It's Dumping, Oh Yeh

Finally, the Wasatch front is getting a good dumping. Edge your skis, wax the bottoms and enjoy some powder runs. Expected up to 3 feet of snow!

Live cam Canyons







Wednesday before this dump









Bentgear.com
"Geared for Adventure"

Soldier Hollow Wasatch Citizen Series Race

The annual Nordic Wasatch Citizen Series Race is a great way to get the Nordic season underway, see old friends or start a new sport. The morning races are followed by a great lunch for all participants, than a raffle where it seems everyone wins. Race lengths for all ages and abilities. 10 a.m start.

Soildier Hollow is nestled above Midway and in the shadow of the Wasatch mountains and home to the Cross Country 2002 Winter Olymic games.

Bentgear.com
"Geared for Adventure"

HIGH TRAIN TO TIBET

I recently came across this article about the new train system build by China going into Tibet at an altuide of 17,000ft. Is this a good thing for the people of Tibet? or will it bring economic growth for the Tibet people. If you have a chance to go would you go?

John Flinn, Chronicle Staff Writer


Strange things are starting to happen as the Lhasa Express chuffs across the rooftop of the world. Outside the double-glazed, UV-blocking windows, I can see black-robed Tibetan nomads tending their enormous, shaggy yaks -- a scene little changed from Marco Polo's day.

But that seems perfectly normal compared to what's happening inside the train. As the altimeter approaches 17,000 feet, a package of potato chips balloons outward until it ruptures a seam. Sunscreen and hand sanitizer erupt unbidden from bottles. In soft sleeper class, Chinese businessmen sprawl listlessly on their bunks, sucking oxygen from plastic hoses. The bathrooms smell of vomit.

Maybe trains were not meant to go this high.

It is, by any reckoning, one of the great engineering feats of our age. Over the last five years, hundreds of thousands of workers laid 700 miles of track over the Kunlun Mountains and across the Tibetan plateau, through some of the highest, coldest and most forbidding real estate on the planet. It cost $4.2 billion.

If anyone was up to the task, it was the Chinese. After all, as a Beijing businessman reminded me, it was Chinese laborers who built the most difficult parts of America's transcontinental railroad.

To be able to swing their pickaxes at altitudes of 13,000 feet and higher, railroad workers wore oxygen masks and were required to spend two hours each day inside one of the 18 oxygen tents set up along the rail line. Even so, Zhang Xiqing, the railway's chief operations director, told the Hong Kong Standard newspaper that 14,500 of them ended up in the hospital, many with a potentially fatal swelling of the brain and lungs caused by extreme altitude.
Environments decry the damage to such a fragile landscape, and others fear its effect on Tibetans and their culture, which have been reeling under 56 years of often-brutal Chinese rule. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, actor Richard Gere, chairman of the International Campaign for Tibet, called it "the most serious threat by the Chinese yet to the survival of Tibet's unique religious, cultural and linguistic identity."

In all, the rail journey from Beijing to Lhasa covers 2,525 miles and takes just under 48 hours. Environmental and cultural issues aside, how does it rate as a travel experience.

The highest point on the rail line, the Tangu La pass, is usually listed as 16,640-feet. But the map in my Lonely Planet guide places it at 16,994.75 feet, which means passengers -- especially those in the upper bunks -- poke their heads above 17,000 feet. Another map cites an even higher elevation for the pass: 17,126 feet.

One thing is certain: The human body was never designed to rocket up to an elevation this rarefied this quickly. The Sky Train had been operating only a month when it suffered its first passenger fatality, a 76-year-old Hong Kong who suffered a heart attack brought on by the altitude. He had been warned by a doctor not to board the train.

The atmosphere here holds between 40 and 50 percent less oxygen than at sea level. Extra oxygen is pumped into the unpressurized rail cars as they roll across the Tibetan plateau, but it's not clear that it does much good. All around me in the dining car, passengers were suffering the hangover-like symptoms of altitude sickness: throbbing headaches and severe nausea. One by one they staggered off to the bathroom.

Four hundred miles of the route lie atop a particularly unstable form of permafrost that thaws during the day and freezes at night, causing the tundra above it to rise and fall by inches. To try to prevent tracks from buckling and cracking, Chinese engineers elevated more than 100 miles of it and installed the giant golf tees along other stretches. These are cooling pipes that use solar energy to turn liquid ammonia into gas, chilling the ground and preventing the permafrost from melting.

But the climate is warming more rapidly than forecast when the system was designed, and already some sections of track and concrete pillars have cracked, railway ministry spokesman Wang Yongping told the Beijing News recently.

It was also startlingly large. The Chinese, it turns out, have ambitious rail plans for Tibet. Over the next decade they plan to build lines linking Lhasa with Shigatse and Nyingchi, and another one connecting Shigatse and Yadong on the China-Indian border. There is even talk of running a line to Zangmou on the Nepal border.

The train departs Beijing every night at 9:30 p.m. and arrives in Lhasa just under 48 hours later. Tickets are in high demand, and the Chinese don't go out of their way to make it easy for foreigners to book. (The return trip is a little easier to book because many visitors fly home. It departs Lhasa daily at 8 a.m.)

Bentgear.com
"Geared for Adventure"