Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A deep mountainside gorge or gully, especially in the Swiss Alps.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A dredging-machine which employs iron elevator-buckets on an endless chain and excavates by making a gully where the buckets pass.
- noun A steeply ascending gorge or gully: applied especially to gorges near the Alpine summits.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A deep gorge; a gully.
- noun (Hydraul. Engin.) A dredging machine for excavating canals, etc.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A steep
gorge along amountainside .
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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To get down that tongue of rock to the lower snows of the couloir was a job that fairly brought us to the end of our tether.
Mr. Standfast John Buchan 1907
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The snow in the couloir is a delight, turned sugary because it has sat untouched on the hill for so long, and we whoop as we ski down it, stopping occasionally to take photos, before we eventually reach a snow-covered road in a forgotten side valley.
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The snow in the couloir is a delight, turned sugary because it has sat untouched on the hill for so long, and we whoop as we ski down it, stopping occasionally to take photos, before we eventually reach a snow-covered road in a forgotten side valley.
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And it's prone to just halving off building-size chunks of ice and flushing down to the couloir, and if you're there at the wrong time, you're in big trouble.
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And it's prone to just halving off building-size chunks of ice and flushing down to the couloir, and if you're there at the wrong time, you're in big trouble.
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Barry had climbed the couloir once before, in 1982, back when he admits he didn't know all that much about avalanche conditions.
A Nature for the Great Outdoors Michael J. Ybarra 2010
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The rescue team went on to say that they had witnessed a climber in a red suit with patches fall from the middle of the Traverse, the section of the route which connects the top of the Bottleneck couloir to the summit slopes.
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Kina had skied big lines in the Tetons for years; on many of them, if you failed to make the right turn at the right time, you would fall for a thousand feet, pinballing between the rocky walls of the couloir until you ragdolled out the bottom.
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But another Sherpa guide had dropped his ice axe, effectively stranding him, so Chhiring tied him to his harness, and down climbed the couloir with his friend hanging off him.
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The route to the summit of K2 follows steepening snow slopes towards a snow and ice couloir called "the Bottleneck".
Freddie Wilkinson: Avalanche Triggers Survival Situation on K2 2008
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