mattp

All day on Monday and Tuesday, it is all about who can whine the loudest about smoke, yuppies, or having to drive accross town, and then there is the occasional grudge match that lingers for weeks or even months when somebody doesn't get their way. But if you hang in their long enough to find out where it's going to be, you'll be welcome. And if you show up, you'll find that it is just a bunch of the regular's and not-so-regulars from cc.com, talking about where they've been climbing or who offered the most clever post in the past few days. Once the beers start to roll, its all peace and love and AlpineK stops bitching about the pachuli oil, Captain Caveman turns out to be your best friend, and Dwayner and V even show up to sign autographs. Sometimes we have show and tell, with somebody's pictures or the latest new gizmo or whatever, and of course there is the occasional gear swap. To identify each other, we all wear helmets with our names on the front of them.

Be careful with the crampons -- it won't take much of an error to end up with a broken leg or torn knee or something. Personally, I'll concentrate on not falling with crampons on and leave the practice for somebody else.

Klenke - Most parties approach this climb as a mountain climb where the goal is to get to the top, and not as a rock climb where it matters exactly which variation you take on any given ten foot stretch of the route. I think very few if any parties feel compelled to stay right on the crest of the north buttress. Does that mean they should call it the NW Face? Not, in my opinion, if they are generally following the N. Ridge rather than heading out to the middle o the face. I did it twenty or twenty five years ago, and I remember detouring a little bit, but I remember it as a ridge climb and not as a climb of the NW Face. Matt

I think they make great trips, but the beach hikes can get rather crowded in the summer. They're best before Memorial Day or after Labor Day, in my opinion, and if you don't like crowds you might also consider deliberately going when the weather is not perfect. It's no fun out there in a major gale, and in a real monsoon you might even get stuck between the creeks on the southern wilderness strip, but it can be just fine out there in a normal wet-weather cycle if it isn't too windy. If you are planning a backpacking trip elsewhere on the Olympic Penninsula and find the weather is not looking as good as you like, consider heading for the beach.

Way to go Michelle. You didn't have to come forward and admit your sin, yet you did. I'm not advocating nailing the "clean routes" at Index, but I think you have plenty of company in using pins on them when it is wet or snowing out.

After getting a rappel rope stuck while retreating in the rain a couple of years ago, I prussik'ed up a long steep pitch using only the runners from my rack. If you do like ChucK says, and carry real runners instead of those stupid stiffy dog-bone draws, you can fashion prussiks any time. To keep one on your foot, simply make a girth hitch and step into it, then leave one strand of the hitch below your foot and slip the other up around your ankle.

I' m not implying that you're implying your were a badass. I am merely stating fact. YOU ARE BADASS, Erik! My only point was that I agree with Wayne that folks who are used to clipping bolts every three feet are going to find a couple places where that is not the case on the M.I.R. I didn't comment on whether there were too many or too few bolts, or whetherit was the world's best climb or anything -- we should hold that debate at the cabin after 27 parties from cc.com mob the route on Saturday. Now go back to work.

We could go to Hales with the understanding that "after hours" we'll head accross the street, to the Ballard Grill and Alehouse. Everybody wins, no?

Erik, you are one badass mothofo!!! There are runouts of more than three feet in a couple of places!

Wayne is right. The "Methow Inspiration Route," although heavily bolted, has a few spots on it that will give many sport climbers a little pause.

Did anybody pick up my hiking shoes I left stashed near the Eightmile Lake trailhead?

Wrong again, PLC. Every lawyer I know settles the vast majority of their cases. I agree with you about one thing, though. There are a lot of jerks in the legal profession. I think Rod is right that most lawyer's are decent people who are just trying to do their job, but there are plenty of jerks to go around. However, there are a lot of combative idiots for clients, too. Indeed, anytime a client walks into my office and tells me that they have a long history of legal problems, I immediately assume they must be a jerk and further discussion or involvement shows that this assumption is correct, more-often-than-not.

