Snow is cold

So it is officially wintertime in Iowa again, and we will not be seeing green grass for another five months. I don't like snow. It's cold and wet and most of the time it's not crisp white snow, but the dark black snow that is formed from the exhaust of cars. It ruins your shoes, makes the roads slippery, and cancels school. Actually, the canceling school is fine. To most people snow is a mild inconvenience, a triviality, but snow is a huge deal.

Ask any northern state government if snow is a big deal. It slows down our economy in a huge way every time a fresh blanket of snow covers everything. In Canada they even have specified snow dump sites. One snow dump site was so large that even though the rest of the snow melted in April, it stayed until September. It costs billions of dollars to our nation to deal with snow. Oh yeah and it also causes car crashes all across the nation.

But snow has some positive sides right? I'm a skier and I love skiing. However, I'm starting to think slightly differently about that fluffy powder you cut down the mountain on. For one thing it is not as fluffy when you crash into it at forty mph. The other thing is avalanches. Avalanches are tremendous forces of nature. Oh, and there are people who find avalanches to ski and snowboard in front of. It's called an avalanche escape run, and it's absolutely stupid. There are videos all over Youtube of guys skiing and snowboarding away from thundering stampedes of snowy death behind them. One guy is even cocky enough to do a backflip off a cliff as he is escaping.

The thing that scares me is when people get caught. The example is Julien Lopez, and there is a video of him falling during an avalanche escape. That means the snow catches up to him and he is completely enveloped in the rampaging snow. He completely disappears from sight into the white mountain face. That's a burial tomb right there. No one is anywhere near close enough to dig him out, even if they could locate him. I absolutely hate the idea of death from cold or suffocation and there is both of them wrapped up in a neat body-sized package. Luckily enough Julien was only buried slightly so that he could dig his way out though. He described it as one of the most terrifying moments of his life.

Listen, I understand the adrenaline rush of putting yourself into extreme situations. However, there is a point where you have to think about how awfully this could go wrong and whether it's worth it to take that risk. Make sure to bundle up and thanks for reading.