What is a "Whiteout"?

A Whiteout basically means you cannot even see your hand in front of your face either from fog, snow, sleet or any other condition day or night that creates this effect.

Also, I and my friends experienced this in 1970 before GPS and GPS locators, before cell phones to call for help so basically we were just screwed until the whiteout ended because we had not idea at all exactly where we were. We ONLY knew we were somewhere between Bunny Flats and Horse Camp and that's all. So, we dug a snow cave where you can get the temperatures up to 40 or 50 without the snow all melting down on top of you as water. This is enough to maintain more body heat so you don't freeze to death because of high wind chill factors and heat loss. So, even though our Levi jeans melted into the snow because we didn't have ground cloths for our sleeping bags when we got out of the snow cave in the morning by digging out through about a 4 foot snow drift or more luckily it was only about 20 degrees out and it had stopped snowing at least for then so though the sky was still grey and stormy we could see at least where we were and we headed on our snow shoes through 3 feet of base and another 3 feet of newly fallen powder snow back to our car only to find only the top three inches of the aerial visible of my VW bug because it was buried completely in the snow. So, we were very grateful to hear a 7 foot rotating blades snow plow coming up the road opening the road for the old Ski Lift near Panther Meadows which was destroyed likely by around 1970 by a bad Avalanche up there.

So, our pants were wet from our sleeping bags melting into the snow in the snow cave so luckily at 20 degrees our Levis froze except at the knees so they became ice block Levis which provided enough dead air space so we didn't freeze to death while walking to our car on snowshoes. So, the pants went from being wet to ice blocks and my friends beard started breaking off from the cold and his breath gathering on his beard in the cold as ice.