Branch, John. “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.” The New York Times. 2012. Web. 29 August 2015.
First, let me say that it’s interesting to read this absolutely gorgeous webtext and then read some of the other texts out there about this incident. King5 News report, Outside Magazine’s report, written by one of the skiers, Megan Michelson, and from Powder, the magazine for which one of the skiers worked.
There is, by far, more findable info about the article, “Snow Fall….” than about the tragedy itself. What does this say about digital communication and its power and potential?
I wonder… why might someone want to read this article instead of watch the story via film documentary alone?
It’s a beautiful website, though. Undeniably. It works on so many different levels.
The opening page–that desolate gray and white mountain top, the movement of the snow in the “harsh” wind, the light shining off the icy slope, giving it a knife-like edginess despite the gentleness of the lines across the image. THe reader scrolls down and up emerges the white page–snow white–and a wide, readable column of black type.
The type is “article” type, magazine article, book type–familiar, comforting. And the first thing offered is an image:
“The snow burst through the trees with no warning but a last-second whoosh of sound, a two-story wall of white and Chris Rudolph’s piercing cry: ‘Avalanche! Elyse!'” (1).***Notice how multimodal the experience of reading this text is. Visual image. Sound.
The page is very long and takes quite a long time to read to the bottom. There are 6 pages like this, “sections,” really, presented as one column of text. The embedded links appear as images to the right–a video featuring Elyse Saugstad recounting her experience getting pummeled in the avalanche, slide shows featuring photos of each of the 16 skiers present that day on the trip (including childhood pic). You can hear the audio of the video embeds while you continue reading; there is a great deal of emotion conveyed/crafted in that experience.
The MAPS! really make this. As the read scrolls, she hits a point that triggers, automatically, a large, gray-scale map of the Cascade range. The reader follows as the map leads down a highway towards Cowboy Mt and Steven’s Pass Ski Area. The motion is slow, easy, aerial. It provides a sense of scale, of bounds and out-of-bounds that works on so many levels…. I particularly like the visual demonstrating how avalanche conditions build up (“To the Peak,” section 2).
Some selective history of Tunnel Creek is offered, with a couple of photos–This really isn’t a visually overwhelming space! What’s here is very deliberate and uncluttere. GoPro video of the actual ski is so incredible!
The crafting of this piece does several things I wonder about. It seems to suggest hubris as the “cause” of the tragedy–by leaning so heavily on the expertise of the skiers in sections 1, 2, and 3. Ending with Laurie Brenan’s video suggests these adventurers were selfish or stupid somehow. It’s as though the article promotes a thesis like this: The avalanche didn’t kill these skiers; their hubris did. This is a construction I feel strongly suspicious of. The sense is one of blame and condemnation–it’s subtle, but I sense it in the construction of this site.
In light of Megan Michaelson’s Outside article…That piece blames “groupthink” for what happened, and extends the explanation to the way the industry prepares people for avalanches. Just providing gear isn’t enough, in fact it’s counter-productive:
There is a sea change occurring in avalanche education. A decade ago, courses focused on digging snow pits and analyzing weak layers. But then, says Lel Tone, an avalanche-safety instructor, “we realized we were giving people a false sense of confidence. Looking at the statistics, there was a period of time when people who had taken an Avy 1 course were the ones being caught in avalanches.”
Researchers decided that the so-called human factors—familiarity, social pressures, and the expert halo (in which the experienced believe that their expertise will keep them safe)—were more to blame than previously thought. So instructors began teaching people to use checklists, like airline pilots, to mitigate those human factors.
…
Rather than focusing exclusively on the snow conditions, McCammon is concerned with the questions that we’re constantly processing in these situations, questions like: What is everyone else doing? What do the experts say? How familiar am I with what’s going on? These are answered on a nearly subconscious level. In situations driven by desire—say, a longing for powder during a winter as starved for snow as 2012 was—it becomes even harder to make the right choices.
And I can’t help but hear resonance in this line from her article: “In newspapers, we were made to look like crazed adrenaline junkies for engaging in such a dangerous sport. A New York Times headline was particularly harsh: “Avalanches on the Rise for Thrill-Seeking Skiers.”
What is the purpose of the “Snow Fall” article? Is it merely storytelling? beautiful?
The Outside article seems much more purposeful. Is this just in the explicit nature of its talking about who/what is to blame for the deaths?
Leave a Reply