By “low cloud” do you mean “fog”?
Sounds like Denver, except in the 20-25 degree C range change.
I’ve firsthand seen 75F and sunny turn to 35F and snowing with no visibility - in moments, literally 5 minutes, in Denver.
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Not exclusively. Cumbria’s hills and mountains may not be big compared to the rest of the world, but they are big enough for clouds to be lower than their summits.
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Weather is weather the world over. Being unprepared for it is potentially fatal the world over. That’s as true at 7,000 feet as it is at 200ft.
The point wasn’t that England is somehow special rather that the people kibitzing about how these guys clearly didn’t need rescuing or that rescuing them doesn’t potentially put the rescuers at risk because the ‘mountain’ is so tiny and you can just walk up it severely underestimate the dangers.
As of course did the gentlemen in the original post.
For some reason, the piddlyness of the hills and the fact that you don’t need climbing gear does seem to make people inclined to underestimate the risks.
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I was once coming down from Mt Kosciusko, Oz’s highest peak, during a blizzard. The wind was sufficient to hold you at a 45° angle in the exposed bits.
Heading the other way, up the mountain and into the blizzard, were a group of twentysomethings dressed in beachwear (shorts, sandals, t-shirt), sharing one blanket between them as they walked.
It took a while, but I got them turned around eventually.
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Indeed. The whiteout picture was of a piddly hill in Massachusetts that you can just walk up - in fair weather. Traction gear is recommended from about mid-October to mid-May - and lots of people get in trouble because the weather is totally different up on the ridge from what you see when you park the car.
The northeastern US shares a problem with Great Britain - the hills aren’t all that impressive in terms of elevation, nor terribly difficult technically (unless you seek out a technical route) and deadly for all that. There’s one lovely - and quite easy - trail near me that seems to kill at last a couple of hikers every year. There are two scenarios: alcohol-fueled antics, and people who are unprepared for the weather. In both cases, they wind up in the bottom of a glen, 80 metres or so below, having slipped on wet rock or ice, or simply stepped off the trail in fog - whether in the atmosphere or their own brains.
In any case, I made the mistake of leaving my main point to the end. I know a bunch of Search and Rescue workers, and I’ve been one myself. I don’t know even one Search & Rescue worker that thinks charging subjects is a good idea.
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Sure, but I see no distinction your trying to make with “low cloud”; the word for cloud-near-ground-that-decreases-visibility is fog, even when the ground in question has high elevation.
Let’s agree that they are the same phenomenon.
When it forms around you, or blows in basically at ground level while you’'re staying put, that’s a different experience from seeing it above you, climbing into it, and perhaps even breaking out above it. What do you call it when you’re looking down on a layer that is below you and above the terrain beneath?
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[quote]What do you call it when you’re looking down on a layer that is below you and above the terrain beneath?
[/quote]
Either airborne or falling?
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