Poster takes third place in College of Science contest

Avalanche Terrain Poster takes third -

Last semester Tim Weigel and I took a class from Gary Raines of the USGS about modeling using GIS. We learned about weights of evidence, fuzzy logic, and artificial neural networks. Tim and I did a project in collaboration with Randall Osterhuber at the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory in which we used weights of evidence to model avalanche terrain in watersheds adjacent to two watersheds that had been heavily studied.

We entered the poster that we made for class in the 2007 College of Science poster competion and took third place. I'm planning on giving a talk at the Nevada GIS conference at South Lake Tahoe next month about this project. Below is a snapshot of the poster. Click on the image for a larger view. I intend to update the image with a better one sometime in the near future.

Lean Winter Ski Conditions -

This year I got my season ski pass for Heavenly Ski Resort down in South Lake Tahoe. Tim Weigel, Shasta Ferranto and myself have teemed up to make up the tele mafia at Heavenly. There really aren't too many other tele skiers on the mountain so we're probably quite noticeable. I think this has been one of the leanest snow years for the Sierra Nevada on record. Certainly it is way below last year. As a result most of the skiing is pretty restricted to groomed runs with snowmaking, and this February! Actually, we did score a few decent tree shots but that was just after New Years.

My goal for the season is to get comfortable skiing moguls on tele skis. The rationale is that moguls will force me to be quick on my feet as well as force me to ski the fall line. Hopefully these two traits will come in handy in the woods and on the steeps. To date I've clocked 11 ski days this season, although some days were on alpine skis and not every day has been a full day.