mattp

Good call.

I think most people who make much of a habit of climbing Mount Rainier with large groups have done this at some point. In any given group of ten, you are going to have one person who cannot go on while the others are perfectly fit to continue.

There was bit of a fad for not reporting climbs in the 1980's. A couple of our heroes (like Chouinard or somebody) commented that guidebooks were taking the adventure out of climbing and that the quest to make and report first ascents all over the place was egotistical and why can't we just climb.

What guidebook/description did you have for Rainman? Any corrections?

Vertical bushwacking can be rather strenuous at times, but I recall some parts of the NE buttress route, the way I did it, as being a very pleasant vertical bushwack. On steep rock, the cedars grew out from the rock and then upwards, forming perfect ladder rungs in a kind of J shape. It was quite unlike the nightmarish maple thickets you often encounter on approach hikes and, while upwards progress was sometimes impeded, a firm stair rung was quite beneficial. Three cheers for the Cascades!

It was indeed a long day. That is why I've recommended bivying at the base of the route, err, I mean, a couple hundred feet below. We were slow or late on the hike in (I don't remember) and we camped down in the trees before getting on the glacier and it cost us.

What'd you think of Dark Rhythm?

To the rack I would add a small handful or tiny nuts. RP's or steel whatever-they-are's to a small stopper or two. Thanks for a good day, Mr. Trog.

Trogdor has the lost water bottle. He and I went back yesterday and as we were walking back along the base of the wall we found it was on the trail. By the way, we did your rappel route from the Blueberry Terrace yesterday. What an exciting rap line!!! Very impressive. On the third rap we skipped the intermediate station with only old slings, and went straight to the next one down. Our 60 meter ropes were just long enough with about a half meter to spare. It is a good one for tying a knots on the end!

I would add that, to my eyes at least, the cliff is overall looking pretty good. Sure, there are some things I don't particularly approve of, and we could and sometimes should debate this or that specific bolt or bush, but Index has in my mind clearly been cared for. I really appreciate the fact that you no longer see heaps of rappel webbing all over the cliff, the trails are generally in good shape, and cleaning/pruning efforts have nearly all been undertaken with care to clean up the mess and avoid leaving hacked stumps or other unsightly or inconvenient mess behind.

Depending on where (3:00 rock for example), if there is no cloud cover in the morning and if the day starts out warm, you may find it is more comfortable to climb there in the afternoon.

I'll be on the dome. But don't worry, there are lots of great routes to choose from even if someone is on the one you're after. Crowding is generally not a problem at Darrington. The sun can be intense, though. Last time I was up there, with temps a little hotter than predicted for this weekend and no wind at all, some folks got baked off the rock.

That Whitchuck road remains closed and may well never be fixed -- the planning discussions and environmental review procedure continue, I believe, but there is no clear decision. At least some environmental groups have stated that they see the flood damage from two years ago as an opportunity to reclaim some roadless area and they intend to or have advocated that the roads NOT be repaired at all. In addition, the budgets are being cut so badly the F.S. can't afford to maintain what they have on the grid already, and the Whitechuck repair will be very expensive. The shortest approach may be from the N. Fork of the Sauk -- see the trip report from a week ago.

Oly told me to go to Darrington.

The Sisters can produce some seriously bad bug swarms. If you want mosquito's, go check out Red Meadow, below the east flank of South Sister. One thing that makes them more tolerable is to at least keep them off your face. Get a piece of mosquito netting and sew it into a pillow case. Then wear it over a brim hat.

To get water out of a talus slope, a 2 foot length of 3/8" tubing can be VERY helpful. However, you might want to reconsider your ambitions of drinking anything from the south slope of Mt. Adams. The Lunch Counter smells sort of like a sewer, and the throngs climbing up and down the hill have almost certainly fowled anything above there as well. (And I pretty much drink water freely and untreated everywhere I go.)