PLC- If you are settling frivolous slip-and-fall cases filed against you for $15k, particularliy if you are settling them before the plaintiff has even spent the time and money to work up their case, you have a crappy defense lawyer or, more likely, your propery insurer is throwing away their money . If you don't like this, shop around. -Matt

PLC- There is already a statute that provides that one who files a frivolous lawsuit pays the attorney's fees of the other side, and the civil rules also make ample provision for this kind of compensation. While it is true that the courts do not enforce these kinds of rules as often as they should, your idea is not a new one nor is it one that anybody would disagree with (including the personal injury lawyer who shares an office with me). The problem is that, with our adversarial legal system (Plaintiff v. Defendant or Prosecutor v. Defense Attorney), the Judges know that neither party is likely to be telling them the whole story - so they really need some clear evidence of someone's attempt to manipulate the system before they can conclude that that someone actually did so. I haven't really studied the issue, but I believe that abuses of the legal system go both ways - and in my experience it seems that defense attorneys are more likely to obfiscate, delay and generally manipulate the process because the defendant can confuse the matter and thereby weaken the plaintiff's case, or they may postpones any monetary loss by causing delays in the process, whereas the plaintiff's reward comes from proving their case and game-playing is not only expensive but it risks seriously weakening their credibility with the Judge or Jury. It costs a lot more money to put on a lawsuit than you might think and I do not know a single plaintiff's attorney who can pay their overhead, let alone derive any income, from "nominal" settlements. The seriously frivolous lawsuits that I have known of have almost all been filed by people who are representing themselves, and either seeking to pay back a pesky neighbor or boss, or to make some kind of political statement. As you stated, anybody can file a lawsuit whether or not they have any grounds for it, and responding to a frivolous lawsuit can be expensive, but I worked for a King County judge for two years and I can tell you that in actual fact I only remember one blatantly frivolous lawsuit coming before "my" judge in that entire time. There were indeed probably more than that, and maybe there were tons of truly frivolous cases that settled out of court for a nominal amount, but I remember only one out of over a thousand cases where I actually had some knowledge of the matter through reviewing legal briefs or watching courtroom arguments and where it was clear that the suit had absolute no basis. I am sure you can log on to some anti-attorney website and find some statistics that show how common these lawsuits are, but I believe the anti-trial-lawyer crusade is distorting the issues in a major way. -Matt

Most parties do not continue from the top of the North Face to the summit but, rather, walk down the Hanging Glacier-Curtis Glacier to the White Salmon descent. Those parties that do continue to the summit usually walk around the south side of the mountain to complete the climb via the normal gullies above the Sulphide Glacier, and then continue around the mountain through Hell's Highway and back to the White Salmon descent. It will be a pretty long day if you include the summit climb, and right now I bet it would be made even longer by an isothermal (rotten) snowpack in the basin below the north side of the mountain.

Josh, I understand your dislike for the idea of paving trails because they seem like an unnecessary intrusion of civilization into the mountain environment. However, some of those paved trails may be paved to prevent erosion as much as to facilitate wheelchair access and either way I think it is pretty cool that a wheelchair can get out of the parking lot at Paradise or up to Lake Anne at Rainy Pass or whatever. After all, even at Mount Rainier (which is probably the place where you see the most of this kind of thing) there is a pretty small area around a couple of parking lots where you find paved trails and 99.999999% of the park is free from this "intrusion." I have at times wondered whether it was necessary to build such a huge trail at Big Four Mountain (its not paved but it may as well be), but when I talked to the guy who runs the trail program for Mt. Baker Snoq Natl Forest about it, he explained that over 90% of their visitors in the region go to that one spot and he seemed to feel that, by making it easily accessible and maintaining it as an attractive destination for the hordes, they were not only serving an important segment of the recreational user community but they were probably actually reducing overall impact by concentrating it in a single location.

I agree that it is easier to stay high on the approach, but I'd have to say that I've gone in and out of there several times and, in the Spring, it is not all that bad if you drop down low. If one of the gullies you have to cross in order to "stay high" forces you to drop down, don't sweat it.

The little gremlin is getting ready to jump for the first clip on a sport-climb.

As much as I object to the ideas behind the trailpark passes and the wilderness permit lotteries or the climbing fees at Mount Rainier, I have almost never found it all that difficult to comply with the relevant regulations. It can get pretty spendy some times, and the whole idea of paying to used public lands seems wrong to me, but the issues are, for the most part, political and not practical -- unless you really want to go to a highly popular destination like Camp Schurman or Boston Basin or the Enchantment Lakes on a weekend. Some here will rant about how they can't plan their drive to the N. Cascades in order to be at the ranger station during business hours or whatever, and there is some truth to these kinds of complaints. However, in my 30 years' of climbing in Washington, I can only think of a couple of times when it wasn't relatively easy to get the required permit. I've twice been denied a permit to go the Enchantments, and I've had a ranger at Marblemount insist that a planned bivvy on the N side of the W. Ridge of Forbidden Peak was in the "Boston Basin permit area" and therefore would not be allowed when that permit area was full. I've also had to camp a thousand feet above or below Camp Schurman on Mount Rainier. But for me, the question of whether to go without a permit largely boils down to what kind of a political statement you want to make. Personally, I don't think playing hide and seek with the rangers is going to make a very effective political statement. If you object to permits, I think you should write letters to your congressional representatives, the Park Superintendent, the newspaper, or whatever; you should attend public meetings and speak your mind; you should contribute time and money to organizations who are fighting the fees.

