Welcome to Louis (Lou) Dawson's backcountry skiing information & opinion website. Lou's passion for the past 50 years has been alpinism, climbing, mountaineering and skiing -- along with all manner of outdoor recreation. He has authored numerous books and articles about
ski touring and is well known as the first person to ski down all 54 of Colorado's 14,000-foot peaks, otherwise known as the
Fourteeners! Books and free ski touring news and information here.
All material on this website is copyrighted, the name WildSnow is trademarked, permission required for reproduction (electronic or otherwise) and display on other websites. PLEASE SEE OUR COPYRIGHT and TRADEMARK INFORMATION.
We include "affiliate sales" links with most of our blog posts. This means we receive a percentage of a sale if you click over from our site (at no cost to you). None of our affiliate commission links are direct relationships with specific gear companies or shopping carts, instead we remain removed by using a third party who manages all our affiliate sales and relationships. We also sell display "banner" advertising, in this case our relationships are closer to the companies who advertise, but our display advertising income is carefully separated financially and editorially from our blog content, over which we always maintain 100% editorial control -- we make this clear during every advertising deal we work out. Please also notice we do the occasional "sponsored" post, these are under similar financial arrangements as our banner advertising, only the banner or other type of reference to a company are included in the blog post, simply to show they provided financial support to WildSnow.com and provide them with advertising in return. Unlike most other "sponsored content" you find on the internet, our sponsored posts are entirely under our editorial control and created by WildSnow specific writers.See our full disclosures here.
Backcountry skiing is dangerous. You may be killed or severely injured if you do any form of ski mountaineering, skimo randonnee and randonnée skiing. The information and news on this website is intended only as general information. Due to human error and passing time, the information, text and images contained within this website may be inaccurate, false, or out-of-date. By using, reading or viewing the information provided on this website, you agree to absolve the owners of Wild Snow as well as content contributors of any liability for injuries or losses incurred while using such information. Furthermore, you agree to use any of this website's information, maps, photos, or binding mounting instructions templates at your own risk, and waive Wild Snow owners and contributors of liability for use of said items for ski touring or any other use.
No problems here Lou…I use Firefox…and WordPress seems to be working for me.
Opera 9.24 on WinXP – all good!
Safari 3.1 on a Mac (Leopard OSX 10.5) with no problems; also seems to work fine with Firefox 2.0 on the same platform
The site crashes Safari on OS X 10.3.9. OS X 10.5 seems to be fine. I encountered the problem on a computer I rarely use, so I’ll see if I can gather some more information for you about the problem.
Do you have a list of the plugins you’re using? That may help us troubleshoot the problem.
The only problem I have noticed is that the link to subscribe to the RSS feed doesn’t work. I use Firefox…
Lou,
I’ve had the same problem as Jason (above) Safari on OS X 10.3.9
Thanks guys! When I get back to the states we’ll look at this some more. I’ll get the list of plugins up as well. It’s only a half dozen or so. ‘best, Lou
I get referred to a word press login page when I click the Politics of Powder link in the backcountry skiing news section. It was only that link so far. Using IE 6.0.29 on XP pro 5.1
I also can’t seem to get your RSS feed to work which is a bummer as I rarely surf to web sites anymore. With so many great blogs and sites to read, RSS is a must.
well.. no problem occured when i viewing this site.. i can feel the spirit of skiing..
Some of you might have encountered recent problems browsing Wildsnow.com. Simple answer is we’ve got so much traffic the server gets overloaded on many weekday mornings. Server company says they’ve improved things. We’ll see Monday morning. Anyone care to feedback, please do it here. Thanks, Lou
I’m finding lots of the links, background and add-ons are now just loading as a box with “copyrighted image link see http://www.wildsnow.com” written in them. Refreshing seems to sort it out. As I’m on the other side of the world (and hence browsing at off-peak times) I doubt it’s server traffic that’s the problem.
Seems to be sorted since Sunday night (GMT +1).
Lou, Starting two days ago, when try to go to http://www.wildsnow.com, I’m re-directed to http://wildsnow.com/cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi. This only happens using Firefox. Everything is OK on Internet Explorer. Any idea what is going on? Thanks.
