Jeff Dozier Wins Microsoft Award - Climbing related

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Jan

Mountain climber

Okinawa, Japan

Topic Author's Original Post - Oct 21, 2009 - 09:16am PT

Jeff Dozier was a climber in the Valley in the 1960's and lived in Berkeley in the "Great Pad" with Sacherer, Beck, Erb, and Steve Thompson.

Currently a professor at UC Santa Barbara, he has just won Microsoft's Jim Gray award. One of the articles describing him begins:

Jeff Dozier’s life’s work revealed itself in 1974, while he was 20,000 feet high in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush range. “I was climbing with some friends, and one of them asked if we thought the slope could avalanche. I had no clue, and I thought to myself, ‘I can deal with risk. What I can’t deal with is not knowing.’”

Not long afterward, Dozier – who then held a newly minted doctorate in geography from the University of Michigan – took a class about avalanches, and realized much of his academic work had application in the world of snow and ice. So he wrote a grant proposal to NASA for a study that would take the nascent worlds of computing and remote sensing via satellite and apply them to the study of mountain snowpack. “I’ve been working on those kinds of processes ever since,” he says.

For more info see:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/oct09/10-16jimgrayaward.mspx?rss_fdn=Custom

and

http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=2108

TripL7

Trad climber

'dago'

Oct 21, 2009 - 09:41am PT

Three Cheers for Jeff Dozier!!!

Valley climber, Prof. of Environmental Studies, with many fine friends past and present, and still going strong at 65. Congratulations Jeff for a life well lived.

Maysho

climber

Soda Springs, CA

Oct 21, 2009 - 09:57am PT

Thanks for posting this Jan!

In my program we take many students (middle and high school) to the Central Sierra Snow Lab at Donner Summit, run by UC. This is part of our lesson in "the Sierra snowpack is your water bank!" the students get some hands on experience measuring snow density at different layers and different exposures, it will be cool to teach a little about Prof. Dozier's work and the large scale view and application of his methods.

Peter

hossjulia

Trad climber

Eastside

Oct 21, 2009 - 10:04am PT

This is great news, congrats Jeff!

DonC

climber

Oct 21, 2009 - 10:28am PT

congratulations to a fellow geographer

Dick Erb

climber

June Lake, CA

Oct 21, 2009 - 11:15am PT

Way to go Jeff. I always knew you were no dummy.

I was with Jeff on a couple of trips to the Hindu Kush. There was one interesting sort of avalanche related incident that I remember. On an ascent of Kohi Tundi Jeff and I headed up from base camp one morning with two porters to scout the route and set up camp 1. Traversing under an ice cliff a few rocks sailed by and we kept moving. Higher up when the route traversed back over the ice cliff our porters started chucking rocks over the edge. Our first thought was, Wow these guys are into trundling, but we soon realized they were aiming for the stones on the lip of the cliff to knock them off before their descent back under the cliff in the warming sun. At camp 1 we gave a note to one of the porters for our friends below warning them not to come up until early the next morning because of rockfall danger. They got the note and in their impatience started up right away. Mike Wadleigh was shooting a film of the climb and got some good footage of many boulders bouncing and sliding down the glacier, and one bloody scene of a climbers hand that had been struck by a rock.

Jim Wilcox

Boulder climber

Santa Barbara

Oct 21, 2009 - 11:55am PT

Congratulations, Jeff.
I'm sure your enjoying the weather on the Eastside right about now. It's a miserable 75 degrees over here :)

guido

Trad climber

Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific

Oct 21, 2009 - 09:49pm PT

Congratulations Dr Deeg

1974- "Low Budget Boys Hindu Kush Expedition"

From left to right: McLean, Jack Dozier (dad), Jeff, Bill Dozier (uncle), Boche, Hennek and Cohen.

Mustafa Hotel central courtyard-Kabul

Looks like Jeff is already getting ready to celebrate!

Jan

Mountain climber

Okinawa, Japan

Topic Author's Reply - Oct 22, 2009 - 10:50am PT

Great photo guido. Anymore?

guido

Trad climber

Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific

Oct 22, 2009 - 11:21am PT

Many, but most are buried in a storage room I can hardly climb into anymore. Build a shelf and they will fill it!