Not to make excuses for a clumsy system or anything, but is there anything about computers that is NOT a pain in the ass?

I think there is nothing inherently less reliable about a cam placement than a nut. Afterall, you can often place a cam in what would otherwise be a good nut placement and it is more secure than the nut because it will not fail when pulled upward or outward (yes something not likely to happen when you are actually on rappel but possible when you are setting up to get started). The possibility of a walking cam is much greater when fooling around at the starting point, too. Once you've started your rappel, I think weighting/unweighting the rope is not likely to cause a cam to walk unless you have some fancy rescue-type equalizing set up where things may move around given unequal weighting or perhaps when you make a diagonal start or something. Of greater concern with regard the reliability of a cam as a rappel anchor, I think, is that you can and may well use a cam in a spot where a nut would not go and which is inherantly less secure - like a parallel sided crack in shiny rock, as Gary describes, or a flaring crack, or behind a loose flake, etc.

Now go back to that gallery page and right-click the image. You'll get a URL that ends in ".jpg" and if you insert that between the image tags, you'll get a picture.

Nope. I'm commenting on the fact that if you read the article that PP linked, it sounds as if the U.S. was saying that they think they might have prevented the 7/7 bombings if only the British hadn't blocked their efforts to do so. It is all speculation, and everybody is just trying to make their political points regardless of any actual facts -- like those who said 7/7 would never have happened if only Spain hadn't pulled out of Iraq following the Madrid bombings. I'm saying that the connection with last year's bungling an ongoing intelligence operation targetting a British terrorist cell is probably just as clear as that the Bush spokespeople want to make now. You won't find them willing to talk about their screw up last summer, though -- only what they present as Brittain's lack of resolve eight weeks ago.

So you're saying the "Pup Effect" is for EVERYTHING to be covered in filth? The wire brush is man's best friend, huh? (Or should I say "pup's best friend.)

In Darrington, we call this the "Darrington Effect." Looking up at most any route from below you see all the lichen, moss and even bushes that grow beneath overlaps and on the downside of every knob and ripple, but the upward facing surfaces in any area that doesn't have an ongoing seepage issue are all clean 'cause anything that grows there gets taken off by avalanches and spindrift and ice creep during the winter. Sounds like you have the "Pup Effect" going on.

Does anybody remember when, last Summer, they had a mole working for U.S. or British intelligence, and the Bush administration blew that person's cover by telling the press they had inside information in an attempt to justify raising the terror alert during the Democratic convention? After this, the British had to hurry up and arrest a bunch of guys real quick and it virtually put a stop to what was until that point a very productive intelligence operation targetting a cell operating in Brittain. Who knows what they might have learned had they arrested this guy Puget refers to. It is equally feasible that, a year ago, the U.S. blew British efforts that might have prevented 7/7 as it is that, a month ago, the British denied a U.S. proposal that would have. A year ago we had a mole who was exchanging email with higher ups and forwarding his findings on to us. Would we have gotten crucial intelligence from this guy Aswat?

TO display an image, you have to put a complete address between image tags in the text of your post. . I believe there can be no spaces before and after the address, but that may not matter. Medium compression of a jpg file with photoshop results in a very viewable image for the web, and I think 600 x 800 will fit just fine. It will also fit the browser window unless somebody has some extremely narrow screen settings (try it to confirm the file size). Then you have to post it to a website somewhere so that it has a URL. If you want to put it in the photo gallery here, you may want to submit a slightly larger image than medium compression 600 x 800, but if you do and if the large size image as viewed in the photo gallery takes up an entire screen or more, it is more considerate to link the medium sized image from the photo gallery so that the thread remains readable without scrolling right and left. TO use an image from the photo gallery for viewing in a post, you will have to right click the photo as viewed in that gallery to get the actual URL for the photo iteself, rather than that for a page which loads the photo with all the photo gallery navigation and etc. appearing (if you just copy the address while viewing a picture in the gallery, it won't work).