Hi Geoff, thanks so much for that! I noticed a decrease in traffic and was wondering where it might have originated. I’ll dredge up one of my Firefox installs and test. I’ve been doing a ton of back end work on the site this past 10 days, for sure I messed something up. It’ll probably be easy to fix, once I can duplicate problem. ‘best, Lou
I’ve found that everything is OK when I use Firefox on a different account, so the problem must be that something changed in my settings. Sorry for sending you on a wild goose chase.
Hi Geoff, one thing I’ve learned with IT is that if one person has a problem, it’s probably occurring for others, so I’ll keep looking into it. Optimistic note is I fired up an old computer with a Firefox install and it worked fine.
The problem you encountered is documented, but I’d need to replicate before I could fix. So far, no replication.
I’ve got some pretty complex stuff going on behind the scenes on the website, so please let me know if you discover any other problems.
Thanks, Lou
I was having the same problem as Geoff accessing wildsnow via firefox. I eventually fixed it by taking a link to wildsnow from google and getting rid of the cached version of the page.
That worked. Thanks Ian.
Hi Lou,
I haven’t been able to access Wildsnow.com from the work PC these last few days and can’t really complain to my iT department, being as my firm isn’t involved in backcountry skiing… I did mention another issue and they decided to rebuild my PC so it could be the issue is at my end, though access other websites ok. But, as you mention lots of background work.
I haven’t checked the details, but it’s internet explorer, won’t be the latest version but don’t know which one sorry. Via google search I would click on wildsnow and get to the home page, but could only see the title, grey outline and everything else was blank, with it showing as still trying to connect.
Windows system, in the uk.
Frame, I’ll email you. Thanks for helping out.
Just an FYI for all of you, I do use browser compatibility testing, and the site checks out quite well both informally as well as when using browser testing services on numerous browsers/versions. Nonetheless, I like to keep striving for perfection as to do otherwise is eventually a messy compromised user experience. As for design philosophy, first and foremost we strive to make a clean, relatively fast loading site that still accommodates our advertising so we can stay in business and keep blogging. I also spend quite a bit of time working on our mobile version, since a large percentage of our traffic is mobile, I thus try to respect people using phone data plans by providing as low bandwidth as possible. Ditto for significant European traffic percentage , which in that case means I need to keep the site functional for Google Translate. Quite a jungle!
A tech note: If you’re serious about your web browsing experience, learn how to do a browser cache clear/reset and always try that first when trouble shooting a website problem, preferably after a hard reboot of your computer. In terms of what I develop the site for, Google Chrome is first, Firefox second, IE (distant) third. I test all three here at HQ, usually later or current versions.
Lou
I found a couple of versions of IE the site didn’t load in. Fixed. If you’re an IE user who’s had problems, do a hard reboot of your computer, then clear IE cache once you’re in there, and after those two things try loading Wildsnow.com again and see what happens. Hopefully will work now. Caveat, it’s possible site still doesn’t display with IE 7, am testing. Thanks, Lou
In my case, clearing cache and doing a hard reboot was not enough to solve the problem. I also had to go to WildSnow by using a link from Google. After doing that once, I was able to go directly to WildSnow.
Hmmm, it just sounds like you guys got the site cached while it was in an error phase, and whatever you’re doing is clearing the cache. Nearly every browser I’ve tested has worked, but I did have some problems with IE 7. That’s an easy upgrade, so anyone, if you’re having problems viewing site in Internet Explorer be sure to upgrade. Thanks everyone for the feedback, really a big help. Lou
Had the same issue in Firefox.28.0. Cleared my cache and that fixed the problem.
Thank you for just enabling me to browse into your blog after 4 months’ frustration of being not possible to read your posts due to a server problem. This trouble happened when I changed the Internet provider from the usual line one to the cable one. By the way I must say congratulations to Dynafit’s use of “Hokkaido” and “Yotei” for their top range plank and gears.
From the tons of powder blessed island, Hokkaido,