Bronco

There is currently a similar but free plan at www.gymjones.com you just have to register. I think the upper five plans on this page are free, I'm into the second week of the "operator" and while not radically different from other training I've done, it is nice to have a varied program that I have to check a box each day. You can check them out here: https://gymjones.com/training-plans A good place to start might be better definition of your goals, what are your climbing objectives this summer? Steep snow or 5.12 cragging?

Wow, how much does that route get climbed?

I thought it (walking the road in climbing or ski boots) was mandatory to get into the Cascade Softman Club.

Can you give us another hint?

Looks cold but fun, nice job! What's the story with the stick? Was Chuck hoping to have a camp fire?

I don't know you guys or your experience level so feel free to ignore this post. Sometimes things just compound, you were light on calories, sounds like you climbed slow, messed with protection and ropes too much, had route finding issues, didn't have good gear for a bivy. These things along with shorter day light combined to provide an epic. Any one of those things by itself doesn't cause the epic. Nobody got hurt which is great, good lessons and experience were gained. Maybe dial it back a bit and get more comfortable on easier terrain. I've had a few partners that were strong technical climbers but totally uncomfortable unroped on exposed but easy terrain. Knowing when you need to rope up is an important progression for everyone and everyone has a different tolerance. I've found it's also helpful to be thinking about potential bailout difficulties as you're climbing and you eventually will reach a point where its easier to bail upward and forget about the possibility of descending down the route. This is also good to discus with your partner before the climb starts as well. As someone who has pulled the plug on a few climbs, it's been helpful for me to listen to that little voice in the back of my head, it's right more than it's wrong. It's perfectly fine to back off of climbs you know you're capable of, just have to develop more trust in your intuition than in your ego. (i.e.- we should be able to climb this no problem so let's keep going despite moving slow) You guys (and I guess the guys who did it in 10 hours) were pretty slow. It's been 10 years or so but myself and 3 other guys climbed the NBC car to car in an easy day. We may have roped up at the top of the couloir. I know some freak who used to do it as a conditioning climb in 5 hours, car to car. Hope that helps and thanks for sharing the story, it's a good one.

Good story, thanks for posting. Anybody who's climbed much has been in a situation where they would consider activating a PLB if they had one. I don't have one but its on my "to do" list. I'm not sure I understand the sequence of events but, did you activate the PLB and leave it on while you summited and descended? Could this account for the false readings?

Interesting Article from here: http://www.hcn.org/issues/47.4/big-dig-big-disgrace suggesting that new roads don't alleviate traffic congestion. I never thought of it that way but the concept makes sense to me. Along the Seattle waterfront, beneath 60 feet of earth, lies a monument to human ingenuity. Her name is Bertha, and she’s the biggest tunnel-boring machine ever built: longer than a football field, heavy as the Eiffel Tower, endowed with a tooth-studded face five stories tall. Like a giant earthworm, she can chew through dirt and eject it as slurry; in good soil, she’s capable of digesting 35 feet per day. On one of her Twitter accounts (@BerthaDigsSR99), she has over 14,000 followers. She is, in every respect, a marvel, come to rescue Seattle drivers from an unsafe and unsightly elevated freeway. There’s only one problem: She’s broken. Bertha’s saga began in 2001, when an earthquake damaged Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct. In 2009, city and state leaders agreed to replace the perilous viaduct with a 2-mile-long double-decker tunnel. Such a tunnel would require a custom-built machine, and on April 2, 2013, Seattle’s mechanical savior arrived on a barge from Osaka, Japan. “Nice place you’ve got here,” Bertha tweeted. “I was expecting rain.” As it turned out, Bertha would be the one who needed saving. On Dec. 3, 2013, she hit a steel pipe; soon after, she overheated. Workers eventually discovered that the bearing seals on her face had suffered damage. Bertha ground to a halt, 1,023 feet into an 8,000-foot dig. More than a year later, Bertha has barely moved another inch, the timeline for completion has been pushed back 20 months, and Seattleites are restless. The viaduct is still standing, shaky as ever. Buildings in nearby Pioneer Square have settled and cracked, perhaps as a result of attempts to rescue the stalled drill. In January, two Republican state senators introduced a bill that would kill the $4.2 billion project altogether. “We can’t just continue to pour billions of dollars into a hole with no sign of success on the horizon,” said Spokane’s Michael Baumgartner, one of the sponsors. Bertha’s proponents argue that if the viaduct comes down without a highway to succeed it, all those displaced vehicles — up to 110,000 per day — will worsen the city’s already nightmarish gridlock. But growing evidence suggests the relationship between highways and traffic doesn’t work that way. To the contrary: If you don’t build highways, the cars won’t come. Imagine living in Los Angeles. Once a week, you shop for groceries at a pricey supermarket two miles away. You could save money at the Walmart 10 miles down the highway, but with traffic that becomes a half-hour trip. So you stay close to home. Now imagine that the city adds an extra lane to the highway. Surely, you think, the traffic will dissipate; now it’s worth driving to Walmart. But you’re not the only one obeying that logic. Once the road is expanded, more folks use it to shop, visit relatives, go out to movies and restaurants. Soon, the highway is as clogged as ever. That’s exactly what happened when L.A. opened an expensive car-pool lane on I-405 last May. Four months later, traffic was a minute slower than it had been before. Economists call this phenomenon “induced demand”: Build more roads, and people will drive more. “What’s interesting is that traffic increases in almost exactly a one-to-one relationship with road capacity,” says Matthew Turner, an economist at Brown University and author of a 2011 paper called The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion. “You cannot build your way out of problems.” Back in the mid-2000s, many community leaders argued — and still argue — that Seattle didn’t need to replace the viaduct. Improving surface roads and transit, they said, would be cheaper, safer, and more compatible with greenhouse gas reduction goals. But the so-called “surface/transit option” never got far. Abandon the highway, then-Gov. Christine Gregoire said in 2009, and “you can shut down business in Seattle.” Seattle’s traffic is undeniably terrible — the fourth-worst in the country. Yet driving rates in Seattle and Washington state have largely been stagnant — and, in some places, falling — for over a decade. National rates have also dropped every year since 2004. The trend is probably generational: Young people drive far less than their parents did. “Bertha, to me, is a failure of imagination,” says Clark Williams-Derry, deputy director of the Sightline Institute, a Seattle sustainability think tank. “It comes from a mindset that can’t conceive of a world in which traffic volumes might be falling.” Eliminating highways could help expedite driving’s decline: According to one review, up to 25 percent of traffic simply disappears when road capacity vanishes. In the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and the fatal, seismically induced collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct, San Francisco decided to tear down two elevated highways, the Embarcadero and Central freeways, and replace them with surface boulevards. The much-feared congestion crises never materialized. As it turns out, even improving public transit has little influence. Only downsizing roads can change driving habits. Nonetheless, Bertha will almost certainly survive: Too much money and too many reputations are at stake to entomb her now; the bill to kill the project didn’t receive so much as a hearing. Bertha recently began crawling toward an access shaft, from which a crane will hoist her head to the surface for repairs. “There’s really no fiscally prudent course other than the course we’re on,” Gov. Jay Inslee said recently. Though it may be too late for Seattle to turn back, other cities contemplating car-friendly mega-projects would be wise to learn from the city’s struggles. “In the 1950s, bigger and more complicated seemed better,” says Williams-Derry. “But today’s transportation solutions are distributed, based on technology, more incremental, more efficient. Bertha is not a 21st-century solution.”

