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Crag & Route Beta

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Topic Date User

Yosemite closures 15-Jun-2012 At 8:28:47 PM wombly

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>On 15/06/2012 One Day Hero wrote:
>You have too much faith in people Miguel. Do you really believe that site 15 is too >dangerous to allow camping, but site 18 is perfectly safe? If these clowns are suggesting >that the risk of being squished goes from 'unacceptable' to 'safe' in the space of 10m, >they're stupid or lying or both.

ODH - too clever by half. Been taking lessons from denialists recently?

If you read through the report it pretty clearly outlines why they made the decision. It all comes back to probability. From both the past evidence (i.e. the distribution of boulders produced by rockfall - including those in camp 4) and the modelling there was a pretty quick drop off in the amount of boulders that make it off the talus slope that runs along the norther side of camp 4 - about 40% were in the first 10 metres of the edge. Thus, it's much less likely to get a house sized mutha running right out on the road, compared to one ending up on the picnic shelter.

From there it's just a matter of trying to define a recurrence interval that you're happy with. Is one squashed tent every 1000 years OK? one every 100 years? The line used by the parks service was decided on a 1 in 500 year event. More conservative than most flood based zoning systems, but given the rapidity of the hazard and high likelyhood of someone getting strawberry jammed in their sleep is probably too far off the scale for somewhere that life has value.