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Posted by David Sherman on Monday, August 17, 2009 at 16:24:57 :
In Reply to: Knock-Down Ambulance:THE HARD WAY posted by Don in Missouri on Monday, August 17, 2009 at 16:09:01 :
If the snow there is anything like the snow on my place sometimes, I think snow alone could have done that. The smashing is too "smooth" to have resulted from it rolling down a cliff or from rocks falling on it. I've seen the damage 10 feet of heavy snow can do. I wouldn't be surprised that if that ambulance had sat there for 40 years, and there might have been 20 feet of snow at some point during that time. I've had the hood and cab of my D200 get turned inside out, and the hard-top cabs on an M37, M35, and M135 get bent and cracked, plus part of the utility body on the Bell Telephone truck. You get 10 feet of snow, and then it rains on it for a few days, and it's easy to have 100 lbs/sq ft of weight.
Based on the kind of plants growing around that ambulance, it's a place that gets seriously deep snow. The big plants in the foreground are california cornlilly, aka false hellebore, which generally only grows vigorously on avalanche slopes or other places with deep snow, and the willows in the background also suggest a wet area that gets enough avalanches that the conifers never survive long enough to crowd them out. The small firs in the background haven't gotten tall enough yet to stick out of the snow and get broken by avalanches. The talus slope in the far background suggests that you're in the bottom of a cliff-rimmed basin. Maybe an avalanche landed on top of it at some point, since it's in the bottom of the basin, and added another couple hundred psf to the regular snow load. Even if the truck was well-buried in the snow when the avalanche came down, the weight could have smashed it as the snow pack settled and got rained on in the spring.
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