Picked up The Creature from Jekyll Island, first few pages look pretty good. Didn't know the backstory of the creation of the Federal Reserve.

Hey, keep up the good attitude and good luck with your rehab. I'm greatly impressed with your optimism, can't imagine what it's like to recieve that diagnosis. I gotta admit I got a lump in my throat just reading this today. There is such a fine line between a close call and a serious fall like yours.

The climb was actually reported on ESPN Sportscenter this morning. They said Tommy and Kevin didn't even use "cables". Pretty weird!

1. Take a Level One Avalanche course, get a transceiver if you don't already have one; 2. Please avoid snowshoeing in the skin track if you go to BC Ski destinations like Heather/Skyline.

Nice work using some old school tricks, enjoyed the story!

Now I'm sure that's the guy in Everett who wrote the C-word on the sidewalk in front of my office with "mud". Actually he ran out of feces/mud before he could get all four letters written. Should have went with the 12" letters instead of 36". Everybody can dream I guess.

Trashy, you got me thinking about this important issue so I conducted some "research" so I can sleep good tonight knowing we've correctly identified the critical elements of base layer selection. http://www.backpackinglight.com/cgi-bin/backpackinglight/comfort_moisture_transport_wool_synthetic_clothing.html#.VKxFnMZN2FI According to that article, wool is slightly heavier and dries 50% slower than synthetic. Despite that, most of the testers seem to prefer the wool for comfort and lack of stink. I like each, just for different purposes. I wonder if I can get one of the clown shirts they used in the test, then I'd have the best of both worlds.

I've seen that guy in downtown Everett. Didn't know he has a U-Tube channel, pretty cool.

A few observations based on my experience: Synthetic Pros: Dry faster, wick better, much cheaper than wool and lighter garment weight (if you're a weight weenie), a lot of different colors to choose from. Woolie Pros: Don't retain stink, seems like when it's warmer or sweating a lot the slow drying properties of wool reduce the amount of sweating out. I may be wrong on that but it's my perception (and perspiration). I wear a wool base layer riding my bike to work so I don't arrive so smelly and my shirt doesn't stink up the office, even after several rides. For climbing, I'll generally wear synthetic for the bit of weight savings and ability to quickly dry it out in camp.

Anyone know what Dan's up to these days? Really enjoyed seeing his stoke filled TRs and photos.

Nice work and thanks for the TR!

He just posted last year - http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/1111366/Re_TR_North_Hozomeen_Mtn_Zorro#Post1111366 I think Jay has inadvertently exposed the existence of the bonus point rating system for users. Watch out!

Baring could be the best of both worlds with its King County location (technically) and ok traffic. Plentiful banjo music and good access to Index.

Good to know. Is there a link to a listing of which lookouts are locked down and which ones might be open to the public or is it a more complex issue than that?

Allrightythen.

How about the lookout on Hart's Pass? It was locked up tight on Labor Day weekend.

Keenan, thanks for your info, someone has to keep us old guys in line! I just checked out the montanaice forum and it certainly is lacking in recent activity. Other than a couple of Sphinx questions, not much has been posted in years. Thanks again!