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Hey Bronco, YOU RULE! And I don't work at no insurance company I have been on my way to fork over $250 to Feathered Friends for that serendipity jacket for, like, a month or something, but I couldn't bring myself to pay that much for a jacket even if I had already decided to get one. And I was dead sure I'd never find those things on sale - but, they still had three left in small, color I wanted, at the Sierra Trading Post! So, Bronco, YOU RULE, because you personally saved me $90. Whee. Your beer's on me if we run into each other at the pub or something. Ecstatic/stebbi

I heard you guys had some kind of home-made rock shoe crampon in the works for your Patagonia trip? Is it true or am I just gullible?

I was up there two weeks ago, it's sweet - very different than it is earlier in the season but just as nice a climb. The trail up Shannon Ridge is in good condition, it was easy to lose in the shrubs in June but not any more. Or maybe we just lost it because we were going up kinda early. The worst part of the hike is from the Ridge up to the Sulphide, it has some dusty trail, some boulder fields and some (very low) angle slabs. The Sulphide itself isn't at all cut up. Once you're up to high camp, just keep left until you're past the steep slope, then turn east and go for the summit pyramid. The summit pyramid itself has no snow on it whatsoever. It's nice to have a rope to rap down if you don't like downclimbing, but other than that it is pretty much a scramble.

Ah, what a dilemma, paying the Forest Service or paying Terrible Ted.

Now, if Cascade climbers were a religious organization, then we'd hike, run, scramble and climb but we wouldn't really be recreating would we? What does it take to form a religious organization around here?

Actually the only reason I want straps is that I want to be able to use them with lighter boots too, ones without grooves. The crampons I mentioned are also available with step-in bindings. I've heard over and over again that the BD Sabretooths are among the best crampons you can get for alpine stuff. Haven't tried them myself though, but the design looks nice. Those would be what I would get if I were buying a new pair for all-around use in WA.

I met Stim Bullitt sport climbing at Little Si today. Way cool guy. Wonder if I'll be able to climb like that when I'm his age, like a 100 years from now.

I have a pair of Salomons, Super Mountain 9 Guide I think (blue w/ orange). I've been on rock through 5.8 in them, all the WA volcanos and a number of peaks in the North Cascades and Olympics, and a few frozen waterfalls. I really like them, even for those long approach slogs... I'm not quite sure what the difference between the 8/9 is but the 8 probably aren't quite as stiff. That would mean they're not as good for technical ice and rigid crampons. They'll work great on snow climbs and lower-angle ice climbs unless you're planning on multi-day winter climbs - a plastic double would work better for that because you'd have an easier time keeping your feet warm and dry with the removable liner in the sleeping bag every night... I use a pair of Grivel Rambos, which work great for technical ice but are way overkill for French technique on low-angle snow - like on the volcanos and the Cascade climbs I have been on. I got them for waterfalls and wound up having to add anti-bots, which are the most hateful, screwiest piece of gear I know about. One of these days I'll get a nice pair of horizontal-oriented strap-on aluminum crampons, like those Stubais, or so I keep telling myself.

So what small, local shops are we talking about? Most of the shops I regularly go to around Seattle have some kind of niche and may not really be that threatened by mail-order. The Marmot store and Feathered Friends both sport their own brands of very high quality gear, if their prices can be beat by mail-order from Europe then they basically deserve to lose business. Both also do a lot of rentals. Second Ascent does a lot of second-hand, which is a see-before-you-buy kind of thing. And Jim, well, if you catch him in a good mood he knows everything about climbing around here and what gear to take, which means great service - plus his prices are way low. I bought a summer sleeping bag in Vancouver about a month ago, Integral Designs which is Canadian, and paid about the same price I'd have paid Jim if he'd had the right size in stock. Maybe a little more even. What other stores are we talking about? Some of the gyms sell stuff, but that's obviously not what keeps them going. Oh, and finally, sometimes you just need that piece of gear right now and then the local guy beats mail-order hands down. I wouldn't do mail order except if I had a fairly big order to make, in the hundreds of dollars, and I very rarely have that kind of money to spend on gear. It tends to be $10-50 every now and then, one more cam, one more hex, right before that trip when I just really, really need whatever size...

