Slope Comfort Zone??

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oldranger
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Re: Slope Comfort Zone??

Post by oldranger »

Shawn,

Maybe this should be moved to a different thread. But anyhow sometime in the mid 90's I got a call from someone interested in finding the missing p-40. At any rate given the info that he had and with the description in Jordan's account,
With the canopy open and the airspeed hovering around 100 miles per hour he rolled the ship over on the left wing
it seems if the plane was basically heading north that it was likely to veer toward the west. This makes likely crash sites on the e. side ofof the north end of Barton ridge and if the plane cleared the ridge the e. facing slope of the lower end of Ferguson Creek or Box Canyons or even the s. slope of Sentinel ridge. Each of these areas get virtually no crosscountry travel and to my knowledge there would be little feed to attract cattle and cowboys as this area still had cattle grazing for some years after the area became a National Park. The w. end of Sugarloaf Valley, Williams and Commanche meadows, was grazed thru 1985. At 100 mph and if the altitude was known a reasonable radius of travel could be determined. If the wreckage was on Sphinx crest or on the slopes of Palmer Mt. there is a high probability it would not be discovered since x-country travel would typically take the path of least resistance there are many areas that would not see any travel. Finally where ever the wreckage is you would litterally have to walk into the crash site or be incredibly lucky to spot the wreckage from your route if it was off to the side. There is still wreckage visible above Roaring River ranger Station that is visible from the Cloud Canyon trail, if you know exactly when and where to look but few travelers ever spot it. Well enough! sorry George, but this is the one unfinished goal I had during my tenure at RR.

Mike
Mike

Who can't do everything he used to and what he can do takes a hell of a lot longer!
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gdurkee
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Re: Slope Comfort Zone??

Post by gdurkee »

Mike & Shawn: No problem. The greater theme here is how to find stuff like large airplanes. Any discussion on that seems relevant, even though off my original subject heading.

Brian: I think the overall premise is Can terrain mapping & analysis be used to predict density of use over time? Can that then be used to predict Probability of Area (POA) to design search segments to narrow what is otherwise a huge search area? I think so, though there's some major tweaking involved. Your comments and Mike's make me think a model could differentiate for slope as the primary factor above, say, 8,500 feet and vegetation below that. Though what Mike said and my experience still would suggest a lot of people traveling everywhere, even through forest.

Also, Mike: I don't know those areas well, but anything open has probably been well covered from the air -- both through searches over the years; fire recons; and Ed Nelson making some specific searches for the T-33 over a pretty wide area. In addition, Roland Knapp's frog crews visited every lake in the Sierra to map for frogs. They followed some pretty gnarly terrain and little visited areas. I think the forested (and brushy) areas are a good place to look (if the POA can be refined), but think open areas are lower probability.

Geologic maps are another feature I hadn't really considered. At first thought, there may not be enough relevant information. However, I do think that the park's map layer of glaciers, moraines and ice fields might be useful. The area where the T-33's canopy was found has a lot of permanent ice fields nearby. The remains of the crewmen only just being exposed from the Mendel Glacier is worth considering. Also interesting is how small the pieces are from that aircraft. There is nothing larger than about 10 feet long that I saw (except the engine). Equally interesting is that as remote as that was, it was found within 3 years of crashing in 1945 where there were few hikers/climbers in that area.

More fun stuff to consider!

Anyone have experience with remote sensing capabilities?

g.
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rlown
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Re: Slope Comfort Zone??

Post by rlown »

Is there a map of known aircraft crash sites that you're indexing against? It would be interesting to see, only because one can descern from the predicted flight path of the plane, how maybe it ended up there, based on weather, pilot control, etc. In general, unless a plane glided in to an almost level river area under a pilot's control, there would be little left to see from the air, unless it struck tinder, and someone saw smoke. After a few months, or years, it would be hard to find.

I know, not so much about slope for search, but a pilot doesn't really care about slope until his engine dies over the Sierra and he cant see the darned terrain.
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Re: Slope Comfort Zone??

Post by Shawn »

Mike -

Good info. I've been up there a few times (Sphinx and Palmer) since speaking to Jordan. While I certainly wasn't in the area to look for aircraft, when I passed thru the areas I sure recalled my talks with him and looked up (or down) at the more difficult terrain with a totally different view of things.

