mattp

Indeed, it often is a condescending way to describe a climb but I'd say it is also a rather vivid one that is succinct and has significant meaning -- and the meaning os not necessarily sexist or critical of women. Nat makes a good point about how his reaction to his wife's fluctuating confidence level or fear might be different than his reaction to some other partner's, but I think he understates the matter significantly. For the same or similar reasons to the fact that ski instructors always try to separate couples or parents with their children, I think it is quite important to pick low-stress outings at least at the outset of one's climbing career with their wife or girlfriend and unless they have something to prove, I bet most women would pick a very comfortable climb for their first outing with their new boyfriend, too. My advice to anybody taking their newbie wife/girlfriend/husband/boyfriend/gay lover/or their child climbing is to pick a very easy outing, preferably to a place where you know exactly what to expect. If you have some kind of competitive thing going with them where this would be an insult of some kind, or beneath you, I think the odds are great that you are not going to enjoy climbing with them anyway. I've seen not only any possible interest in climbing destroyed by being overly ambitious, but I've seen it take a serious toll on relationships as well.

I feel your pain there, Foraker, but I think the selfish yob and his newbie friends probably have as much a right to be there as you do and if you are a regular climber, that experience may in fact be a lot more significant for those newbies than it would be for you. I bet lots of us wish somebody would have taken us up a classic like that when we were newbies. If you don't want to wait for other parties, I'd suggest you stay away from climbs like Nutcracker. Don't even think about dlimbing Outer Space.

Catbird, I am surprised if you have spent much time at Vantage and you don't have a keen awareness that it is more prone to rockfall than any other climbing area in Washington. No place else in the State do I avoid setting a belay right below a climb and there is no place else where I spend much time worrying about just sitting on the ground near where others are climbing. No place. Call me superstitious, I guess, but the number of rockfall accidents there almost certainly exceeds all other rock climbing area in the state combined. I think you would be doing folks a disservice if you in any way suggest that "it is no big deal." It is manageable, but it is a serious issue that requires careful management.

Summer will eventually be here. This was ChucK, below Jacob's Ladder, May 2, 2003:

You can still cross that bridge, though, and if you play your cards right you may not get a soaker out of it.

I'd say tread lightly. I have a friend who restores furniture, and he spends a lot of time and money NOT to refinish or even truly scrub things. It is a simple item, so I bet you could clean it up without messing with the original finish and without destroying the petina, and I bet that'd be maximum value.

He's definitely part mad-scientist. Go follow one of his routes and you will agree. Buy some gear from him and maybe he'll let you take a spin on his merry-go-round.

jaee - It may not be as much of a double standard as you think. When there is new snow or deep snow, I generally opt for skiing over climbing. This is most of the time when the avalanche hazard is rated "moderate" or above. For winter technical climbing, I usually look for a period of time where the snow is set up and the avalanche hazard is minimal. Further, the terrain I want to ski is almost exclusively prime avalanche terrain.

To Erden's explanation, I would add that if you have your biners both oriented the same way on your draws, you will not end up with one of the gates facing the rock when you use it in a corner. One of my partnes insists on racking all his draws with the gates opposite of each other - that's how he keeps it consistent - but I think it is better to keep them facing the same way as Erden describes.

Derivative, but rocking: Outshined, and several other cuts from Badmotorfinger. Soundgarten didn't do a damned thing that Led Zeppelin didn't do twenty years earlier, but who's complaining? I've got an audioslave CD, but who else is doing the heavy metal thing with that kind of vigor right now? (By the way, don't miss the Melvins next week if you want to bang your head!)

Yeah, but was the song about a Hurricane? (By the way, it makes you wonder if they are wearing insulating shoes or something, doesn't it? All that power, and they're jumping up and down in piles of cords and stuff, in the rain...)

Hurricane, during the encore at Gorge: all hell broke loose from the sky and sheets of water were blowing accross the stage, and you could see water splashing up off the drums!

Cortez the Killer is a great song, but what about TAD. Nobody's talking about TAD!!!!! Jack Pepsi in a small club

Mitch Ryder kicks ass. You gotta learn some respect, Mr. ChucK! Do you hate Jimi Hendrix, too? Sheesh.

