J2Ski Forum Posts and Replies by ise

Some people aren't as good as others with altitude, it's one of those things and it's hard to do too much about it.

Climbers have a couple of sayings that help, "climb high, sleep low" and "don't go up until the symptoms come down". There's all kinds of good advice that will be hard to follow on a ski trip.

It's really bad to ascend rapidly and you're a lot better off walking up but that's not very practical.

Once you've arrived at height you should allow 24 hours for the body's response to altitude to kick in before serious exertion. Mild exercise during this time is a good thing as it stimulates your altitude response.

high carbohydrate diet at height which means more than 70% of your calorie intake should be carbohydrate

avoid tobacco and alcohol and other depressant drugs including, barbiturates, tranquilizers, and sleeping pills. These reduce circulation and make the symptoms worse.

If you really suffer then doctors can prescribe drugs like Diamox or Dexamethasone (a steroid). Diamox is used widely and in circulation without prescription but it can cause a reaction so you really should only take it under medical advice/supervision.

Herbal treatments ie Ginkgo Biloba may help, there's no clear consensus on this though. Studies do seem to suggest it's pretty good but there's not enough real evidence yet to get dosages agreed or to properly describe the mechanism. However, there's not a huge downside to it so the regime would be 80-120mg daily doses starting around 3 days before ascent. There was an interesting test done : http://www.everestnews.com/stories024/peterh.htm

As you say, hydration is linked to AMS either as s precursor or a symptom so it's worth drinking a lot.

As for RECCO's, that's a whole other story :lol: Carrying one is a waste of time, if you have a camera, radio, mobile phone or just random bits of metal you'll pick up on a RECCO detector anyway. But deployment of RECCO detectors is too slow to be effective so if you're caught in a slide your primary chance of survival is recovery by other party members, that means all being equipped with transceivers, probes and shovels and knowing how to use them. If you want to be double sure then buy a RECCO strip, it should only be a couple of dollars but be aware it's not an effective tool.

The incidence of so-called "in-bounds" avalanches in the US is definitely another story, personally I wouldn't ski those areas without carrying full kit but I never would have so nothing's changed for me. In Austria though it would be ill-advised to venture off-piste without proper kit and training.

Wanderer wrote:Not sure where your pictures were lifted from ISE. However, I am quite wary of using any of the "free" picture storage facilities because of concerns about the re-use of pictures. As far as I can see, their typical terms and conditions can give them full copyright on your pictures :evil: . Probably irrelevant for most snaps but very relevant if you are uploading very good, high quality pictures such as some of the beautiful pictures Ise regularly posted here.

I copied the relevant condition from Flickr and I think this is pretty standard material. If I understand it correctly, they can do whatever they want with photos posted onto the site which are available to all viewers and you can do nothing about it and are entitled to nothing :evil: . I imagine they would not bother including such a provision unless they envisaged availing of the facility from time to time to make some money.

and I thought Flickr were one of the better ones :roll: this is one of the reasons I have my own site for hosting images, I give away more rights than I sell but at least those people have the manners to ask first.

Most of the stuff I lose is straight of the blog and not just images, one bunch of losers last year were taking text as well to generate search terms for a google adsense scam.

amanda n wrote:wow ise that is beautiful where is it?

Schwarzsee in the Bernese Alps in canton Fribourg, Switzerland. It's a really, really stunning area and utterly unknown out the local area. Schwarzsee, or Lac Noir, means "black lake" of course which right now is frozen so hard there were cars on it last weekend.

I've a bit of a passion for the area and there's a lot of stuff on my blog http://snowslider.net/tag/schwarzsee

karen72 wrote:is that not what flickr is for? so everyone can look at and use the photos that you post?

No, if you post a photo on flickr and the copyright is still yours, anything else would be unreasonable, if you post a holiday snap and the Sun newspaper use it as part of their campaign against "booze binge Britain" you'd be pretty p*ssed off, at the least you'd want paying and you might find your image somewhere you really don't want it to be. That's not to say that's exactly how some photo sites do work, on those you post your photo and sign away reuse rights for ever.

In this case I know they didn't ask the owner of the Schwarzsee image because the owner would probably have pointed out there's many places called Schwarzsee and their photo' was of the one near Zermatt while the forecast webpage is the Schwarzsee in Senseland, Fribourg.

They lifted photo's off my blog of another local ski station which I noticed and complained about, they gave me some flannel about it being a great photo' and representative of the area as though it was a compliment.

The Inook Odysseys I use are around £100 retail I think, around the same for TSL's and 150-200 plus for MSR's. Inooks and TSL's are fine for most uses though, as long as the heels can be raised and locked down which isn't the case on some more US-based models.

alexfab wrote:My wife is non- skier. Shi love to wolk in the winter forest. At what ski resort is it possible?

This sort of thing ? :

if anyone's thinking of branching out into this field can I offer the advice to make sure your order was correct :lol:

Snow Forecast stole one of my photographs some time back and I see they're still at it. Instead of helping themselves to photographs on my blog they're raiding other places on the internet...

http://www.snow-forecast.com/resorts/Schwarzsee

oops .... wrong Schwarzsee idiots :roll:

Really the big French ski stations are not so good for the active non-skier, their main business is alpine skiers and they're not geared up for other people so they have the odd walking trails but it's on a very small scale. That's not to say all French stations have that problem, I've recently been in Le Grand Bornard and that's very good for active non-skiers and there's a a number of really good other places just not 3V, PDS or pretty much anywhere in the Tarentaise. Austria and Switzerland are different, possibilities for active non-skiers are huge as a rule and in places the tables are turned and downhill skiers are in a minority or there's no downhill at all.