Oops, forgot one thing - there should be a decent optical viewfinder, and you should be able to turn off the LCD panel. You won't see anything on the panel in bright sunshine anyway, and they burn batteries like hell. Save those rechargeables for actually snapping pictures, get a big memory card, then look all you want at home...

Hullo Capt'n. Here are the top-of-the-list things I'd look for if I were in the market for a new digital camera right now - Number 1, 2, 3: a good lens Number 4, 5, 6: at least 2 megapixel CCD Optical zoom, preferably 3x Focus/exposure lock (half-press button etc) Compact flash storage (type II if possible) Small form factor/light camera OK for cold, wet/hot, dusty conditions Cheap, because it might break Of course you can't have all of them in a single camera... Nikon has really good lenses. Sony uses Zeiss lenses that I understand are good. The Canon Elf apparently doesn't have quite as good a lens. Olympus is another company that has good lenses. I don't know much about the quality of the various CCDs beyond that for $500 you'll definitely get two megapixels. The Canon Elf is a sweet form factor for climbing, and has an extra bonus: For $50 you can get a see-through box on it that makes it waterproof down to 3 feet, dustproof, even insulates a little bit against cold/heat. That's pretty neat. The Nikon Coolpix 775 also has a very nice form factor, but Nikon doesn't sell a nice box like that for the Elf. Darn, eh. Sony uses those @#$% memory sticks which is stupid and locks you in to using Sony only. Compact flash is much better, it lets you share the cards between lots of devices from various manufacturers (and comes in large sizes). Compact flash type II rocks - that lets you use IBM microdrives which you will have a really hard time filling even if you snap all day. You'll pay more than $500 for a camera that takes type II though - the Nikon Coolpix 995 is somewhere between $700 and $1000. Another nice thing about these Nikons is that they take adapter lenses. I have an older Nikon, the Coolpix 950. It's a 2.1 megapixel camera and much more durable than I anticipated when I bought it - I took it to the summit of Rainier 10 days ago and it worked fine; it was cold enough that my film camera malfunctioned. I did keep it inside my fleece jacket and in the sleeping bag at night. If you're shopping for a bargain, earlier this week I heard on the radio that one of the downtown photo shops is selling the 950 for ~ $500. That's a neat price - they're $700 most places and I paid between $900-1000 two years ago. I don't remember which store though but I guess you could make some phonecalls to find out. Does anyone have experience with Olympus digital cameras? Does Olympus have a small form factor camera, like the Elf and the Coolpix 775? Cheers/stebbi

I've used the Simond Piranha, I really like them. Very versatile - I wish I had a pair Simond's steep water ice tool, the Naja, is also really nice. For a good laugh, go to www.simond.com and check out the Scud. That has got to be the funkiest ice tool ever. Anyway, according to the Simond web they have a contact in Canada. VERTICAL ADDICTION Contact : Benoit Gosselin DAVIDSON 2092 MONTRÉAL QUÉBEC HIW 2Y8 Canada Phone : 001 514 526 18 30 Fax : 001 514 814 42 18 E.mail : benoitgosselin@hotmail.com

I have the same decision to make, I want to replace my 13 years old -5 degree synthetic bag (still going strong, I think it's made of steel) with something less warm and oh-so-much lighter and more compressible. I like to sleep on snow in a bivi bag, which can make for pretty bad condensation, wet toeboxes etc. so I figured I'd stick to synthetics. I thought I had made up my mind to get an Integral Designs Renaissance, $200 for what I think is a *really* nice 20 degree primaloft bag, but all this down advocacy has me rethinking the matter. Has anyone used the renaissance? Thumbs up? Any good or bad experiences with primaloft? Can anyone suggest one or two down bags I could check out that are comparable to the renaissance in terms of warmth?

Thanks Rodchester. Was primaloft ever used much? Looks like most companies use polarguard. I was trying to figure out why, smells like marketing to me. Something about a small company that makes primaloft vs. a bigger one with polarguard, blah-dee-blah. If someone reading this has worn out a primaloft bag (or has one that's still going) I'd sure like to hear from you... Jim Nelson seems to like them enough.