mattp

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.

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.