Quote Blog

"The sideways blowing snow swept me off of my feet and I plunged down the chute."

In every book that I have read this year pertaining to action sports, the weather has determined many fates for either events, activities and in some cases peoples lives. In the quote above, Norm finds himself in a very sticky situation as he is using a horizontal stick to keep him from riding down this tall frozen waterfall during his descent back to civilization after taking part in a deadly plane crash. He watched his father pass away in front of him, his step mom the same, and the pilot be ejected from the cockpit during impact and not surviving the blow. Its just 10 year old Norm out there all by himself. 4,000 feet up from any other sign of life. If that isnt bad enough, there is an epic blizzard that has erupted in the mountains completely unexpectingly. Without notice, this ominous storm made its way into the Rocky Mountains after gaining wind over the plains to the west. The plane was driven off course by the winds and instead of flying through this section of plains leading from one side of the rockies to the other, it veered off into the mountains that formed a barrier to this plain. The mountains, being so tall, were too much for the plane to overcome.

It is situations like these that reinforce my thoughts about studying weather. Because this storm was completely unexpected and it turned out to be so deadly, there should have been some way of finding out about its path. I beleive that the technology that this world is able to come out with is completely capapble of doing a better job. Yes, this was back in the early 90's and things have come along a little more but us humans can do a better job of this. We're capable. I think the fault in the observatory system is simply not enough observatories. I think if some organization came togeather and engineered some sort of mini module that gathered data such as wind speed, wind direction, pressure etc... and scattered them around the country our knowledge on whats going on above us would be substantially more valid.