mattp

I think that lower pair of dots would be on a route detouring completely out of the couloir for a couple of pitches.

I don't know what their specific objective was, but quite possibly they were simply exploring/skiing/hanging out in the basin up below Salish. I tell you: they are twisted individuals and one of them, in particular, has been up there several times with no real climbing intent even though he is a climber. Weird, huh? (He has in recent times talked about the NE Buttress of N. Three Fingers, the face on Salish Peak, etc., though.)

I assume you are referring to the S. Face; that is one that I would say is definitely NOT overhyped. It is simply fantastic. I'm not kidding. There are climbs that I think DO fall into the overhyped category: Outer Space, Liberty Crack, the South Face of Cutthroat, and Observation Rock for example. The Tooth, however, is about as exciting as it gets for the grade and the rock is great. It is easy to get to, easy to set up, and you climb at a continuous grade right to a cool summit with no screwing around. The descent is straight-forward. Lastly, you can see it from I-90 so everytime you drive to Ellensbury you can look up and remember how cool it was!

Isn't that the best 5.10 climb in the state?

Join us at Snugtop's lair tomorrow evening, Feb 21: Canterbury Ale & Eats 534 15th Ave. E, Seattle, WA 98112 Here is an enthusiastic review of the place: "The best part is the crazy medieval vibe running through the place." Lot of folks climbed some pretty cool stuff this past weekend, and there is lots to talk about.

That'd be a couple friends of mine. Twisted individuals who, like you (I presume), think it is a pretty cool area. You don't want to ask questions.

The default setting has to do with how much time you waste on this site (I mean, how many posts you make), but if you donate $ or if you draw enough attention from a mod or administrator you can get a special category all your own. FAQ page

Thanks, Wayne. I cut and paste from some restaurant review website and they must have listed an incorrect address. Oh well. Anyway, now we have it right so (hopefully) nobody drives around lost. (The fact that 15th Avenue and 15th Avenue East have two sets of numbering systems on the SAME STREET is bad enough without looking for the wrong address. Head for Capitol Hill, and it is north of Group Health a few blocks but south of Aloha, at the corner of East Mercer.)

If that lower pair is a climbing team, they are going around what we found to be the crux of the couloir. I'm not being critical: depending on conditions, this might well be a sensible option and I have told folks that I thought there was a detour option at that point.

I suspect you are under-hyping your TR a bit. Nice job, gents! (I can't wait to see your pictures!)

I bet the face had a lot more snow and ice cover all the way around this weekend. I've seen the left one looking like a snow couloir from a distance.

Actually, we ended up knowing what not to go.

Awesome. I can only imagine that it was a significant effort just getting to the face, and the descent, too, may have been complicated. Hopefully, they'll get around to posting a trip report when they've had a chance to rest up.

Look for trip reports of Mt. Persis. I found something that probably meets your needs that way a year or two ago when I was looking for the same thing.

Join us at Snugtop's lair tomorrow evening, Feb 21: [/b]Canterbury Ale & Eats 534 15th Ave. E, Seattle, WA 98112[/b] Here is an enthusiastic review of the place: "The best part is the crazy medieval vibe running through the place." [edited by mattp to correct address after error pointed out by Wayne]

I think that would be the right hand line in this shot:

Even though Saint Elias is very high and closer to the coast than many of the paks, I'd suggest taking a trip or two to the Saint Elias or Fairweathers first. Get a feel for the place and you'll likely have a more successful trip.

Jason is right about the face being very big. Even though the routes are not technical the whole way, it is pretty big anyway and the descent is not trivial. For the North Rib or the gully just left, there is a good bivvy spot at about one-third height, where the rib itself starts.

Jay, you are going kumbaya on us! You want Muslim leadership to be like MLK? You want the U.S. to reduce foreign intervention in the Middle East? Greater cooperation with our allies? What is this world coming to? This is not the JayB we've come to know.

Jay, isn't your last proposal a lot like what we tried with Saddam? I still think you're mistaking a sugar pill for the panacea.

Jay, I think your post a few hours ago suggests you may be looking for a panacea but getting a sugar pill. You argue that what we need to improve our position in the world is to better cooperate with our allies on intelligence gathering. While nobody is going to argue against seeking good intelligence, it will continue to be more important what we do with that information than how much information we are able to gather. What is clear is that, throughout our relations with the Middle East and elsewhere, we consistently seem to ignore intelligence we don’t like, maybe even lie about it, and that even if we can get a good snapshot right now we are unable to or even unwilling to look ahead and consider where a particular policy choice will take us. Improved spy operations will not fix any of this. I don’t know what will help, but one thing I think DOESN’T help is our consistent reliance on military intervention and covert operations to try to impose our solution on a given situation. It is pretty much always just a bandaid that doesn’t address the underlying issues, and even where it might be a good bandaid we seem unwilling to cooperate with the host nations unless there is a very clear and immediate benefit or support for us or for some American enterprise. Your friends in Iran went around pointing to houses that we should bomb. This shows that they expect the only thing America is going to do for or to them is to drop bombs. You didn’t mention their pointing out hospitals that need repair, or a broken sewer line, or a growing intellectual movement or an industry that needs partnership with American business, or ....

I'd agree that it does seem rather nervy to solo a route over so many busted up crevasses as the Nisqually Icefall, and I immediately found McKay’s post somewhat persuasive. On the other hand I've done something not too dissimilar and, not only that, but I’ve often said that I have never heard of anybody who was an experienced NW mountaineer falling into a Cascade crevasse and I think that the weather and snowfall patterns here make crevasse detection a little easier than it might be in other ranges where snowfall is not quite so seasonal and prevalent temperatures may not be so moderate (my apologies to the the NW veteran who has in fact fallen in). It would probably be a little safer to wait a week or two after the eight-week snowfalls let up, but she chose a relatively good time to go and I don’t think it was all that outrageous. I say

Go Will! (You and I disagree about lots of things, but) the depth of the hypocrisy and ineptitude of the current administration is simply staggering. I'm afraid that Mr. B seems bent on going through those gyrations to avoid dealing with the obvious frightening reality. We re-elected those screw-ups!!!

Yeah. You wouldn't want to take the time to think about and then post what you actually think or somebody like Olyclimber will call you "long winded." (By the way, I don't think we are likely to be able to pull off your proposed plan -- if history is any guide. I don't think you can look back and point to may times when we've actually known what we were doing and successfully carried it out in a several-step, long term way as you suggest. Not only that, but our man George Bush has been doing all he can to alienate our allies so we'll have a lot of work to do before we can build the cooperative mutual support pact that you envision.)

WTF are you talking about, JayB? The Kumbaya contingent? Has anybody here ever said they like/tolerate/would somehow seek to appease Al Queda or any other militant Islamist who seeks to blow us up? We might not want to make moderates hate us, but is that - to you - Kumbaya? Or are you just going out of your way to be offensive? If so that's fine, but it doesn't help you come off as one who may actually have anything much to add to any discussion. As far as what is "detrimental to their interest and beneficial to ours" -- it is largely in the eyes of the beholder. You seem to argue that it is OK to (A) stir up the Islamic pot, but maybe not (B) to disclose that our soldiers, at the direction of their commanders, are doing things that we agreed sixty years ago or more that we would not do. If you imply that A is in our interest, but not B, I tend to disagree on both counts. And what about © as Will noted they don't allow any pictures of U.S. causualties? (Note I used the word "tend." I wouldn't necessarily ban anything like the offending cartoons but I do question whether it was a good idea to publish them and I noticed you left some room for argument that maybe printing the abuse photos was OK but we could still argue about just why it might have been OK.)