mattp

Yes, the roads in the east half of the park are closed. Coming from Spokane or points E-ward on I-90, You'll have to take I-90 to SR 18, just past North Bend, then head down to Puyallup and take 161 or 7 south to Mount Raininer.

I don't remember which gendarme was which. We went over the first one, if I am not mistaken, then started looking for ways around them. I'm pretty sure we traverssed around the second on the S. Side. For the upper tower, above the notch, we traverssed shortly right to gain a steep gully/chimney and then another bit of traverssing. I believe we counted 16 or 17 pitches.

When I climbed the route, there was absolutely nothing that one could call "solid" anywhere on it. Ice screws in rime and the occasional tiny drip of water ice over snow are a joke, and pickets in rime ice in warm sunshine or buried in colder snow beneath it weren't much better. We could get fairly secure belays by stomping a big hole and sitting in it, though, and actually there was one solid anchor--at the rappel point midway, we chopped down around the top of the pinnacle to be sure our anchor sling was around actual garbage rock rather than simply sunlit rime. It is still a fun climb, though. 'Hope you guys are able to go back and find it in slightly better shape next time.

We've had this discussion on this site each of the last two or three years, I think. I have become more and more convinced that beacons probably DO NOT save as many lives as has been suggested. The Colorado article cited above has a very small sample size, so from it alone I wouldn't accept any figure of 19 dead : 9 alive as necessarily indicative of what we will see in the long run. Their statement that nearly identical survival statistics have been reported in Switzerland tends to support these survival percentages, but still I thinik this does not tell the complete story. Later in the article it compares recovery rates using transceivers to those with other methods and the "results" for transceivers are not all that impressive, really. "Transceivers in the hands of recreationalists are even less effective than spot probing," it says, with spot probing being simply looking at terrain and probing in low spots or where you see a mitten on the surface or something. Might some of the successful recoveries using beacons have been also accomplished with spot probing? We don't know. The real drawback of the study and others like it is that they generally do not compare the overall survival rates for skiers and climbers who venture into the mountains with and without beacons. It is an open topic for debate, but I believe there is a very large likelihood that the use of avalanche beacons enables us to feel safer when measuring up a potentially dangerous slope. If the idea that we may be rescued enters into our analysis in any conscious or unconscious manner whatever, we may in fact choose to take risks we would otherwise have avoided. Consider, too, that our snow here in the PNW is generally heavier and wetter than elsewhere. I bet our survival rates for buried avalance victims are lower than they might be in, say, Colorado. I agree with the statement above that "beacons do save lives. Use them. If you've ever taken part in a probe line - you'll use a beacon everytime." However, consider the very real risk associated with venturing into avalanche terrain: like cj001f said: don't get caught!

Rodchester, My father is a professor who taught American foreign Relations at the University of Michigan for forty years, and he served for many years on a committee reviewing classified archives proposed for declassification and he has had an opportunity to learn a great deal about the history of American foreign interventions. Partisan views aside, he once offered this general principal: The history of American foreign intervention is a history of mistakes and unforseen consequences. The number of instance where we propped up some failing leader or inserted a new government somehwere or declined to do so and things turned out the way we expected them to is nearly zero. This is not a critique of one policy or another, it is merely a general statement. And I take the implication to be that we need to be VERY cautious and that very careful analysis of all available intelligence information should be undetaken before we commit to a certain policy -- whether we are making hurried decisions in the middle of a "war on terrorism" or looking ahead toward Southeast Asia in the year 2020. I agree with you that we will have to "wait and see" what happens in Iraq, but many of us do not believe our leaders were cautious enough in their rush to war last Spring.

Rodchester- Do you actually believe that we will allow a democratic government in post-war Iraq? I'm not an expert in Iraqi politics, but I would guess their FIRST priorities would be to evict the U.S. military and nationalize all oil industry infrastructure in the country and they'd likley be for Islamic rule and suppression of minority sects like Sunni's and Kurds. I have a hard time believing that "democracy" is what were after -- if by that you mean "one man, one vote."

Valid points all, Rodchester, but I think much of this "homeland security" B.S. is really just another part of GWBush's reelection campaign. After 9/11 they had to respond, and I'm sure they have some high quality security experts on the job, but we've repeatedly learned that it is just about as easy to get a boxcutter onto an airplane today as it was the day before 9/11. Similarly, I bet the opening of a letter from England once in a while has done little or nothing to reduce our possible exposure to letter bombs or deadly poisons. Meanwhile, we are reminded every day that we are a nation at war and that those bad guys from the Middle East want to kill us, and we are told GW has it handled for us.

