While we love ski touring huts, tents are still an option. So is carbon monoxide. If you’re tenting and need to cook inside your shelter, take care. Deadly CO gas can build up quickly and overcome you even if you think you’re ventilating. The gas is odorless and tasteless, though it may combine with stove fumes that are more obvious. Over the years we’ve heard of numerous CO deaths in the backcountry, everything from snow cave dwellers to folks in camper vans. A recent accident here in Colorado brings the point home. (CO detectors are available, but in our experience they don’t work well in in cold or wet conditions.
Never run a gas stove in a tent without plenty of ventilation — even then be extremely careful. Even moderate amounts of CO can overwhelm you quickly as it accumulates in your blood over time. Feeling sleepy and have a headache? Throw that stove out the tent door before you pass out! Or better, never cook or use a gas heater in an enclosed tent. The gas is odorless and tasteless. With high concentrations you can pass out before any hint of the danger, but sleeping or napping with a stove pumping gas seems to be a common ingredient in CO poisoning incidents.
News Flash: Killian Jornet is an alien. While we don’t always believe everything we hear at Red Bull, this could very well be true. He continues to reap skimo medals and did 340,000 metres of vertical this past ski season (1,115,000 feet). More here.
I love PBR beer. When it’s mostly chicken.
Dog days of summer up here in the Northern Hemi? Our elliptical trainer with Dynafit bindings just doesn’t cut it — no excitement. Perhaps we should try redneck barefoot water skiing?
Sorry to hear that prolific ski alpinist Andy Zimet died in the high mountains, probably from altitude sickness. Tricky when you’re going solo as you don’t have anyone looking out for you if you develop symptoms. More here.
Department of website curation: During summer I spend literally hundreds of hours keeping our 3,000+ blog posts in some semblance of condition, so a certain percentage remain useful or simply fun to troll back through for entertaining reading. Much of that involves managing our external links, which frequently go bad due to what’s known in the trade as “web rot.” Thing is, hyperlinks are what make web pages cool. Letting the links go bad is poor management on both sides of the equation (“linker” me, and the “linkee”). The only way to really curate links is by doing hand checks, so once we fix the truly “broken” ones that a link checker finds, that’s what we do, we click our links and find out if they still go where they should. We could use your help. If you find an external link here on WildSnow that seems weird or downright offensive, let me know and I’ll fix it pronto. FYI, this is not trivial. As of this morning we have 10,884 links in our blog posts and pages, all of which need to be checked one way or another over coming months and years. It’s a process that never ends.
WildSnow.com publisher emeritus and founder Lou (Louis Dawson) has a 50+ years career in climbing, backcountry skiing and ski mountaineering. He was the first person in history to ski down all 54 Colorado 14,000-foot peaks, has authored numerous books about about backcountry skiing, and has skied from the summit of Denali in Alaska, North America’s highest mountain.