I'm sympathetic to your argument there, RobBob: much of what is currently hot is highly derivative. However, there's been some kick ass derivitave music, that's for sure! I have a historical correction, though: Rap is 30 years old. The Last Poets and Gil Scott Heron were doing it in the early '70's although it came into its own as a new genre with GrandMasterFlash about 1980 or so.

Where do I sign?

It sounds like you've pretty much figured out when it is a good idea to pre-place runners on your cams, Catbird -- when you believe you know exactly what to expect. I'll sometimes do this when I can see the entire pitch from the base, as at Vantage, or when I have climbed the pitch before and I can remember that the #2 camelot should have an extra long runner or whatever. I'll rarely do it in any other situation. As noted above, I do not always place a separate runner on my cams if it is a straight-line crack and the factory runner seems adequate. However, I belive that failure to add a runner was one of the factors cited as having contributed to the fact that a cam or cams may have been out of position when Goran Kropp was killed. Even though the crack on Air Guitar is straight as an arrow, I believe that his lead rope may have been swept back and forth or in and out as he moved past some of his pieces.

Nooksack Tower The Bertulis route is good, too.

I've enjoyed the run down from the Lake, too, but the trail from there out to the parking lot can be very challenging with a deep trough down the middle of it and not enough bail-out options if the snow surface is firm or otherwise unfriendly. Anybody who has done many Cascade ski approaches other than some drive-up volcano route should know to expect this, though.

I'd be a little shy about recommending the Price. I know it's in 50 crowded climbs and it is a very beautiful place, but the route passes beneath a whole lotta seracs and the upper headwall is steep and northeast facing so it tends to hold lingering avy danger. The apprach is not trivial either. It is generally climbed as a carry-over, with a bivouac somewhere on route and a car shuttle. It's not a death route, but I don't think it is one to take lightly either. I've climbed the North Face in early May and it was a very pleasant alpine romp. Dru's right, too, that the White Salmon is a good choice in May. I've skied it twice at that time of year. On a nice weather weekend, the Sulphide Glacier can be downright crowded in May.

Don't go to Chamonix.

The problems with crapping in the woods are at least twofold: (1) you are potentially fouling the water supply and (2) you are leaving a mess behind. It is a relatively simple and obvious thing to follow the advice about not taking a dump near any stream or lake, but minimizing the likeliehood that somebody else is going to step in your shit or find your toilet paper seems to be more difficult for many people. In wet western Washington woods it is a good idea to burn your toilet paper and I don't know what scrambled legs' problem is. Don't try this in Leavenworth in August, though, or you may torch the whole place. In the forest, scratch a cat-hole in the duff and then bury your load when you get done. Above treeline, it is probably better to leave it on the surface if you are in an out-of-the way place, but maybe not in some popular area like Boston Basin. Do not cover it up with a rock - this preserves it for the next guy to find when they are looking for rocks to hold down their tent - and it will last under there as a recognizeable pile of shit and toilet paper for years.

I would not recommend the Sickle based on my one experience with it. I descended that way after climbing the Mowich Face about ten years ago, in late July, and it seemed to have hundreds of seracs poised above it. Moreover, there were a couple of borderline technical bits to it, so it was not a particularly fast way down either. There was some very steep terrain involved in downclimbing over St. Andrews rocks, as well, and on balance we wished we had simply descended back down the Mowich as my partner had suggested when we were standing on Liberty Crest and I said "hey - the book says the Sickle is a good way to go -- let's try it."

Many moons ago I took several groups of new or relatively inexperienced climbers up the Emmons Glacier route and we probably had about a 50% success rate. The one time I took a group of inexperienced climbers up the Tahoma, we made it only to about 10,500 feet before concluding the venture was doomed for lack of momentum. It had taken us 2 days to reach a high camp that was still fairly low, and it was obvious that we weren't going to find our way through the maze of mid-season crevasses on the Tahoma Glacier and complete a climb to the summit in anything like a reasonable amount of time. We had a great trip, though -- it is a beautiful side of the mountain and everyone was having a good time. While the Tahoma Glacier route is not really more technically demanding than the Emmons, there is more mountaineering involved.

-- and then looting it.