Snow by Giles Whittell

Author:Giles Whittell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2019-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

Fredston says the dust cloud from the collapsing World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, reminded her of powder blast from an avalanche. Its physics is similar to the pyroclastic flows of hot gases down the flanks of erupting volcanoes, but cooler.

Not many people know what it is like to be inside a powder blast, but Colin Haley does. He lives in Seattle but is at home wherever there are mountains. In April 2015 he was acclimatizing for a climbing expedition in northern Nepal when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook the whole country. Its impact was random, and Haley was lucky. When the quake struck, he was with his climbing partner in the village of Kyanjin Gompa in the Langtang Valley, near Tibet. Within a few minutes Langtang, a collection of teahouses and stone dwellings five miles down the valley from Kyanjin Gompa, was buried under 40 million tons of rock and ice. A large part of the mountain above it had shaken loose and crashed to the valley floor.

Kyanjin Gompa was spared the rockslide. Most of those living and staying there had time to run outside and make for a grassy plateau east of the village. That’s what Haley did, thinking it the obvious safest place. He described the coming of the blast in his blog:

I was just about free of the last buildings, almost into the grassy meadow, when I glanced back and saw the avalanche. No one had heard it beforehand, because there was so much noise of collapsing buildings and people screaming. No one saw it beforehand because of the thick cloud ceiling not far above the village. I saw a humongous cloud of snow descending through the cloud layer and down-valley towards us.… I have seen plenty of big avalanches in Alaska and Pakistan, and none of them were anything like this. The avalanche that was coming down through the clouds and across the moraine seemed to be 300–400 meters tall. It was merely the powder cloud, the actual debris of ice and rock having stopped on the uphill side of the moraine, but [it] was moving much faster than I’ve usually seen in powder clouds.

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