UD English prof featured July 29 on History Channel documentary

3:25 p.m., July 23, 2003-- McKay Jenkins, associate professor of English, will be a featured expert on cable TV’s the History Channel during a one-hour documentary about avalanches. The documentary will air at 9 p.m., Tuesday, July 29, as part of the History Channel’s continuing series, “Nature Tech.” Jenkins’ expertise comes from writing and researching “The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone,” published by Random House in 2000. The book tells the story of five young mountain climbers from Montana who died in a massive avalanche in late December 1969. Search parties did not find their bodies until the snow thawed in June.

For a Q&A with McKay Jenkins about avalanches, click here.

For more information about McKay Jenkins’ book, click here.

The book also includes Jenkins’ interviews with avalanche survivors who described in vivid detail their horrifying experiences. The story of the five climbers will be re-told during the documentary using much of the same narrative tension that Jenkins brought to his book.

Jenkins also has witnessed an avalanche from across a mountain valley—as close as he or most any sane person cares to get.

“I was on a bike trip in the

Canadian Rockies in the summer,” he said. “We were camping at about 7,000 feet, and one morning we woke up and heard this colossal crack and this whole cliff across [the valley] from us had broken away. It sounded like a hundred freight trains coming down the mountain.”

Article by Dean Geddes-Key, AS 2005

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