundling, but we soon realized they were aiming for the stones on the lip of the cliff to knock them off before their descent back under the cliff in the warming sun. At camp 1 we gave a note to one of the porters for our friends below warning them not to come up until early the next morning because of rockfall danger. They got the note and in their impatience started up right away. Mike Wadleigh was shooting a film of the climb and got some good footage of many boulders bouncing and sliding down the glacier, and one bloody scene of a climbers hand that had been struck by a rock.
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Jim Wilcox
Boulder climber
Santa Barbara
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Oct 21, 2009 - 11:55am PT
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Congratulations, Jeff.
I'm sure your enjoying the weather on the Eastside right about now. It's a miserable 75 degrees over here :)
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guido
Trad climber
Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific
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Oct 21, 2009 - 09:49pm PT
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Congratulations Dr Deeg
1974- "Low Budget Boys Hindu Kush Expedition"
From left to right: McLean, Jack Dozier (dad), Jeff, Bill Dozier (uncle), Boche, Hennek and Cohen.
Mustafa Hotel central courtyard-Kabul
Looks like Jeff is already getting ready to celebrate!
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 22, 2009 - 10:50am PT
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Great photo guido. Anymore?
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guido
Trad climber
Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific
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Oct 22, 2009 - 11:21am PT
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Many, but most are buried in a storage room I can hardly climb into anymore. Build a shelf and they will fill it!
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Roger Breedlove
climber
Cleveland Heights, Ohio
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Oct 22, 2009 - 12:10pm PT
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Congratulations, Jeff.
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Fletcher
Trad climber
Shivasana
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Oct 22, 2009 - 09:02pm PT
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Very nice. Congrats Jeff!
I'm enjoying the photos and stories.
I very briefly worked with a startup his wife was involved with about 15 years ago. Never got to meet the man, himself.
And in case anyone is wondering how Dozier Dome got it's name.... now you know!
Eric
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Oct 22, 2009 - 09:04pm PT
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cool thread.
and another great pic from guido.
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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Oct 23, 2009 - 05:29am PT
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A few photos. Like Guido's, most of mine from so long ago have not been scanned yet. But I do know where the boxes are.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 23, 2009 - 10:20am PT
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Beautiful photos!
You know it's thanks to the wondrous tales that Jeff, Bill Peppin, Steve Thompson, and John Morton brought back from Europe in 1965-66, that I was able to persuade Frank to go to Europe for a break after he finished his Ph.D. in 1968. I always felt I could not have persuaded him if you guys hadn't done it first. As it was, we followed quite a few of your suggestions including a fun trip to the salt mines in Austria.
It was Jeff and Dick Erb's stories of Afghanistan though that really triggered my imagination.I really wanted to travel there overland from Europe back in the days when it was possible. Instead, I had my own adventures in Nepal in the early '70's.
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Peter Haan
Trad climber
San Francisco, CA
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Oct 23, 2009 - 10:26am PT
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Good on you, Jeff !!!! Glad to hear this!
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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Oct 23, 2009 - 12:48pm PT
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Going overland from Europe to South Asia was possible in the 60s and 70s. My first visit to Afghanistan was in 1966. I went to school in Cologne in the fall of 65, and when it was time to return to the US I decided to go eastward. In Germany, I had met an Italian girlfriend, who lived in Bergamo, near Milan, and I spent Christmas with her family (on the way visiting Royal and Liz for a couple of days in Leysin). Then, Steve Thompson was in Istanbul, where his father was teaching at Robert Kolej, and that was my next stop. Steve and I went climbing near Antalya on the south coast of Turkey. A dragon reportedly lived in the cliff, and we could feel hot air coming out of the cracks!
Through hitchhiking (mainly on trucks) and buses, I was able to stay on the ground from Turkey through Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, into Pakistan. I was stymied at the Pakistan-India border. They had just been at war, and although the fighting had stopped, the border was not open. I was in Lahore and wanted to get to Ludhiana to visit a brother of one of my father's clients. It was only about 60 miles away across the border, but I had to travel 1500 -- train to Karachi, fly to New Delhi, then train to Ludhiana.
After getting across India on trains (3rd class, which fit a dirtbag budget), travel overland through Burma (now Myanmar) was not possible, and I wanted to get back to California to start the spring quarter in school. So I flew home from Calcutta through Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.
A lot of changes in the Middle East since then, most of them bad. The same trip would be dangerous today. Back then, even though I sometimes went for days without meeting anyone who spoke a language I knew, I never felt unsafe.
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Ray Olson
Trad climber
Imperial Beach, California
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Oct 23, 2009 - 01:14pm PT
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Congratulations to Mr. Dozier on receiving the coveted
Microsoft award.
My belated thanks to Jan for her wonderful ongoing
contributions to this forum
Guido, what support do you need sir regarding the scanning
of your valuable slide archives?
one more thing, as I step out on a limb:
please keep in mind that, whatever you might
believe about Microsoft, they are a multi-faceted
entitiy with a stellar reputation in aspects of technology
and software for developers etc.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 23, 2009 - 02:07pm PT
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Jeff-
I spent 6 weeks traveling all over India in 1973 on third class trains, alone as a young woman. I slept on the floors of the first class ladies' waiting rooms after bribing my way in. One of the hardest and more dangerous things I ever did.
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guido
Trad climber
Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific
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Oct 23, 2009 - 02:55pm PT
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Jeff
Wouldn't it be cool if we could get Hennek, Boche,McLean,Cohen and OTHERS, to dive into the photo archives and enlighten us with some tales?
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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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