Erik's right. Any moron you meet out there is a moron. And lots of moron's is way worse than just a few. Go rock climbing in the Fall and skiing in the Spring if you don't like moron's, but whether or not there is a posted "mountie alert" I wouldn't expect to find all the easy climbs empty and available at Index or Leavenworth or Vantage or North Bend on a nice day on a weekend in April or May. And I certainly wouldn't expect anybody to announce, in advance, that they are going to be at such and such a crag with 25 of their moron friends -- at least not on this bulletin board -- because they'll catch nothing but flack for it. If you get warning of an impending mountie outing, be thankful. If the mountie moves their rope so you can do a climb, be thankful. But as rude and competetive as most of us are, you really don't have any right to demand it because I doubt most of you would move your rope for them if you thought that one of your friends might still want to take another lap on it and I don't see many of you announcing that "Hey, you might not want to climb Outer Space on Saturday, because I'm taking my girlfriend and two of our gym-friends up it and we're going to be slow."

Yeah, what Fleb said. This weekend is out for me. Bring the boy and let's do it next weekend, Dave. Jah Erik will show him how to hold a proper safety meeting.

Snakes?

Wedgewood just won't cut it on TAX NITE. Downtown is the only place to be ... AlpineK is right: Owl and Thistle! Bring all your tax returns. If you have any class at all, you don't mail the return until 11:59 p.m., and the downtown P.O. is the place to do it. We should have a pretty good turnout and folks like Dave Schuldt shouldn't be going home at 8:00 p.m.

Jon is right, we've had significant discussion about this, at least in the moderator's forum, and I think on the more public parts of the board too. I believe there are good arguments for and against keeping route reports free of any follow-up discussion, but I tend more toward allowing follow-up discussion but asking folks to stay on topic. If you want an on-line guidebook, the bivouac.com format is certainly better than cc.com in as far as it is much easier to log on, type the name of a peak, and determine right away whether there is any recent route report, or even an old one. Useful information is never buried in spray because there isn't any spray. However, there is also no discussion on bivouac.com, and you can email the author if a route report if you want to discuss something about a climb but you cannot post a question or comment where others will read it. There is no way to ask: "does anybody know how much snow lingers on the descent from Snow Creek Wall right now? Or in the follow up to somebody's post, there is no way to post "hey, that climb sounds really cool, but I don't think it's as hard as all that, or later in the season there is a better descent if you head rightward and avoid all the loose talus encountered by heading straight down, or whatever. In other words, I think the conversational format probably adds more information to the mix, as long as that extra information doesn't just get lost in a bunch of baloney. Look at the Dragontail Peak discussions lately -- for the most part folks are staying on target and exchanging useful information and a couple of route reports from those who were successful would not be quite as informative (those who retreat rarely post their reports, but they do join in discussing the climbs in this conversational format). Some folks have suggested we could have the best of both. They suggest we keep route reports unadulterated and allow follow-up discussion in another part of the board. That would be an option, I suppose, but do we really need two Alpine Lakes forums -- one for original reports and anther for follow-up? Or would we send all follow-up discussion to, say, the Climbers' forum where it would not be categorized by area? I think Timmy has a good idea with his effort to peg certain particularly interesting route reports like a reported first ascent of some significant objective, or perhaps something that is just plain well-written, but beyond that I kind of like the current format. As we are able to ask people to stay on topic in the route reports forums, I think they will become more useful for those who just want the information and don't care to read the BS, but there will always be a trade-off because we'll have to choose between more highly regulated and well-organized formats and those that are looser but allow more exchange of information. And apart from the research-ability question, of course, there is the question of whether we want to be like some dead website where we assume nothing interesting ever happens.

Tax night is the big event, folks. GregW is going to be down there, burning an American flag to protest the payment of Taxes, and Trask is going to be holding up signs with pictures of something disgusting in an effort to protest... well, just in an effort to express himself. Jay_B and JB are going to be stading on opposite sides of the street with megaphones, and even Peter Puget will be there, but he won't identify himself. Dryad and Catbirdseed will be coordinating a silent vigil in Rainier Square.