George -

I would think that map, marked up as you say during the spring training, would be a prized possession with all of that experince on hand noting the "path less traveled" all at one time.
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Re: Slope Comfort Zone??

Post by giantbrookie »

George, from my experience the slope-degree of difficulty relationship is somewhat dependent on the smaller order topographic details that are below the resolution of standard DEMS (although certainly within the realm of Lidar). What goes as class 3 plus is less steep than most imagine and one must be careful over what length of slope one averages. If you measure a lot of slope angles, say averaged over 100 feet or so, you find that the transition from a broken talus slope to a full blown cliff is actually at about 40 degrees even if the average human mind sees "cliff" at about 60 degrees. This actually has to do with the angle of repose of rock (based on the "friction angle" for sliding on fractures--this tends to be in the 35-40 degree range for "good" rock). For example the legendary Willis Wall on Mt. Rainier, which is mixed technical snow, ice, and rock, with a top end rock pitch of about 5.7 has an average angle of about 45 degrees. Some slopes at about 40 degrees have nicely spaced big benches and come out as class 2. The highest angle class 2 (by my reckoning) slopes I've seen are the exit stage right chutes off of the NE couloir of Abbot (rated 3rd class, but seemingly just steep 2--grade inflation in my estimation--I'd rate only the top knife edge moves on this route class 3) and the usual "staircase gully" ascent route of Tower Peak (long time historical rating of 3rd class but I just didn't see it--It was indeed a staircase with very wide benches). These have a very steep average angle but really big benches, so that a human's risk of fall and likely fall distance is minimal (hence the my verdict of steep class 2). Neither of these reaches really required hand-over-hand climbing owing to the very generous benches. Although amazingly steep, for class 2, I doubt if the average slope angle for these reaches is much above 40 degrees, though (if indeed it is). Where one transitions from class 3 to 4 plus is much trickier. Certainly if one is up at 60 degrees average over a hundred plus feet I think it will generally be safe to say that one is above 3rd class, but, as noted below one can get well above 3rd class at much lower slope angles down below 40 degrees. It just takes one small headwall or step beyond one's reach (with some air) to take an otherwise class 3 and raise it a notch or two. Also, on exposed featureless granite slabs, the rating can go to class 5 (think Starr King) at average slope angles that may be below 40 degrees. Bottom line is that a slope map can give a rough impression of climbing difficulty, but there will be lots of 35-40 degree terrain that will play much tougher than its average slope angle.
Since my fishing (etc.) website is still down, you can be distracted by geology stuff at: http://www.fresnostate.edu/csm/ees/facu ... ayshi.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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paul
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Re: Slope Comfort Zone??

Post by paul »

I think one other factor in trying to guess where people don't go is to consider destinations. People most often go to peaks, passes, lakes and meadows. Anywhere on the way to any of those is likely to have been traveled. Corridors have been mentioned already: streams and ridges tend to be the natural corridors where there are no trails. So there is considerable area that is not on the way to anywhere, and is not a destination on its own, that has a high likelihood of having never been trod upon. And the areas that meet those criteria and have thick brush are even more likely to be untrodden, and also have good potential for hiding wreckage.
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gdurkee
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Re: Slope Comfort Zone??

Post by gdurkee »

As the discussion continues here, I would really love to do a multi-year tracklog dump to see exactly where some people do go. Russ' suggestions elsewhere on using Google Earth are one possibility. I'm still pretty convinced that above, say, 8,500 most all terrain is covered over 10 to 20 years. Good arguments here that in forested/brushy country that may not be true, though looking at a map, there's darned few forested areas that I don't think get at least some occasional traffic through it. If we could just get the dope growers in the brushy Mineral King area to report any wrecks they've discovered... . They have undoubtedly covered every inch of that terrain.

I just started an email exchange with some UAV nerdlings with DARPA. I'm hopeful one can show up at our GIS/SAR workshop. If not, I might run some of these ideas by them and see what possibilities exist for remote sensing of terrain and strategies they might suggest for finding stuff.

Incidentally, there is a "crash map" for the US and California. The accuracy isn't great. I tried to look at it with a view to type of aircraft, where they go down (by elevation) and any clusters that jump out, but it would take a better statistical brain than mine to make sense of it. Interesting though. Basically anything with an elevation of greater than 1 foot is a hazard. It's like there's this bathtub ring of wrecks around the Central Valley.

thanks for the continued thoughts.

g.
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