Losing any sense of a horizon, those caught in a whiteout can become overwhelmed by vertigo, a state in which the connection between the eye and the inner ear becomes so confused that one's very sense of footing becomes unreliable. In a whiteout, a skier may be so caught in the thrall of a storm that he is unable to see the gloved hand in front of his face, let alone the slope passing beneath his feet. As ephemeral as snow is in the air, it becomes even more mysterious once on the ground, and has long been a source of rhetorical rumination for poets and scientists alike. A swirl of ethereal, airborne snow flowing over a high mountain ridge mirrors in both its aspect and physics a plume of sand blowing over a dune. It obscures the familiar yet reveals new shapes, it comes in the season of darkness yet makes both day and night more brilliant with reflected light, it arrives with the killing frost and the disappearance of many plants and animals yet preserves seedlings and tiny creatures under its warming blanket, it is pure and beautiful yet volatile and transitory, it confines the body yet releases the imagination.
Snow seems averse to being studied.
When it is poked or disturbed or manhandled in any way, it changes quicker than a chameleon, from one kind of snow to another, leaving the observer baffled. The weight of any pile of snow is thus the product of its depth multiplied by its water density. Since the average ten-inch snowpack can weigh as much as one hundred tons per acre, it is easy to see why shoveling snow has become such a regular cause of suburban heart attacks. External factors, such as a strong wind, can also have an effect on the density and weight of a snowpack. A strong wind can jam crystals together and so fill empty spaces with ambient moisture that the pack reaches a density five to ten times that of the original snowfall.