chelle

Lover's Leap would be my suggestion. Awesome climbing and free camping. Donner Summit is good too, but not as much multipitch and I don't think the camping is as good as at the Leap.

worked on Sat morning. rode my bike on Sat afternoon, bought a cyclometer. my climbing partners all bailed on Sunday and so I rode around Mercer to check the distance with my new widget. 31.3 miles door-to-door. Hung out with great girl friends each night. All-in-all a great weekend.

Hey Stebbi. I'm going to be down there doing some aid climbing with a friend between the 16-20 or 21st. Gonna spend most of my 2 weeks in CA with the family. If you're around that early look for me in camp4. I will not have my truck cause I'm flying. Michelle

Bump. Need $600 but will entertain a fair offer. I'm headed back to school (just gave up a week's pay walking the GHC picket lines) and need some cash. It's nearly fall wall season in the valley aren't any of you heading down there and want a new stylish bivy?

You never know Dru. I didn't read that it was a strict 2 day fly-in-fly-out business only trip. Maybe he'd be inspired to take an extra day. Just passing along info. And if they're spanked after the 1st grade IV, they'll have an option besides sitting in the casinos wasting money.

Hi JK. If you get a chance to climb Frogland when you are there do it. It is really fun and despite what Layton said felt hard for a 5.8. Another great rest day activity is to hike up Bridge Mountain. It is very cool improbable looking 3rd class scrambling and takes you to a really neat summit. But had we not heard that while it looks improbable it is very doable before we started we might have turned back a couple times because it really looks more exposed than it is. Sticky rubber approach shoes will work well for the hike/scramble. Have fun.

Come on Josh. The comment was not the right way to show empathy or symapthy. And this "I was sooo sad when one day the cat just disappeared" makes it spray. The situation is sad and the climbing community lost a member.

CBS go spray somewhere else. This is a sad story and someone died.

Hey Off, There are some ant tree belays on lower cathedral and the lower brother areas. Funny how those ant covered trees smell sweet and acrid like raid.

Bring mosquito netting if you plan to sleep at the base. The mosquitoes were pretty bad 24/7 out there last week, maybe they're better after the rain now though.

Nearly new A5 double portaledge and expedition fly for sale $600. You'd pay about $1200 new. Buyer pays shipping. Send me a pm.

I'll trade you a set of metolius stoppers for the BD ones. They are in great condition.

If you drive up towards Bunny Flat out of the town of Mt. Shasta (look up approach info for climbing Shasta) you can pull off in the forest service land anywhere and camp. I'm not sure what the situation is closer down towards lake shasta, but you may get hassled...

You looking for $CDN or $US?

The wasps got me in Thailand at the top of the 1st climb we hopped on after dropping our bags in the room. Stuck my hand into this perfect pocket to the left of the chains and 3 black hornets came flying out stinging me. Got me twice before my belayer could get me lowered away from them. It all happened so fast it wasn't that scary. Knowing I had to climb up through that set of webs and that they could just lower down onto me, or that they'd fall on me when I knocked the web down was the creepy part. I gotta stop thinking about this or I won't be able to sleep tonight. Chao.

Maybe. But I can handle ticks. Strange but true. Ticks are slower and they don't spin webs so they don't creep me out as much.

You so funny! Sucks when they fly out of the frying pan for sure. Or hit you when you're on the deck of the boat. But I meant while rock climbing.

I got shut down today on a climb I'd thought about for months because of a particular little vermin that I simply cannot get my head around. I have climbed next to lizards, bats, snakes...I can handle them all. I cannot handle spiders! It appears that few people have recently climbed up Battered Sandwich at Index. I dealt with the occasional spider during the first 1/2 of the climb. I beat them away with my hand or a large size cam. I destroyed their webs. I thrutched my way up the lower part of the climb determined that I was going to get up this thing. And I made it up to that point without having to pull on my #3.5 cam this time. When I stood up at the little rest at the base of the chimney section I looked up and saw a maze of webs covering about 4 feet of the climb and about 15-20 dime sized (not including legs) spiders. They looked like tanish black widows. Eeek! I thought long and hard about what I was going to do. I really wanted this climb. I talked to my belayer about it. I took a few deep breaths and headed up a few feet, then decided I just couldn't do it. Ugh! I placed a piece and lowered. Bravely my belayer went up and without complaining cleared the way and then I got to climb up. All he said was man there are a lot of spiders up here. Thanks for understanding. What a great climb! Next time I am bringing my wisk broom to tape on the end of my nut tool. Anybody else have a particular kind of vermin that shuts you down?

Snowbyrd - I thought you were at GG saving a spot for people.

Glad you guys had a great time. I enjoyed that route immensely when I did it 3 summers ago on the weekend I signed my lease here in Seattle. Very fond memories. Thanks for sharing.

I've run into pretty large Mountie groups on da Toof (10), SEWS (10-12) and out on Shuksan (8). They were all right but should teach their students about the appropriateness of letting faster, more competent parties pass. But the most annoying experience with a large crowd in the back country was the 50-60 people climbing with RMI on the DC route on Rainier 3 summers ago. The snow conditions sucked and my party (3 teams of 5 up for a friend's wedding on the mountain so we weren't really small either) turned back at the base of the DC because the snow was 3" of breakable crust with 6" of sugar underneath. Stuff was already sloughing at 2 am. The RMI "bus" was not very understanding that we needed to get by them on the traverse and bitched about it the whole time we were passing. We turned back mostly because we didn't feel like getting to the top of the DC and waiting for so many bumblies to get up so we could go back down since a summit in those conditions was unlikely. It was funny to watch the RMI train later in the morning though fumbling their way back down the route around 7 in the morning. I was glad I got 3 more hours of sleep in the tent rather than wait for them up on the route...

My toes and parts of my feet go numb every year from nerve compression. The toes are mostly due to my rock shoes and the tops of my feet are sometimes numb to various degrees from boots (ski or climbing). The worst part of the healing comes when the nerves are close to being back to normal and I get random shooting pains through the ends of my big toes. Ouch!!! One thing to remember if your feet are numb is to take care of them because if you can't feel them you might get a bad blister or an infection that you don't know is bad until it is too late.

Give us a couple days to get new info up Lammy. We're all volunteers with day jobs.

Sounds fun!

Trang - check your pm's.