Snowstruck: In the Grip of Avalanches |  | Author: Jill Fredston
Publisher: Harvest Books
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Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 255588
Media: Paperback
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 1
ISBN: 0156032546
Dewey Decimal Number: 551.307
EAN: 9780156032544
ASIN: 0156032546
Publication Date: January 8, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Every year around the globe, people cross paths with avalanches—some massive, some no deeper than a pizza box—with deadly results. Avalanche expert Jill Fredston stalks these so-called freaks of nature, forecasting where and when they will strike, deliberately triggering them with explosives, teaching potential victims how to stay alive, and leading rescue efforts when tragedy strikes. In Snowstruck, Fredston draws on decades of personal experience to take “avalanches out of the statistical realm and into the human one” (Skiing Magazine): a skier making what may prove his final decision, a victim buried so tightly that he can’t move a finger, rescuers racing both time and weather, forecasters treading the line between reasonable risk and danger. Fredston brings to life the awesome forces of nature that can turn the mountains deadly—and the equally inexorable forces of human nature that lure us time and again into treacherous terrain.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 15
 Freeranging like Alaska January 18, 2008
Timothy Byrne (Seattle, WA United States)
What I love about this book is it's absolute independence from any formula of genre. It's part memoir, part documentary, part journalism, and some other bits and pieces of this and that. Perhaps living in Alaska one has less concern for what others typically do when they write.
The book is built on two main lines, like the two cords of a rapel if you will. First there is the description of the various man-meets-avalanche moments that create most of the books episodes, and the theme here is something like the tendency that humans have to underestimate the forces of nature and their complete disregard for human existence. Then there is the autobiography of the author and her husband, shaped by taking part in the man-avalanche conflict. The two threads are twisted around eachother to make up the book.
If there's a moral to the story it would be that folks who play in nature need to think themselves out of the mindset that catastrophe generally results from big chances and big mistakes.
 Science Made Exciting August 30, 2007
E. Martin (fairbanks, alaska United States)
I am a disaster afficionado--have been since I can remember. Books, movies, documentaries--if something on the planet erupted, shook, blew, flooded or flamed, I'm interested.
Maybe it's the awesome power of Mother Nature that attracts me. She is one tough chick you just don't mess with--and I want to be her.
Anyway, for a disaster buff like myself, a book sporting a title with the word "avalanche" in it has to get my attention. And Jill Fredston's "Snowstruck: In the Grip of Avalanches" not only grabbed my attention, it held me by the throat to the very end.
Fredston has an impressive resume: She has spent the last 25 years studying avalanches and has worked in education, prevention, rescue and recovery. She is co-director of the Alaska Mountain Safety Center and co-author of "Snow Sense: A Guide to Evaluating Snow Avalanche Hazard." Her partner in both endeavors is Doug Fesler, who also happens to be her husband. But more important than her credentials is her awe of and respect for the forces she studies.
She tells the reader of her arrival in Alaska in 1982, proud possessor of a masters degree in polar studies and ice. Landing a job as a snow and ice specialist for the University of Alaska, she become known for her expertise in "anything frozen."
When the university inherited the Alaska Avalanche Forecast Center, Fredston was appointed director, even though she knew nothing about the subject. That's when she met Fesler, who at that time was Alaska's "reigning avalanche authority" and who had recommended against her hire.
But Fredston, "blithely unaware that he thought me as green as they come," eagerly learned from him, following him out into the field, studying snow whenever she had the chance--and face it, in Alaska, there's about six months out of the year, at least, to study snow--and learned "to read the history of a single winter's weather in a snow pit wall," as Fesler advised her.
Eventually, the two fell in love and started a domestic partnership, combining it with business when both lost their jobs with the state during the budget crisis of the late 1980s.
Fredston has an easy, charming style, a way of mixing science, anecdote, narrative and history into a coherent and inherently readable book. Vivid description and imagery, a thorough knowledge of her subject matter and a love of all that it encompasses add passion and depth to what could have been a dry treatise on why snow falls.
Listen to this: "Snow voices complain in a variety of ways," in describing the sounds an avalanche makes. It almost never sounds--or looks, as she points out in a later chapters--like movie avalanches do.
"My thoughts always seemed folded in among the layers of the snowpack."
"The thin line that tethers us to life is invisible, far from straight, and famously fickle. It is a line we are walking yet are only allowed to stray across once."
Powerful words. Powerful images. Powerful message.
In fact, I got so caught up in the story I kept forgetting I was supposed to be reviewing, not enjoying. I had to keep going back and re-reading to make sure I wasn't liking it for no reason. You know, being a disaster buff and all.
Tough job I have.
To be sure, the book's not perfect. The first chapter begins with the January 2000 avalanche in Cordova, getting into the head of one of the victims--and then she veers off onto Doug Fesler, who at the time is a stranger to the reader and not even close to Cordova. There's a lot of meandering and sidetracking through this chapter, giving the reader back story and some historic and scientific facts about avalanches. All very interesting, but ... she gets us caring about the people in Cordova, so breaking away and going on another trail is disconcerting.
