A Response to “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, a digital narrative by John Branch, was a lengthy read, but had a significant impact on me. At first, it seemed as if I were about to embark on a narrative of over-used similes and vivid description that borders on repetitive. I was also under the impression that the story was fiction. Thankfully, I was wrong on both counts. After shaking off a little of the powder that seemed to have figuratively landed on my shoulder, I continued reading about these skiers and all the events that led up to their journey to Tunnel Creek. It wasn’t until the first video that I realized that the events I was reading about were real.

One thing I must mention from a personal viewpoint before I get into the story (and this has nothing to do with the story itself so much as it has to do with the writer’s choice of narration) is that I don’t like the method of launching into the middle of the action and then retrograding to the ‘before it all happened’ segment. In my perspective, it does something completely opposite to an avalanche and brings everything in the narration to an abrupt stop. It’s supposed to make the reader want to get to the point where it all happened, but for me it makes me withdraw from the story and disconnect. However, while I don’t agree with the writing choice, I do think that John Branch has come up with an engaging story, or more accurately, a living nightmare.

The blending of text and audio, visual and interactive, was an excellent choice to bring the reader into the story. Combined with the histories of each person and a small piece of their personalities, the relation between reader and character was strong. The further I read, the more invested I was in their story. I began to wonder if this was a story of sixteen survivors or if those sixteen did not emerge all together. I was so invested in the people (no longer characters, but people) at this point that I noticed the way the people spoke in their interviews. They used the past tense because, naturally, it had happened already, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that they might be referring to someone in the past tense to indicate that they were no longer living. I actually started to fear for these people whom I’ve never met!

Then, the avalanche hit. The graphic that gave the path and time it took for the avalanche to occur was shocking. When I think of snow, I think of light and fluffy flakes that drift down to the ground in a lazy fashion. I can barely conceive of millions of tons of snow moving at highway speeds down a mountain, but the graphic gave me an idea of what it was like. That much snow moving that fast is a natural disaster that ranks right up with, if not exceeding, the destructive power of an EF-5 tornado.

I think the part that struck me most was the moment they found Jim Jack. My seemingly innocent concept of lightly falling snow had just been erased in a blur of visuals that portray an avalanche sliding down a mountain. Even though they never show it, I could see Jim Jack in my mind’s eye exactly as he was described, pummeled by the snow and curled into a ball at the wrong angle.

Those visuals from previously seemed to set me up to see what happened without physically seeing anything at all. Combined with all the sensory details included in this narrative, I believe that the story was conveyed very effectively. It was a warning and a memorial at the same time. Even experts are no rival when the power of nature decides to sweep down on them. I enjoy watching storms, especially strong storms that move through the midwest. I’m not going to forget this story.