An old but bizarre accident

[polar]

Ah, I see - that's what I get for not actually reading the article Still...a 70-pound pack for an overnight trip takes some doing!

I don't know any detail other than what I read in the ANAM report, but keep in mind this happened on Feb 7, 2001. So assume these guys were prepared for the condition that time of the year, they were probably carrying extra layers, food and water, possibly overnight bivy/camping gear. Back in 2001, gear manufacturers were not so concerned about keeping the weight down, so I can easily see them packing a 70 lbs pack for that type of condition.

[Jay521]

Has anybody had the experience where they could hear the wind gust coming?

I have also experienced exactly that - on Shavano a few years back. Sounded like a freight train or a jet. Took my sister totally off her feet and it was everything I could do to not get blown over. Although we were only a few hundred feet from the summit, we decided enough was enough and headed down.

[Tortoise1]

Supposedly Beck Weathers got "blown off the mountain" on Everest in 1996 although it's not clear exactly how far he went or how much of it was just downhill slide. For some reason that sequence - huddled near death, standing up and declaring "I think I've got this figured out" (how to get back to camp), and then immediately getting completely blown away - just completely cracked me up when I read the book, not sure why. Maybe because it was a Texan.

[snowypeaks]

Longs Peak had a record wind gust of 201 mph in 1981, but the station only lasted a short time.


http://blogs.denverpost.com/weather/201 ... lorado/98/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Mark A Steiner]

Who will forget what an estimated 165 mph wind did to the Meyer-Womble dome on Mount Evans, early 2012.

[Alpine]

There is a little weather station on top of Meadow Mountain near Allenspark. When we were up in mid-December we found the solar panel basically laying on the ground - the angle irons (may have been aluminum actually?) that had held up the panels, were ripped right in two. I got some pics – maybe I will upload those this evening from home. Pretty crazy to see, and had to be wind as this was right on top of the peak. Either that or Bigfoot was up there. Or maybe Chuck Norris.

Anyway I was glad I wasn’t there when that gust came along. My friend is an engineer and said maybe it had to do with cyclical loading – basically just being slammed around multiple times until failure as opposed to one big gust.

[TallGrass]

My friend is an engineer and said maybe it had to do with cyclical loading – basically just ...

... metal fatigue.

When Longs Peak had a "hotel" in the Boulder Field in the '20s or '30s (see Hull Cook journals) they wrote about having to place logs and boulders on the roof to keep it on or they'd return in the spring to the roof being over there and the two-story house being full of snow to shovel out.