Shades Of White Cold Exterior Belies Rich Personality

Where a moose had bedded in the day-old snowshoe trail, the snow was frozen ice-hard. The body heat and weight of the animal had both melted and compacted the surface, and when the animal left, the snow transformed itself.

Elsewhere on the trail, the snow was more like cardboard - stiff but breakable. A day before it had been soft and sugary, but the snowshoes had compressed it, and in the overnight cold the snow had consolidated into something new.

Along the sides of the trail, though, it was the same old snow of the week before. On top, it was soft, but not too soft. A friend’s 40-pound son could float over it on snowshoes, but it wouldn’t support an adult on the webs.

Deep down, in particular, it was weak.

On 35- to 40-degree slopes above the snowshoe track, it was possible to slough off big chunks of snow by standing on it in the snowshoes. Eighteen inches to 2 feet thick, the snow broke to ground level and tumbled downhill in blocks that disintegrated as they went. They hit the trail and smashed into smaller pieces that when walked on with the snowshoes turned to sugar.

Snowshoeing through this dense snow was like wading across a sugar bowl, but after another night of cold, this snow too would, almost unbelieveably, recompose itself into a hard, integrated surface. It was a reminder of what magical stuff snow is, though few people pay its intricacies much attention. There are some.

Avalanche experts like Doug Fesler and others can go on for hours about temperature-gradient snow, consolidated snow, depth hoar, surface hoar and the particulars of particles: large, small, loose, bonded, hard, smooth, heavy, feathery, etc., etc., etc.

Top-flight skiers, and most notable ski waxers like Nick Parker, can dwell on the manifold shapes of individual granules of snow and of their humidity. Some snow, you see, is dry, and some snow is wet, and most snow falls in the wide band of variation between those two.

There are as many subtleties to snow as there are to wine.

Snow can be wet, fine and smooth; dry, coarse and rough; or anything in-between. Really good ski racers, as opposed to the vast majority of us who just sort of plod around, worry about these things because the shape of snow granules and their humidity affect the way a ski slides.

The story is much the same with the avalanche experts and with some of Alaska’s top dog mushers. Iditarod champions like Rick Swenson, Susan Butcher, Jeff King and Martin Buser can tell with a quick feel the abrasiveness of snow. Some snow is soft, and some if it is like sandpaper.

A dog’s feet, which sweat like your armpits, are most comfortable running unencumbered in soft snow. But, when the snow becomes abrasive, they must be put in booties to keep them from being cut or, sometimes, even to keep the pads on the bottom of the foot from wearing off.

Some cold, rough, large-granule snow can, you see, be as abrasive as gravel. People who are really attuned to this sort of thing can feel the difference in the drag such snow causes on the runners of a dogsled or on their skis, but how many of us are that well attuned?

How many of us tend to think of snow as just snow? How many of us have ever gotten down on our hands and knees to look closely at this stuff we ski across?

Or stuck a thermometer in it to discover the significant differences that can often be found between air temperature and snow temperature on a winter day? Or picked up an individual granule and looked at it under a magnifying glass to see if it was large or small, smooth or rough?

Or thought about the physics of all this, because as a practical matter that’s what we’re really talking about here. Whether the discussion focuses on skiing, dog mushing or avalanches, it’s all about friction, cohesion, gravity, and, in some cases, momentum. And it is all about a substance that behaves as a solid, a liquid and probably most often a plastic.

Yes, a plastic: something “capable of continuous and permanent change of shape in any direction without breaking apart,” according to Webster’s.

Snow does that all the time.

During the winter of deep snow in Washington’s Methow Valley two years ago, snow inched down off some metal roofs and curled back under the eaves to form huge fiddle heads as 10 or 15 feet of overhang remained too cohesive to break and fall to the ground.

These tongues of snow were impressive to see, and even more impressive to contemplate.

How could it be?

It’s the magic of snow.

Spokesman-Review outdoors editor Rich Landers contributed to this story.