Drowning in cold water

It's tough to make snow science interesting, but Jenkins does a commendable job

by Jill Yesko
5/10/00

The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone

By McKay Jenkins
Random House, 228 pages, $23.95.

On Dec. 26, 1969, five childhood friends set out to scale Mount Cleveland, a forbidding 10,448-foot peak tucked into a remote corner of Montana's rugged Glacier National Park. What happened next involved one of the largest, most dangerous, and most dramatic manhunts in the history of mountain rescue efforts. Literally swept down the frigid mountain by a roaring avalanche, the young men's bodies were discovered six months later, buried under nearly a quarter-mile of snow, ice, and rock.

That's the point of departure for White Death, McKay Jenkins' tug-at-the-heartstrings recounting of the Mount Cleveland tragedy and meteorologically correct dissection of the avalanche and other snow-related disasters.

While avalanches don't figure on the radar screens of most East Coasters' list of terrifying things, Jenkins -- a dedicated snow junkie and avalanche anthropologist -- writes that since the 1950s, nearly 600 people have lost their lives in catastrophic cascades of snow, some of which can reach the height of condominiums and hit with a force 3,000 times stronger than an Amtrak locomotive. For peasants living in isolated Alpine villages, avalanches often take on mythic and folkloric proportions. Accounts from the Middle Ages portray avalanches as snowy monsters, frigid embodiments of the spirits and ghosts thought to inhabit the high peaks and valleys of Alpine Europe. So frightening were the snow-covered spikes to Europeans that until the Enlightenment, mountains were viewed as sinful "blemishes" on the otherwise tame and civilized surface of the Earth.

Jenkins links the growing number of deaths caused by avalanches in the United States since the 1960s to the increase in leisure time, coupled with advances in outdoor gear and the heavy promotion of risky adventure trips. For the relatively bargain-basement price of $65,000, even mountain climbers with minimal experience can join expeditions to Mount Everest.

Unfortunately for Jenkins, the Mount Cleveland tragedy lacks the high drama that transformed books such as Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air -- a bone-chilling account of two fatal Everest expeditions -- into instant bestsellers. The death of a group of gawky, anonymous Montana young people also lacks the potential for big-bucks Hollywood packaging that has made Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm a must-read for well-heeled armchair adventurers.

Rather, what is most compelling about White Death is Jenkins' description of the snow itself. Even those who aren't card-carrying Weather Channel aficionados will appreciate Jenkins' snow scholarship. It's tough sledding to make snow science interesting, but Jenkins does a commendable job -- writing of one Vermont farmer who published a photographic portfolio with more than 2,000 pictures of individual flakes and citing a Russian meteorologist who has chronicled 246 different types of snow. When it comes to describing the minutiae of snow, Jenkins doesn't spare readers the hoary details.

Jill Yesko writes book reviews for Baltimore City Paper.