I bet you're right that many many of them are trying to do just that, and I hope we are giving them sufficient support. I sincerely hope that niether Iraq or Afghanistan end up worse off than they were before.

I witnessed a burial on that Pan Point slope, about a mile out of the parking lot and at about 6500 feet, some years back. A large number of skiers were all climbing the slope at the same time when the top guy triggered a slab. When the slide stopped, several guys were caught in the debris, and one had only his hand showing above the surface. His buddies ran over to him and did a quick dog-paddle to dig him out. The route suggested by Clyde, along the ridgeline on the right side of that face, with small trees anchoring the snow, is probably the safest line.

Sorry PP, I can only repeat my prior statement. When they told us that the Iraqi's had wmd's and missiles and all this scary stuff, when they told us Saddam had an active nuclear and biological weapons program, and links with al queda, and etc., and when they said he would arm terrorists and that if we waited for a smoking gun it might come in the form of a mushroom cloud, they very clearly wanted us to believe there was an imminent threat. When he said in the SOU speech that there was no imminent threat but a clear and gathering one, he apparently knew there was no "imminent" threat but he certainly wasn't trying to reassure us that we had nothing to worry about in the short term. He did not belabor the point, and he most likely calculated that nobody would change their impression of an imminent danger in response to a half sentence in an hour-long speech - and the statement really did nothing to correct the mis-impression that he and his buddies had worked so hard to promote.

Most of the time, I think the locked heel WILL help. Just not all of the time. But on such days, most people would be better off staying at home anyway. Combat skiing is not for the faint of heart!

That's the point I made above: THAT is the discussion we should have been having. Instead of telling us "we gotta act now before he attacks us with devastating consequences" they should have been presenting a case about how we were going to have to go sooner or later and then was as good of a time as any (or maybe better for tactical or other reasons).

What are you talking about here, PP? I can't follow you. Didn't you assert that chucK was lying himself when he stated that Bush and co had lied about the imminent threat. Isn't the "canard" a false statement? I attempted to address how, your discussion of the meaning of the word "imminent" aside, that they in fact did try to make it sound like an imminent threat when they made their case that we had to go to war BEFORE the summer came and we couldn't wait for more inspections or negotiation or until our allies or the UN might want to join us. This is where you said they didn't lie, but in this matter I believe they clearly did -- through a complex combination of lies of commission and lies of ommission. ?????

PP- Now it's my turn to say "are you serious?" Bush and co verly clearly said that the Iraqi's had wmd's and missiles and all this scary stuff; they told us Saddam had an active nuclear and biological weapons program, and links with al queda, and etc. They clearly presented a picture intended to suggest that if we did not attack when we did, we would be instead be responding to the use of a nuclear device in Washington DC or something equally horrific. All of this was offered as our justification for going to war at a time when our European friends were asking us to give more time for sanctions and inspections, and many in Congress were asking why we couldn't even wait another 6 months but instead had to go to war right away. They made it sound very ominous and imminent, and they certainly did not say anything like "we've got him surrounded and we have little hard evidence that he is actually preparing to or equipped to attack anybody at this point -- we just think he's a bad guy and he would hurt us if he could." Your rebuttal of chucK's point was largely a red herring in that you were arguing how they didn't lie about the imminency blah blah blah while Chuck specifically said that the nature or extent of Bush's lying was not his point. (Unlike a canard, a red herring is a true or at least arguably true statement, but one that serves mostly to distract rather than clarify or contribute to the discussion.) You have very successfully turned the conversation away from the question of "when it is OK to lie to the American public about why we are going to war?"

Yes, it was the Gib Chute. A very fast descent in sloppy snow being warmed by mid-day sun and we were then walking back to Camp Muir. Climb (descent) over.

PP - ChucK thought we might talk about this topic without going back to the earlier debate over whether they lied in the first place, but you apparently cannot. Is it not a lie to say that they were purchasing aluminum tubes that can be used for production of enriched fuels when virtually every scientist who had looked at those tubes told them that the tubes could not be used for that purpose? ( I say "virtually every one" because there may have been somebody who said "well, maybe if ..." but I believe it has been reported over and over again and that it has not been refuted anywhere that the overwhelming if not 100% agreement was that the tubes were not for centrifuge's as reported by Bush and Co. and that this 95% or 100% agreement was known to them or at least would have been known to them if they bothered to read their own intelligence reports and alalysis.) Is it not a lie to say that Saddam tried to purchase enriched Uranium in Niger where the intelligence community, for over a year if I remember correctly, had been telling the White House staff that the evidence in support of that story was fake and it was probably untrue? Is it not a lie for various members of the Bush administration to have kept hammering away on the connection between Iraq and al Queda, promoting the public's general perception that Saddam was behind 911, without ever correcting that misunderstanding? (And don't try to tell me they didn't know they were being "misunderstood" on this pont - that ‘s absurd.) In my view, the discussion we should have had before going to Iraq would have been something like this: he's a bad guy, he's not coming around, and we're still messing around with sanctions after over ten years with little apparent progress and with bad side-affects. Isn't it time we just take him out? But instead, they DID lie and exaggerate and promote fear. ChucK asks: do you justify that and if so, HOW do you justify that?

