@article{329569,
      recid = {329569},
      author = {Jenkins, McKay,},
      title = {The white death : tragedy and heroism in an avalanche zone  /},
      publisher = {Anchor Books,},
      address = {New York :},
      pages = {xxi, 228 p. :},
      year = {2001},
      note = {Originally published: New York : Random House, 2000.},
      abstract = {The day after Christmas 1969, five robust young men set  out to climb the imposing north face of Mount Cleveland in  Glacier National Park. One of the highest vertical walls in  the United States, the face had never before been  scaled--and certainly not in winter, when it was bound with  ice.  But the mountain was to become a memorial for the  boys. After they failed to return to their families, an  aerial search found the boys' tracks dead-ending at the  jagged edge of a colossal avalanche. A massive search  effort turned up little until the spring thaw, when  searchers recovered a camera, dragged a half mile down the  mountain. Its film, miraculously intact, eventually pointed  the way to the boys' bodies, suspended upside down in a  cave of snow and ice.  In The White Death, McKay Jenkins  unfolds a gripping natural history of avalanches, framed by  the story of one of the worst avalanche disasters in  mountaineering history. Ranking among the most destructive  natural phenomena on earth, ava-lanches have shaped human  endeavors from the beginning of recorded history. In 218  b.c., Hannibal lost more than eighteen thousand men, two  thousand horses, and several elephants in deadly slides in  the Italian Alps. During the First World War, combatants  launched explosives onto the slopes above enemy troops,  triggering slides that killed more effectively than  firepower--and, paradoxically, pioneered the technology now  used to tame avalanches on ski slopes all over the world.  Yet our lifesaving skills remain almost as crude and  limited as they were centuries ago: the rescuer's best tool  is still a long, thin pole used for probing the packed snow  for its victims.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/329569},
}