Re: Moving in the snow
Kraig, hope you don't mind me making some additions to your post....
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: kraigWY</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Done a lot of "snow movement" in my 19 years in the Alaska Army National Guard, skis and snowshoes.
Snowshoes are the worse. Skis its hard to tell if you're coming or going. We've even tried wearing snow shows backwards to confuse the direction of our movement. Any good tracker can figure that out.
<span style="color: #FF0000">Sometimes shoes are your only way of moving, though. Also, I recommend no poles when skiing, as they will give away your direction of travel. Try to move cross slope as well as any upward or downward travel also gives away direction.</span>
You can try to brush in the snow and cover your tracks, but that doesn't work well. You don't get the them filled in all the way and you get shadows.
Besides brushed snow looks just like it is, brushed snow.
You move in the trees as best you can, that protects you from the air, but not the ground.
<span style="color: #FF0000">Agreed, I just forewarn that the snow is softer in the trees.</span>
Try to stick to ground game trails if you can. If moving in a (frozen) river, stay to the shady side (normaly this will be the south side).
<span style="color: #FF0000">+ 1 on the trails and on rivers. Rivers can espcially enhance speed. River sides can be very susceptable to post-holing if reeds and/or swamp areas are present, though. The exposed areas crust on top, but can melt from the bottom up leaving a very thin crust that will only support the lightest of creatures.</span>
The best bet is to move during high winds. Western Alaska is like Wyoming. A calm day is a 20-25 MPH breeze. This means your tracks will be covered in about as fast as you can make them. Stay on the down wind side of brush and trees, your track will fill in faster (much like the snow piles you see on the down wind side of snow fences you see along a high way).
<span style="color: #FF0000"> +1 wind is almost always your friend. No smoking, though
and be aware that your smell will carry in 10 mph and under breezes. </span>
The advantage of snow is you can travel a lot faster with less effert then you can on foot.
The best method of covering your tracks in the mountains are avalanches . The Guard sent me to an Avalanche School. It was a search and rescue type school but we went a bit further. If you create an Avalanche behind you it will cover all signs of you being there.
<span style="color: #CC0000">I caution not to try this at home! LOL. Seriously, you really need to go to Avalanche School and/or have some formal training in evaluating snow packs, otherwise you can dispose of yourself and your team rather quickly...and without a trace! I have also found causing slides can be time consuming and only erases small sections of trail as the slide is usually contained by natural features. Finally, if it's me and I see a series of slides, I'm going to become suspicious.
Best use of slides for me....I usually set a cold camp near a slide zone and use that to erase evidence in the morning. If it is snowing this can make for an eventful and noisy night!</span>
Watch your cammo. Sometimes you want full over whites, sometimes you dont. Sometimes you dont want any overwhites.
<span style="color: #CC0000">+10000. Camo can make an even bigger difference in snow conditions. To make a training point once during an exercise, I set-up in a participant's path in heavy conditions. He even kicked me, but would only believe what his eyes were telling him, which was this is a lump of snow and brush. He passed on by and would only believe it afterwards when I took him back to the location where it occurred.</span>
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