Roger Breedlove

climber

Cleveland Heights, Ohio

Oct 22, 2009 - 12:10pm PT

Congratulations, Jeff.

Fletcher

Trad climber

Shivasana

Oct 22, 2009 - 09:02pm PT

Very nice. Congrats Jeff!

I'm enjoying the photos and stories.

I very briefly worked with a startup his wife was involved with about 15 years ago. Never got to meet the man, himself.

And in case anyone is wondering how Dozier Dome got it's name.... now you know!

Eric

klk

Trad climber

cali

Oct 22, 2009 - 09:04pm PT

cool thread.

and another great pic from guido.

DrDeeg

Mountain climber

Mammoth Lakes, CA

Oct 23, 2009 - 05:29am PT

A few photos. Like Guido's, most of mine from so long ago have not been scanned yet. But I do know where the boxes are.

Jan

Mountain climber

Okinawa, Japan

Topic Author's Reply - Oct 23, 2009 - 10:20am PT

Beautiful photos!

You know it's thanks to the wondrous tales that Jeff, Bill Peppin, Steve Thompson, and John Morton brought back from Europe in 1965-66, that I was able to persuade Frank to go to Europe for a break after he finished his Ph.D. in 1968. I always felt I could not have persuaded him if you guys hadn't done it first. As it was, we followed quite a few of your suggestions including a fun trip to the salt mines in Austria.

It was Jeff and Dick Erb's stories of Afghanistan though that really triggered my imagination.I really wanted to travel there overland from Europe back in the days when it was possible. Instead, I had my own adventures in Nepal in the early '70's.

Peter Haan

Trad climber

San Francisco, CA

Oct 23, 2009 - 10:26am PT

Good on you, Jeff !!!! Glad to hear this!

DrDeeg

Mountain climber

Mammoth Lakes, CA

Oct 23, 2009 - 12:48pm PT

Going overland from Europe to South Asia was possible in the 60s and 70s. My first visit to Afghanistan was in 1966. I went to school in Cologne in the fall of 65, and when it was time to return to the US I decided to go eastward. In Germany, I had met an Italian girlfriend, who lived in Bergamo, near Milan, and I spent Christmas with her family (on the way visiting Royal and Liz for a couple of days in Leysin). Then, Steve Thompson was in Istanbul, where his father was teaching at Robert Kolej, and that was my next stop. Steve and I went climbing near Antalya on the south coast of Turkey. A dragon reportedly lived in the cliff, and we could feel hot air coming out of the cracks!

Through hitchhiking (mainly on trucks) and buses, I was able to stay on the ground from Turkey through Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, into Pakistan. I was stymied at the Pakistan-India border. They had just been at war, and although the fighting had stopped, the border was not open. I was in Lahore and wanted to get to Ludhiana to visit a brother of one of my father's clients. It was only about 60 miles away across the border, but I had to travel 1500 -- train to Karachi, fly to New Delhi, then train to Ludhiana.

After getting across India on trains (3rd class, which fit a dirtbag budget), travel overland through Burma (now Myanmar) was not possible, and I wanted to get back to California to start the spring quarter in school. So I flew home from Calcutta through Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.

A lot of changes in the Middle East since then, most of them bad. The same trip would be dangerous today. Back then, even though I sometimes went for days without meeting anyone who spoke a language I knew, I never felt unsafe.

Ray Olson

Trad climber

Imperial Beach, California

Oct 23, 2009 - 01:14pm PT

Congratulations to Mr. Dozier on receiving the coveted
Microsoft award.

My belated thanks to Jan for her wonderful ongoing
contributions to this forum

Guido, what support do you need sir regarding the scanning
of your valuable slide archives?

one more thing, as I step out on a limb:
please keep in mind that, whatever you might
believe about Microsoft, they are a multi-faceted
entitiy with a stellar reputation in aspects of technology
and software for developers etc.

Jan

Mountain climber

Okinawa, Japan

Topic Author's Reply - Oct 23, 2009 - 02:07pm PT

Jeff-

I spent 6 weeks traveling all over India in 1973 on third class trains, alone as a young woman. I slept on the floors of the first class ladies' waiting rooms after bribing my way in. One of the hardest and more dangerous things I ever did.