March 23, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is James Somers’ absorbing “Cold War,” a reporting piece about snow science and avalanche control. Somers visits Alta, Utah, where explosives are used to cut avalanche risk. High on a mountain, he observes the firing of “a pair of hundred-and-five-millimetre howitzer cannons, of Second World War vintage, installed on semicircular tracks.” He describes “brittle, spiky snow” called depth hoar – “the eeriest stuff on any mountain”:

It is strong in compression but weak in shear. Like a row of champagne glasses slowly loaded with bricks, it can hold a surprising amount of weight until, with the slightest shove, the structure falls apart, creating a slab avalanche.

He describes what it’s like to get caught in an avalanche:

On slopes shallow enough to accumulate snow but steep enough for it to be unstable—the sweet spot is said to be thirty-nine degrees—the layers will separate, and the slab will crack and slide. Churning violently, the snow reaches eighty miles per hour within a few seconds. A skier who avoids colliding with trees and rocks is likely to be pulled under, then pinned in place by thousands of pounds of snow that harden like concrete. Very few people can dig themselves out; most can’t even move their fingers. Within minutes, an ice mask forms around your face. You asphyxiate on your own exhaled carbon dioxide.

He visits the headquarters of the Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos, Switzerland, and observes, among other things, “snow metamorphism” in a device called the Snowbreeder. He visits the Institute’s avalanche test site and vividly describes a 1999 experiment:

If you had been skiing on the mountain during the last avalanche, you might have heard a soft exhalation: air releasing from a crack in the slab. Upslope, it would have looked as though someone had slit the mountain’s forehead. Now its face was falling off; the break, nine football fields across, was as deep as eleven feet in places. Blocks of snow would begin leaping up prettily, breaking like roiling water. In the quiet, you might feel something lapping at the back of your legs before being swept off your feet.

And he visits St. Antönien, a tiny Swiss farming village an hour outside Davos (“The threat of avalanche there is so great that, in storms, residents wear beacons while tending their farms”).

My favourite line in “Cold War” is “Avalanche country is like bear country. The threat hardly ever comes, but it defines the place, and lends it its grandeur.” Lines like that remind me of John McPhee’s work. That’s one of the highest compliments I can pay a piece of writing. I look forward to reading more of Somers’ work in The New Yorker.