A Hard Road Home (Part One) Whiteout on Windy Ridge

http://cakabala.com/?m=201110

Found this out on the internet last night while I was going some historical research on the worst Iowa Blizzards. This story is fairly recent, and really shows how you can lose track of where you are and how quickly a bad situation can become deadly.

Whiteouts are freakyyy! Years ago, I spent a night in a roadside ditch in the White Mts of AZ as a result of whiteout conditions. I was OK because I was on my way to a back country ski trip, but it was fun digging out the next day!

This is another blizzard story....been wanting to read this for a while now..

http://www.amazon.com/The-Childrens-Blizzard-David-Laskin/dp/0060520760

I read "Ordeal by Hunger", about the Donner party, about ten years ago, and parts of it resonate still today. I'm sure Children of the Blizzard would be the same way.

Short answer: Carry a kit (and a phone--it might work) and stay with your ar

I have The Children's Blizzard on my Kindle app. It is a very dry read and I could not get through the 3rd chapter. The story delves far too much into family history and people who have no real relevance to the story at hand. Also the extreme and overly long meteorological details really takes away from what could of been a good read. So save your money and skip this book.

For example in chapter 3:
Though the convulsions of the atmosphere are often complex and multifaceted, extreme cold has a fairly simple formula. Diminish the duration and intensity of sunlight, deflect winds carrying milder currents, level the surface of the land, wait long enough—and you’re sure to end up with a pool of dense, calm, frigid air. Just to be sure, add a layer of clean white snow so that what light does reach the ground is reflected back into the atmosphere before the earth can absorb its warmth. If, on top of all this, you have clear skies above you, temperatures will plunge spectacularly at night as the atmosphere’s infrared energy radiates off into space. Of course, there are other recipes for outbreaks of cold weather, including the movement of fronts and pressure systems, but this is the easiest and surest. A week or so of these conditions and the cold will be fierce, unyielding, and deadly.


Constantly and futilely, the earth’s atmosphere seeks to achieve equilibrium. Weather is the turbulent means to this perfect, hopeless end. Contrasting temperatures try to balance out to one uniform temperature, pressure differences strive for resolution, winds blow in a vain attempt to finally calm down global tensions. All of this is enormously complicated by the ceaseless rotation of the planet. Weather is the steam the atmosphere lets off as it heaves itself again and again into a more comfortable position. Weather keeps happening because the equilibrium of the atmosphere keeps getting messed up.

It doesn’t help that the planet itself is irregular, with crumpled solid chunks of land randomly interrupting the smooth liquid surface of the oceans. Equilibrium doesn’t stand a chance against all these complex interacting variables. There’s so much going on out there—and up there—that the very striving for equilibrium is erratic, chaotic. There are patterns, of course, repetitions and cycles, long stretches of monotony and eerie symmetries, but weather, by its very nature, lacks a fixed overall structure. It’s a stream that perpetually remakes the channel of its flow.