U.S. Department of Agriculture Deputy Under Secretary Merlyn Carlson, center, and Ken Church, great grandson of Dr. James Church, dump snow out of a sampling tube Tuesday at the Mount Rose Ski Area near Reno. The USDA and the University of Nevada, Reno, celebrated 100 years of studying snow. Photo by The Associated Press

MOUNT ROSE -- Two men groaned and gasped Tuesday as they pulled a long, hollow metal pole from the snow near the 10,880-foot summit of Mount Rose, 20 miles southwest of Reno.

While a couple dozen people watched, one of the men measured the depth of the snow, weighed the sample that was pulled up inside the pole and then consulted his charts.

"It's looking good," said Dan Greenlee, the snow survey program manager for the Reno office of the Natural Resources Conservation Service. "Seventy-two inches of water. Fifteen feet of snow. I would consider this a drought-buster. Lake Tahoe is going to come close to filling."

The crowd, mainly federal government bureaucrats from Washington, hooted in approval. Greenlee excitedly explained the snowpack is 177 percent of normal for this time of the year and the fourth heaviest since they began measuring snow at the Mount Rose Ski Area site in 1981.

"That's cool," said Microsoft search engine developer Kenneth Ward Church, sweaty from helping Greenlee push and pull poles in the snow.

Church is the great-grandson of University of Nevada, Reno, classics professor James Church, who in 1906 traipsed into this mountain range on horseback to take the first known scientific measurements of snow.

His technique of using a hollow pole with serrated edges to pull snow continues to be utilized by snow survey workers across the West to take manual measurements at 2,000 different sites.

In honor of Church's innovation, the National Resources Conservation Service hosted 100th anniversary celebration events Tuesday, here on the mountain and on the campus of the University of Nevada, Reno.

Merlyn Carlson, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, presented UNR Acting President Joe Crowley with a plaque that honors Church. Carlson and members of his staff also exhibited a bit of Church's grit by hiking a half-mile in snow deeper than buildings to the snow survey site.

Church already is a big name on campus. Decades ago the Church Fine Arts Building was named in his honor. The ashes of Church and his wife, Florence, were placed in a cornerstone of the building. He died at age 90 in 1959 after a teaching career that lasted from 1892 and 1939.

The north summit of Mount Rose was named Church Peak in his honor in 1980.

This Mount Rose snow survey on Tuesday was done for show, however. People no longer have to leave their toasty offices to measure snow. Through snowpack telemetry (snotel), data is beamed to satellites and down to computers.

Anyone who logs on to the web site wcc.nrcs.usda.gov can secure the latest snowpack information for the Mount Rose Ski Area Snotel. Those with access to Google Earth can zero in on a photo of the site.

Greenlee was pleased because the manual measurements came within two inches of the measurements by telemetry. The original site where Church measured snow is four miles away in an even more rugged area. Greenlee takes manual measurements there each April 1.

Kenneth Church of Seattle clearly was tickled joining Greenlee in securing the measurements. It was his first snow survey expedition, and he was not sure what to expect. His great-grandfather died when Kenneth Church was only 3. As far as he knows, they never met. But he has heard a lot of family stories about great-granddad.

It seems Church, fresh out of the University of Michigan, often took his wife with him on overnight jaunts into the Sierra Nevada, even in the middle of the winter.

"The people in the town didn't think that was right. People didn't go into the mountains in the winter and they didn't go with their brides. This was before REI. They didn't make designer women's clothes for the outdoors. She wore pants. That was taboo. But it was great fun for them."

One time, according to Kenneth Church, his great-grandfather deliberately set a big fire as a signal so people in Reno would know his wife was safe.

Church was looking for a reason to win public support for their mountain visits and found it in the early 1900s.

Lahontan Dam had been completed and farmers at Fallon were taking irrigation water from the runoff around Lake Tahoe. Home owners at the lake were worried that too much water would be consumed for irrigation and lower the level of the lake.

Jon Werner, director of the federal Water and Climate Center in Portland, said the two factions were on the verge of a "water war."

Church, with help of many of colleagues in the agriculture department at UNR, came up with a scientific way to determine the water supply.

"I heard stories he original used a stove pipe," Greenlee said. "He was looking for something that was uniform."

States quickly latched on to his techniques and started to track snow. George Klyde, who did snow surveys in Utah, later became governor of that state. The federal government began its snow surveys in 1935.

"Doc Church was a great writer," Werner said. "Any guy who is a great writer gets most of the credit."