And, with her citing of other sources, books on risk management and survival, as well as quotes from an incredible range of writers from Maya Angelou to Henry Thoreau, a list of works cited or read would have been fantastic. It would have saved me from having to rifle through pages trying to find identifying information.
Not that I'm complaining. Because she goes back to Cordova at the end, coming full circle back to where she started, leaving the reader with a sense of closure. And a wish that the book was longer.
If Fredston (and Fesler, for as she says, "without him, there would be no story," and he is on every page with her) has a mantra, it's "Educate people. Educate people. Educate." Because far from advising people to stay inside and avoid snow all together, Fredston knows that's not going to happen. And she knows, as statistics she quotes show, that 95 percent of avalanches that kill are triggered by the victims (page 126) and that experts are more likely to be killed than amateurs (page 151).
Complacency, overconfidence--these are factors in those stats, Fredston says, but most avalanches can be avoided by reading the snow pack, knowing the history and the science enough to judge when danger is imminent (a red light, she calls it).
Rather than blaming the victims, Fredston feels great sympathy and pain for every frozen, battered not-breathing body she and Fesler have dug out of the snow.
"... of course greater exposure increases the probability of becoming a statistic. The problem is that behind every statistic is an individual with a name and a circle of friends and relatives left with holes in their hearts."
This grief has gotten to both Fredston and Fesler; Fredston quotes Soren Kierkegaard: "How did I get into this and this and how do I get out of it again, how does it end?"
Bottom line: I loved this book. I could read it again and learn more, even though I took prodigious notes and underlined pages of words and facts. It is compelling because the author describes a world in which man is not the center of the universe nor is he at the top of the food chain. Far from being masters of our universe, we are subject to the rhythms and patterns of those around us, the animals and plants which share the world with us, and the forces of nature that shape it. It's a humbling thought, but a conclusion I reached long ago (about the time I realized that gravity always wins).
I found a quote years ago that sums up my philosophy of my place on this rock, and was quite surprised--but maybe I shouldn't have been--to find it near the end of Fredston's book: "Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice," according to historian Will Durant.
This is not a land where we ever want to forget that.
Showing nature's power to destroy May 1, 2007
armchairinterviews.com (Minnesota)
Of all the natural disasters we've seen, like fire, flood, and earthquake, one important one is often left out: avalanche--those sudden-death slides in snowy mountain country.
Jill Fredston takes care of that in her latest book Snowstruck. Beginning with an avalanche in 2005 that wiped out half the town of Cordova, Alaska, she tells the story of her lifelong fascination with the cold country, her 20 years of research into the subject, and her own marriage to Alaskan avalanche expert Doug Fesler. Together, they travel across Alaska, trying to find out how these sudden killer slides begin, when and where they are most likely to strike. The couple teaches classes to skiers, snowmobilers and others venturing into high country, trying to train them to watch for warning signs of an avalanche.
And yet...and yet...
You will feel Jill's frustration and sorrow as they see these very same students and even close friends go out again and again under dangerous conditions--and pay for it with their lives. Even cities and towns in avalanche country resist a ban on building in likely avalanche paths, and turn a deaf ear to warnings as their citizens construct homes at the very foot of dangerous slopes. You too will want to grit your teeth in the face of such municipal greed.
This is an excellent book not only for skiers and snow sports enthusiasts, but also a harrowing story and a good resource guide for writers and researchers who want to know more about what makes avalanches tick...like time bombs on the slopes above our heads.
Jill Fredston is the author of Rowing to Latitude: Journeys Along the Arctic's Edge, which won the 2002 National Outdoor Book Award for Literature. She and her husband, Doug Fesler, co-direct the Alaska Mountain Safety Center and co-wrote the authoritative Snow Sense: A Guide to Evaluating Snow Avalanche Hazard. They live in the mountains above Anchorage.
Armchair Interviews says: Overall, this is an easy-to-read book about the causes and catastrophes of an unacknowledged natural killer.
Fredston's many encounters and stories all hold lessons for survival. January 6, 2007
Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Author Jill Fredston has worked in avalanche prevention, education and rescue for several decades, trying to keep people and avalanche disasters separate: her account of her experiences in SNOWSTRUCK: IN THE GRIP OF AVALANCHES provides an excellent mix of science, adventure and autobiography as it surveys her experiences. From triggering them with explosives to teaching potential victims how to stay alive, Fredston's many encounters and stories all hold lessons for survival.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
Poetry from a scientist April 12, 2006
C. Schomaker (FL, USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Snowstruck is a fascinating book from an actual scientific expert involved with avalanche rescue, prediction and study, but it reads more like the great adventure narratives from writers like Jon Krakauer or Sebastian Junger. Smart, exciting, and thought-provoking.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 15
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