I think the reason you'd go down that way is largely the same as the reason you might find it easiest to go up that way: it is the most direct route, and pretty mujch all the steep ground is on south facing slopes that will genearlly be more firm than N or NE facing ones. I've descended that way once, and yes - there were stones falling. I didn't want to stand still, but it wasn't really that big of a deal. On another occasion, when we feared stonefall, we simply continued down that "exit gully" and it seems to me that were down on nearly flat terrain within about 15 or 20 miniutes of leaving the top of Gibralter Rock.

I think he is correct that telemark gear is just as heavy as AT these days and, in my view, the telemark fad is largely a historical accident. It does have its advantages (and disadvantages) for backcountry skiing, though. Advantages: 1. telemark bindings make it easier to lift the tail of ski when touring, and stepping over logs and sidestepping around tree-wells and such, 2. telemark bindings are slightly better on rolling terrain and for touring (in my view the "drag" against heal lift is over-emphasized as a drawback by many AT propagandists) 3. telemark boots are slightly more comfortable for hiking 4. the telemark turn yields greater performance in certain types of terrain/snow (largely where slow-speed turns are useful, but also in certain slop and breakable crust conditions) disadvantages 1. telemark gear is not as releaseable and even with release plates it is not as safe in falls and maye not in avalanches 2. a telemark set-up yields lesser performance in almost all technical skiing situations (see above) 3. AT boots are better for technical climbing 4. telemark skiing is more strenuous We've debated telemark v AT on this site at least two or three times before -- run a search to find it.

The avalanche debris in the woods just past 3:00 Rock is gone, but I don't think that is a good way to get to Squire Creek Wall. Even with the big washout, it is miles shorter and avoids an unnecessary climb up and over Squire Creek Pass to approach SQW via Squire Creek.

The simplicity and ease of putting on/off of the bod harnesses is great, and many of them come without any padded waist or gear loops, so they are good when worn in conjunction with a pack. I like a lightweight "bod" type harness for general mountaineering, where I don't plan on spending much hang time, but I pretty much always use something else for rock climbing.

That "craggy" bit on the SE ridge of Mastiff is what I was referring to when I said it took three tries to find a "reasonable" way to climb Mastiff from the east. I've been up there with ski buddies who are not into technical mountain climbing, but twice we were turned back there by snow-plastered rocky scrambling in an exposed setting (we did not have ice axes or crampons or rope).

Nason Ridge is a cool feature because it stands 4,000 feet above the valey next to it and has no close neighbors so it provides a wide view. It is sub-alpine, and has a slightly higher feel then many of the other Stevens Pass area peaks. I haven't looked at the new (5 years old?) edition of Burgdorfer's book, but in the first edition he suggested Nason Ridge as a good ridge tour, but neglected to mention that there are several points where the crest is much more complex and or unfriendly than the map might suggest. From the East, it took, me three trips to find a reasonable way up Mount Mastiff, which requires a very steep traverse over to Lost Lake and then a climb up a bushy slope north from the lake, and then an avalanche-prone east facing slope to the summit. From the west, I know several parties who have tried to traverse from Rainy Pass and found it very unpleasant going in tight trees on steep side-hills. For the central part, I've been up both Howard and Rock Mountain several times and they are good day-trip objectives from Highway 2, but neither is straight-forward and there is a lot of work involved. The traverse between Howard and Rock Mountain will prove slightly complicated, I believe, and it may be necessary to drop fairly low around the SE ridge of a peak a half mile NE of Rock Mountain. I've also looked at the ridge from the air, and the north slope of Howard looks potentially more interesting than Rock.

Nope, never done it. The West face dumps you into Snowy Creek, draining north, though. Have you seen the North face from somewhere? Does it look good?

The West Face of Rock Mountain is a good ski run, visible on the left, is a good ski run.

Cracked: There has been some past discussion of this point, and I'm not sure whether anybody "won" the ensuing argument. However, if you look at Thinker's drawing, you'd realize that the "screamer" we are talking about in this discussion is the primal scream death fall or the full-ropelength "screamer."