SierraDescents.com

September Snow?

By any standard, we’ve just seen a very unusual weather event: a ‘winter’ storm in SoCal—in the month of September.

NWS was forecasting accumulations of 18 inches in the Southern Sierra, with higher totals possible. It may be an exaggeration to say we saw as much rain overnight here in L.A. as all of last season, but it sure felt like it.

Is this a harbinger of a big Sierra winter? It’s not too late to pick up a Mt. Baldy season pass…

Posted in Weather | 0 Comments

The Russell Project

Just finished up a trip report of my hike up Mount Russell’s East Ridge, descending via Russell’s South Face and the Mountaineer’s Route.

In terms of difficulty, I’d have to rate this significantly higher than the Mountaineer’s Route/Whitney North Face, but if you have a reasonable tolerance for big exposure and well-developed Class 3 climbing skills, this climb is highly recommended.

Posted in Climbing | 0 Comments

Global Dimming

PBS’ Nova is running a new episode on a phenomenon they’ve dubbed, “Global Dimming”—the reduction of the sun’s intensity due to atmospheric pollution. On its surface this might seem like a perfectly obvious consequence of pollution, but, as the documentary demonstrates, scientists are making astonishing discoveries about its true scope.

Via a clever experiment in the Maldives, researchers were able to measure the actual reduction caused by human pollution. They expected to find something on the order of a half of one percent. Instead, they discovered man-made pollution caused as much as a ten percent reduction in the intensity of the sun’s rays reaching the ground.

How, you ask? First, plainly, simply putting particulates in the air blocks sunlight. But—and here’s the tricky part—pollution particulates tend to be much smaller than ordinary dust in our atmosphere. Consequently, they create clouds (as water vapor condenses around the particulates) that are vastly more reflective than ordinary clouds. These pollution-enhanced clouds have a profoundly greater cooling effect on the Earth below.

(more…)

Posted in Weather | 0 Comments