Admin":36efikl4 said:
joegm":36efikl4 said:
yeah, like we get enough snow to actually have tree wells for any sustained period of time... :wink:
Base depths have hovered +/- 100 inches for much of the season at the Mansfield stake, so yeah, there's enough snow. The difference is the forest, as most tree skiing in the east is done amongst deciduous trees, not conifers, so there's no apron to restrict snowfall around the base of the tree.
As Marc and others have noted, there’s plenty of snow in some areas around here to make it happen. Even in an average year there’s going to be over six feet of snowpack on Mansfield’s upper elevations (where the conifer skiing is generally found at Stowe), which is enough to swallow up somebody. Freeze/thaw cycles may help to minimize the issue somewhat, but remember we’re not talking about snow here, but a lack of it. A freeze/thaw might stabilize some of the longer branches of the tree in the surrounding snowpack, but in terms of the dangerous air pocket, it doesn’t matter if that goes through freeze/thaw cycles because there’s nothing there but air. As soon as more snow falls, any hints that there was a tree well in the area are going to be covered up, and you now have more potential snow to fall down on top of you when you’re in the hole. Most of the time it’s just nuisance stuff like River said, but sometimes it is more substantial. I can personally recall at least two instances of more dangerous tree well encounters here in Vermont. One was the case of my friend Scott back in the 90s. We were skiing in the open conifers up above Stowe’s Nosedive Glades, when he fell into a tree well and couldn’t get out on his own. I didn’t witness that one first hand because I was too far from him. The other was on March 6th, 2001 at Sugarbush in the Sunrise Snowfield, where my friend James went down into a tree well. That tree well was actually more substantial than Scott’s, but James was a bit luckier and would have been able to extract himself from it without assistance. I talk about those episodes a bit in
an entry I made to a SkiVT-L thread.
I caught the Sugarbush encounter on video, so you can see an example of what going down in a tree well is actually like at the end of the movie below. Right click to download:
Sunrise Snowfield Video
There’s also
a thread on SkiVT-L from February 2004, where tree wells are discussed, and you can read about some encounters that others have had (not necessarily Eastern U.S.). Just use the “
Next in Topic” link to follow the thread.
I never had or heard of any tree well encounters in my five years of skiing at Lost Trail Powder Mountain in Montana. I did do an extensive amount of tree skiing there, and they generally do get enough snow for it to be an issue. It could be just luck that nobody I knew ever encountered one, but it may also have something to do with the structure of the trees there. Lost Trail tends to have a lot of pines as far as I can tell, with some that don’t even have branches in the bottom 10 to 20 feet of the trunk, and in those that do have branches in the heights where people are skiing, such as the smaller trees, the pine vegetation is very sparse compared to spruces, firs, and other more dense evergreens. So, there may not be much of an air pocket created by these trees. Actually, another name I’ve heard used for tree wells is “spruce traps” so there has certainly been some association established spruces and tree wells at some point.
J.Spin
