mattp

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.)

Good argument, there JayB. If I understand you correctly, what it all boils down to is this: if the White House wants it published to embarass their enemies, whether it is a leak that may endanger our national security or not, go for it If somebody else wants to publish something that might rile an enemy of ours, go for it. If somebody wants to publish something that might make our government look bad? Lets look very carefully for a reason why it might be "unAmerican."

Careful there, cowboy. We DID, afterall, just invade two countries and kill tens of thousands of innocents in response to what twenty lunatics without state sponsorship or involvemlent did to us. Further, I think even Al Jezeera lunatics have decided that it is bad press to show beheadings.

Not only the radical Islamists, but the U.S. neocons are also looking for a holy war or at least a de-stabilized middle east and a moslem boogeyman.

I have a hard time understanding how a check-box for “hate crime” would appear on a traffic-ticket form, but who knows. I definitely think you’re a little paranoid about this “outlawing bigotry” thing, though, Jay. I fully agree that dogmatic or fanatic individuals on the left can be every bit as disrespectful or dismissive toward civil rights as the worst bigots on the right -- and even at a more moderate level I think that many people go too far to react as they do to casual use of certain words referring to a female body part or a racial or ethnic group when there is in many cases no ill will attached, or that specific hate crimes statutes may not be the best way to go -- but I don’t think you need to fear that the politically correct gestapo are going to beat down your door. Bush and his pals represent a much greater threat to your freedom and mine. Good one, calling me on my listing Bush’s opposition to hate crimes. As I clarified in a subsequent post to the one you refer to, I don’t think he is necessarily a racist in the KKK sense, but he is certainly a facist who really doesn’t care about civil rights or equality or whatever and I think he’s used his opposition to hate crimes to appeal to right wingers who in fact are in the KKK mold and then he'd lied about it when somebody asks questions. But you are right to think that was probably the weakest of my examples from that list and somewhat at odds with my statement here -- though not entirely: in my list that you refer to I noted it was his lying about his role in the matter that made me think it was an example of his racism. I also think that, when taken as whole, the combination of his statements on hate crimes laws, such programs as head start or public education, and things like affirmative action or border security, there is a consistent pattern that is racist.

Maybe I'm one of those libertarian freaks. I'm with you on the argument that assault is assault and should be taken seriously whether the victim is a staight male or a gay man and I'd add that, in my view, it may even weaken the cause of equal rights to make special categories or rules protecting sub-segments of society from the crime of assault because it by definition seems to suggest that gays or immigrants or whoever are not regular people deserving exactly the same protection as anybody else. However, I would not rule out or eliminate consideration of the circumstances of a crime when it comes time for sentencing. We have specific laws that suggest extra penalties for an assault of someone who may be vulnerable somehow, or where the victim may be a member of a certain group of people like for example a school employee or law enforcement officer, or where the actor has a prior history of violence, or based on their motivation to intimidate a class of persons or to gain some secondary personal benefit, or whether the assault was undertaken in the course of perpetrating some other crime. I'd say a random attack against a gay person just because they are gay certainly is a valid factor to weigh along with such considerations.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to your disaffection with what you often derisively term as politically correctness, Jay, but the indignation and your suggestion that Christians have “gotten beyond that” is a little bit much. Yes, suicide bombers do appear to be almost exclusively Islamic, but Christian fanatics including our President have undertaken plenty of violence with “god’s blessing.” There are lots of reasons people do and don't do what they do and don't do besides the idea that "we've grown up over the years" and are somehow superior. Question: how do you think our politicians’ discussion of a flag burning amendment compares with this Norwegian blasphemy law? Isn’t that TWICE the joke?

Based on angle, those sound like good nominations to me but I can't quite picture that rock formation in the foreground.

Wise counsel. We want ORV people and Parks and other parties on our side, not angered by our hotheaded response to a bad situation.

He wasn't suffering too bad!

We just had a burst of thunder that was incredible. I told my wife that it might be something else -- did an airplane blow up or something? It rolled on in a way that I don't associate with thunder. Five minutes later, we heard a humongous crash and the sky opens up. Our deck was covered with graupel in less than a minute. Wow. I've never seen such a storm except in the mountains. And I grew up in tornado alley. Smack. Bang. Graupel. No wind. No rain. Storm over.

We just had a burst of thunder that was incredible. I told my wife that it might be something else -- did an airplane blow up or something? It rolled on in a way that I don't associate with thunder. Five minutes later, we heard a humongous crash and the sky opens up. Our deck was covered with graupel in less than a minute. Wow. I've never seen such a storm except in the mountains. And I grew up in tornado alley. Smack. Bang. Graupel. No wind. No rain.

Really.

Hijacker! Mt. Erie is the place for your SENDBOT!

Maybe we should have a thread for speculating about who might have done the route which may exist? I know that Bill Sumner lived in Index for a number of years and that, for example, he put up several lines on Mt. Index that were not reported, though I don't think he did so much on steep ice as more mountaineering snow and ice perhaps. I also know that Jack Lewis did quite a lot of ice climbing in those years, and at least some of it went un-reported. And there were others - look at the confusion regarding the Spindrift Couloir and other routes on Big Four Mountain that arose because climbs were not fully documented. "Persis Pillar" is the named I knew for these climbs

Do you have a shot of that mountainside opposite camp? On the map that looks as if it might be one big ski slope if I am thinking of the same slope.

I don't know who or when. I first heard about it in the mid-1980's some time, during a period when lots of climbers were not reporting first ascents. I think it may have been Steve Mascioli who pointed it out to me, but it could have been someone else. I don't think he (or whoever it was) claimed to have climbed it, and I don't think Steve was one who got into the unreported ascents thing, but I sort of recall somebody pointed at it and said one of the pillars, at least, had been climbed. I don't have any real information one way or another. However, if somebody goes out and climbs it, and then reports a first ascent in the American Alpine Journal, we may see somebody else come forth.

Will the books withstand an audit?