Author(s):
Carol F. Sawyer - Texas State Department of Geography
David R. Butler - Texas State Department of Geography
Abstract:
Major transportation corridors (U.S. Highway 2 and a major transcontinental rail line) parallel the southern boundary of Glacier National Park, Montana, an area where snow avalanches occur frequently. Avalanches there occasionally block these transportation corridors and isolate the local population. This paper reports on the results of extending an existing data set from the Hungry Horse News, a local weekly newspaper covering such events, that described snow avalanche closures and impacts in the US 2 area. The original study described data collected from newspaper accounts of avalanches from 1946-1985. That data set is updated here by including avalanche occurrences and impacts reported in the newspaper from 1985 to 2004. The original data set is compared to the new information in order to identify possible trends and temporal patterns for the entire 1946-2004 data set.
