A modern snowmobile is
more powerful than any machine that existed on the planet 200 years
ago. In an hour you can be 20 miles from the nearest road,
high-marking a corniced ridge. But if the engine breaks or you run
out of gas, how quickly the tables can turn. One minute you are
omnipotent, devouring space, living like a god. In the next you are
frightened, shivering like a dog.
The Inuit understood
cold, and how to survive it. For centuries, they lived on Arctic
shores, heating their igloos with seal oil. If there was no seal
oil, they ate their meat raw. In contrast, we modern people have
become dangerously cavalier about this thing we call winter,
perhaps because we live inside a civilization that is one big
bonfire.
Energy consumption in the United States is
approximately 1 million British Thermal Units per person per day,
nearly twice what it is in Europe or Japan. That means we each use
the equivalent of 100 pounds of coal, or eight gallons of gasoline,
or one lightning bolt’s worth of energy per day. With energy
so abundant, our physical survival rarely depends on saving it. But
winter sometimes introduces a new calculus.
In the
Rockies, winter is the big dog, the main event, and this year it
returned with a vengeance. Two kids get out of a car at
Colorado’s Wolf Creek Ski Area, ride the chair lift to the
top, duck a boundary rope, and are never seen again. A Utah couple
photographing wild horses gets stuck in a snowdrift and vanishes.
An ER doc and his nurse fiancée go missing at Taos. Three
snowmobilers disappear north of Vail.
Stranded in the
snow, we face a thermal IQ test, our own personal reality show. At
98.6 degrees F we are sentient; at 86 degrees, we are dead.
“Stay calm, stay put, stay dry, don’t sweat, dig a snow
cave,” the experts advise.
Great advice — but
counterintuitive. Stay put? Panic says to flee. Dig a snow cave? If
cold is the threat, isn’t snow the enemy? The thought of
finding shelter in the belly of the beast — tunneling in like a
bear or a weasel — seems almost un-American.
Short of
energy, the American bias is not to conserve energy but to find
something else to burn: Witness the current natural gas boom in
Wyoming and Colorado. But a blizzard teaches that conserving heat
is the key to survival. A snow shovel is the means of salvation,
not fire-starter.
Maybe we Americans are better at saving
energy than we think. The Utah couple spent nine days and nights in
their Dodge Dakota, practicing radical energy conservation, using
the engine sparingly to stay warm. When they were out of gas and
down to one granola bar, they fashioned a pair of snowshoes out of
the seat cushions (something they recalled seeing on TV), and began
walking. At night they huddled under trees, using carburetor
cleaner to start campfires. Three days later, a snowplow driver
found them, in good shape. Their relatives said it was a miracle.
But they were saved by their heat sense.
As for the other
lost adventurers, an exhaustive search failed to find the two
missing snowboarders at Wolf Creek Ski Area, and they are presumed
dead. The three missing snowmobilers north of Vail had a saw and a
shovel. After three days, a Black Hawk helicopter rescued two of
them. They were found near tree line, incoherent with cold. Their
friend had died earlier of hypothermia.
The Taos ER doc
and his bride-to-be were lost in a whiteout, but they dug a snow
cave, lining it with pine branches. For three nights they shivered,
which is how life keeps death at bay. When the storm finally broke,
a Black Hawk rescued them.
Emerging energy realities
suggest that we Americans will need to save energy with a vengeance
in the decades ahead. So perhaps it’s good for us to spend
time outside in the cold. If you go, be prepared. The fundamentals
of winter survival have not changed in a thousand years, but
technology has. Lost in a blizzard, stranded near treeline without
a shovel, you might have one final lifeline: Open the cell phone
and hope you have service. If you do, you can SOS the sheriff, text
911.
Thumbs stiff, night falling, what might you type?
“The gods are stranded. The apes are freezing. Send
new chariots.”
Randy Udall is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He lives in Carbondale, Colorado,
where for 13 years he directed the Community Office for Resource
Efficiency.
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