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Paper short abstract:

This presentation shows how Swiss and US scientists remade Swiss avalanche science in the Rocky Mountains in the mid-twentieth century. They adapted it to local nature and also to the aesthetics of wilderness and the economics of skiing, changing in turn the meanings of snow in North America.

Paper long abstract:

In the 1930s, investors, municipalities, and states in the Western United States began to develop ski resorts. They hired Swiss experts, such as engineer and alpinist André Roch, to give advice on managing snow and its risk: avalanches. On his frequent visits in the 1930s and 1940s, Roch drew on decades of avalanche research in Switzerland. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Swiss foresters had studied snow, terrain, and vegetation—relying heavily on local knowledge—to map and prevent avalanches. However, this knowledge was in a precarious state. Not only was Roch in the US faced with the question of whether this knowledge was transferable to local conditions, at home, he was part of a dispute over the best approach to studying avalanches. Engineers, like Roch, and physicists made the case for turning the research focus to the material properties of snow and ice—with success. In 1942, the Swiss state funded the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research, dedicated to this line of research, in Davos. It quickly became the center for the science of snow, and US researchers paid frequent visits. Drawing on Roch’s personal papers and scientific and administrative archives in Colorado and Oregon, this presentation shows how Roch and his US interlocutors remade avalanche science in the Rocky Mountains. It argues that they did not only need to adapt the science to local nature but also to the aesthetics of snowy mountain wilderness and the economics of skiing in the US, changing in turn the meanings of snow in North America.