chucK

number 1 was orignally spotted on the ABC news website. Now also spotted on USA Today, and Fox News. number 2, the Washington Post. It would be interesting to look at this story over the various news outlets and extend this categorizing them according to "using her son's death" versus "grieving mother". There's probably some other good categorizers too. edit add the Guardian and CBC to the "using her son's death" list. LA Times and Village Voice have opted for a third characterization that doesn't involve a dead son, "Woman whose vigil galvanized .... etc."

It's pretty easy when on toprope to minimize the gumption needed to get past one short unprotected spot, so I will defend Catbird on his reluctance to believe his own eyes. That said, I doubt the opinions of other climbers of total varying abilities' are going to give much more useful beta than a close-up personal evaluation.

Guess which national news pages these two intro's came from: number 1: "Cindy Sheehan, the California woman who has used her son's death in Iraq to spur the anti-war movement, was arrested Monday while protesting outside the White House." number 2: "Cindy Sheehan, the grieving California mother of a soldier slain in Iraq, was arrested today while protesting the Iraq war outside the White House."

I read that letter to the editor from Kelly Bush that MisterE linked and it seems nice and to the point. I think it was a well thought-out and perfectly appropriate response. MisterE = baby

I now have my McLane guide, and yes it does say 7". I guess my real question was whether I should lug a #5 Camalot size piece up Borderline-Angel's Crest for that offwidth. Probably a moot point as the piece would be no help anyway! Thanks for the beta BTW.

Does the Borderline -> Angel's Crest connection put you on Angel's Crest before or after the optional 6" (10b?) offwidth?

Survival of the fattest

Awesome, great job on the climb and the report. And junior, funny thing about spraying is, it's better to spray about something you have climbed, versus something you haven't. And when you see your mother this weekend, tell her...

AWESOME!!

I think I sense some co-dependency/enabling issues wrt Squid and Olyclimber. Perhaps you oughta ban Oly too for Squidley's benefit.

Nice job! Getting up through that glacier is interesting eh? How did you guys get up there (see other recent inspiration report thread )? We descended as ashw_justin. We had only one rope and there seemed to be plenty of rap stations with good webbing. Lucky for us as we forgot our knives at our packs and we had carried just two long pieces of webbing. The descent description from Kearney or Nelson says something like, "possible to descend down 600 foot steep face from slabs". Sounded sort of scary, but we found a big block with many slings and rings and launched over the edge. We saw one premade station that looked totally screwed (overhung, hanging) within range of our one rope, but found another place where we could stand and build a station. One more single rope rap got us to a heavily engineered station (stoppers, many slings) from which point we continued our downward journey without further complication.

No (to your first question)

FREE JAMES BROWN!!

Vesper Peak, big North Slab. You can easily avoid the glacier and lower buttress shenanigans via a nice, slightly exposed ramp that crosses beneath the steep face. See this link. This shortcut will allow you to do it in a short day. The level of difficulty is similar to the Tooth or Ingalls. From the little tarn/lake between Vesper and Sperry head up toward the notch that is one notch closer to Vesper than the main one. Slabbing is probably a good choice too for injured arm muscles.

Nice job! Quite a marathon when you add in the driving. Though with a 4-month old you're probably acclimated to lack of sleep. How did you guys get off that thing? When we did it I went way down a gulley then had to climb way back up to get back to the ridge and then back down to Sunset col. I'm figuring from many people's descriptions of an easy descent that there must be some traverse up higher? Is that correct?

I agree that this is an imaginary phenomenon, but I think that the complaints about this are just as apt as the frequent lamentations concerning the all of those guys who, seconds after passing the belay test at vertical world, sprint off to the local masonry supply store to buy the cordless-rotohammer and 8lb bucket o' bolts as part of a hell-bent quest to neuter the proud trad routes and runout face-climbs of yore. "It's time to bring indoor climbing to the outdoors, and I'm just the man to do it!!!!!. Time to meet your maker, death routes!!!!!" The other funny thing that often gets brought up is the purported shortage of death-routes to test one's mettle on. Are they really that hard to find? Even at a sport mecca like Smith a quick perusal of the guidebook will reveal scores of X-rated routes available to anyone with an interest in climbing them. Ditto for the dozens of Robbins routes at Vantage, etc, etc. Speaking of imaginary phenomema, one of my personal favorites is that of the platoon full of newbies lining up at the base hatching plots to bolt - say Remorse on SCW -into submission.... Well, these do sound like silly things to say. Can't say I've heard people saying these things, and I don't think they've been mentioned in this thread. However, it could be that your trademark flowery hyperbole is obscuring what I'm supposed to be looking for. I have heard tales of at least two NW underqualifieds armed with Bosch going at it without much restraint at Smith and Vantage. Maybe that's what you're referring to in paragraph 1.

Now that I have begun to temporarily monopolize this thread in earnest, I feel I must respond to you Dru. First of all, I specifically excepted you from criticism in my post. You certainly have made a habit of responding to posts way more inane than the current culprit. Second, GOOD POINT! Though I can think of a lot of other ways to create artificial danger on a route, but to list them would be hypocritical given my recent postings.

Well that's cool. How did you feel about your routes being altered? Did anybody get permission from you? (You're not dead yet are you? ) Do you feel permission from you negates the necessity to get BWRTS's permission? Do you feel your permission was necessary?

Why would anyone (besides the king of spray) argue over the motives of a completely fictional "pulled out of someone's ass" example? Sheesh! Did any interesting information ever get exchanged here about what happens when the FA dies? Do her rights to have the climb left unaltered die with her, or do we still have to get Pope and BWRTS's permissions before we add a bolt? Or has this lovely thread just degenerated into a bunch of random soapboxes loosely categorized under "route development/mainenance"? <-- rhetorical question; that is, no need to reply.

I just love whenever the "5.11 climber putting up 5.8 death routes" comes up . However, we do seem to have migrated away from bringing up all those 5.12 climbers putting up 5.7 death routes. Thank god for that.

Pike's Place IPA! Lately this has been missing from every store in which I look. Only the poor substitute bastard cousin, Kilt Lifter, is stocked lately. I want my Pike's IPA

Scott, she could probably sense your cottonmouth from 500 yards. Tom, read more like an observation (or anecdote) than bitching to me. Maybe your construing it as "bitching" is just a product of your negativity.

Not many pictures from the actual rockclimbing. Tough to take a lot of pictures when you're filled with dread . Here's the only picture I took in the Gash. It's a pretty tough picture to figure out what's going on. It's looking down the good part of the chimney I mentioned in the report. That's the glacier in the background (not the sky).

I think there's a Salsipuedes in California. Translated from Spanish it means "leave if you can".

No, I didn't bring a camera because I was originally planning on visiting over-photographed Mt. Stuart.