Customer Reviews

Snowstruck: In the Grip of Avalanches

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Human beings are a pretty stubborn lot. People insist on building expensive new abodes along the San Andreas fault. Others ignore the dangers posed by hurricanes and build homes and hotels right on the water all along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States. It is not a question of "if" devastation will strike these areas but rather a question of "when". Likewise, over the past quarter century as people play and build in ever more remote areas of this country the threat of death or serious injury at the hands of an avalanche have increased dramatically. This is particularly true in the State of Alaska.

For more than two decades author Jill Fredston and her husband Doug Fesler have been fighting the good fight in our nations largest state trying to educate everyone about the dangers posed by avalanches. The results have been mixed. In "Snowstruck" Jill Fredston speaks of the exhiliration of working in the wilds of Alaska and of the heartbreak when individuals gamble and lose their lives to an avalanche. What is so frustrating to people like Jill and Doug is that most of the folks who are killed in avalanches are experienced individuals who really should know better. In "Snowstruck: In The Grip of Avalanches" Jill Fredston explains how she goes about the task of predicting where an avalanche might occur and what is involved in deliberately triggering them with explosives. In addition, you will accompany Jill and Doug on a number of heart wrenching rescue missions. You will quickly come to understand how frequently these rescue missions become recovery missions. It is very sad particularly in cases where Doug and Jill know the victim.

I found "Snowstruck: In The Grip of Avalanches" particularly interesting because being from Rhode Island it is a topic I knew virtually nothing about. Impressive photographs at the beginning of each chapter further illustrate the magnitude and destructive power of avalanches. If you enjoy the great outdoors this is a book you are going to want to read. Recommended.

This book is awesome. Expertly written, Jill can bring you from your living room to feeling like you are there, participating in the avalanche or the rescue. Having had a good friend perish in an avalanche, who in fact, was dug up by Jill and her husband, this book was so intense that while it is normally a book that you would read from start to finish, it was so superbly written that many chapters would make the memories come rushing back, prompting a break, if only for half an hour before being so compelled to read on. I would recommend this book to anyone, outdoor lover or not.

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.

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

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.

This is a very sincere and frank book coming from the heart.

It is not that much about avalanches - it is about people

and what drives them to do what they do.

I loved it. There are some chapters which were more interesting

to me than others but this is because the author had a very

broad perspective while I was more interested in some specific

angles of the issue.

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.

A rich blend of discovery, wonder, science, tragedy and somber reflections on human nature, Snowstruck is simultaneously educational and entertaining.

The author relates vividly her interest in learning everything about avalances, but also reveals the heartache of regularly interacting with so deadly a topic. Her frustration with the way natural disasters in general and avalanches in particular are reported in the popular press rings very true.

The the author's acquired humility from years of wrestling with this natural phenomenon is much appreciated. One comes away from the book with a clear picture that nature will ultimately have the upper hand in a struggle with humanity, but humans can at least manage their risk taking as well as their own tendency towards arrogance.

I read this book after taking my Avalanche Level I class and reading Fredston & Fesler's Avalanche Field Guide (a must!!) and completely loved it. Fredston does a great job of explaining snowpack and bringing it to life with stories of her time in the field. Whether you have minimal avalanche knowledge or are an avy geek, this book is a fabulously written blend of snow science, a study in human behavior, and anecdotes to bring it all to life.

One of the most intersting books I've read in a while. Up there with "Born to Run." I felt like I was taking a science course under the humanities department.