Don_Gonthier

February 14th...(bring your valentine...or not!) doors open @ 6 p.m. starts @ 7 p.m. students: $5 public: $8 This is going to be a truly great event! For more information: PSU Outdoor Program (503) 725-5668 www.odp.pdx.edu, odp@pdx.edu The MountainFilm website: www.mountainfilm.org three hours of rock climbing & swimming, trampolines, environmental & human rights issues, sled dogs, Soviet espionage, mountain climbing, kayaking and cartoons! The feature film, Daughters of Everest, spotlights the first group of Sherpani (women Sherpas) who attempt to climb Mount Everest. please attend, you won't be disappointed!

Sorry Stiffler. I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't a fun trip, its just that when normal folks are around the "wrestling with my personal deamons in the bleak wilderness" thing can feel a little silly. It's way too easy to find something sensible to do with my time. After all, would you want to climb the runout choss with your mother watching. Anyway. I stand by the interesting description. We didn't get high enough to get really scared and there was gear but it was hard to get in and hard to tell whether it would hold a fall. I would like to go back, I just might not get any higher than last time. By the way, does anyone know where I can find some personal deamons?

I've been there. Tried to do the 5.7 on the upper pillar. Only got up about 30 feet. The climbing wasn't that hard as far as we got and didn't look any worse, at least to the top of the first pitch, but the rock is interesting and there is not much good gear. I wouldn't mind going back so long as we don't also bring along significant others and siblings and their dogs. Getting scetched on bad rock with shitty gear is a joy best savored with only a belayer around.

Sorry, you are right. The first class was on the 6th. It has met only once so far.

If anyone is interested learning to lead bolted routes, there is still some room open in the class I teach at Clackamas Community College. Its called Rock Climbing/Intermediate PE 185 124. It is a 1 credit course and costs $68 for the 11 week term and meets Thursday nights from 6:30 PM to 9:20. It started January 3rd but it is not too late to sign up. Instruction takes place at the college and will cover the basics of leading, anchor building and rappeling. Students should be able to belay and be familiar with basic equipment. Students supply their own harnesses, belay device and rock shoes. If you have any questions, you can post them here or call 503-657-6958 ext. 2988.

I'll vough for the strange sounds at Index. About 5 years ago we were at the Great Northern Slab and were treated to about 2 hours of the craziest sounds coming from across the river. It was obviously human but contained no identifiable words. Moaning, screaming, the works. Amazing experience, I wish to god I had a tape recorder. We asumed it was aretarded hillbilly on a bender.

The truth is that it would probably be O.K. But no one on this board or any where else could tell you without knowing more about the rope. Working load is not a really useful number for judging whether a rope is acceptable for climbing. The first problem is that "working load" may be deffined differently between manufacturers and specific industries. I've seen ropes with working loads between one quarter and one tenth of the breaking strength. So the range for the above rope would be roughly between 1000 and 2500 lbs breaking strength. You might notice that the larger number isn't that far from the breaking strength of climbing rope and webbing. Then you get into how do you measure the breaking strength of a rope. Is it just the load at which the average rope in a sample breaks or is it 1 or 2 standard deviations below the average. In other words, is it O.K. if half of them break at lower loads or one in a hundred or one in a thousand. I imagine it depends on the industry and how much insurance the manufacturer wants to pay for. For most ropes you buy at the hardware store none of this information is available. This means that there is no way to tell the strength of the rope from the information you've given. One reason climbers use a particular type of rope is that this information is available for each piece of rope and equipment. Second, it is likely that the rope you have is a static rope, one constructed to limit stretch. Climbing ropes tend to the other extreme. They are dynamic, constructed to enhance stretch. This quality of the rope is far more important for climbing than the strength. Again, with a climbing rope these properties are all spelled out by the manufacturer so there is no guess work. Most of the people on this board will be agast that I would suggest that a static rope was exceptable but remember that falls while crossing glaciers are going to be anything but static. There is nothing like dragging your partner across the ice to limit impact forces. Hundreds of falls were caught on hardware store hemp and twisted nylon back in the day. Many climbers would contemplate using 8 and 9 mm static rope on simple glacier routes but not a rope with unkown properties. Finally the question of experience does come up. Most climbers have already made decisions about what techniques and equipment they would accept on particular climbs and don't ask questions about the strength of rope. If that is not the case I apologize, but I assume your experience is limited. I would suggest that the experience of the climber has more effect on the safety of the party than the type of rope. In other words, the best equipment in the hands of someone who doesn't understand how to use it can have far worse consiquences than crappy gear in the hands of experienced climbers. In my opion, roping up on a glacier is the best example of this in all of climbing. Look back on accidents on Hood and Rainer involving more than one climber and I believe you will find that the particular type of rope used has little to do with the cause of the accidents. Far more important are questions like when to rope up, when do you take it off and how do you travel when you have it on? If you don't have an answer to these questions, it makes little difference what rope you take. That said, the 8mm for 66.95$ sounds like a great deal.

I climbed one of the needles with Stifler. They are basalt, similar to Vantage. There are a bunch of them and each one is a little different. Most seem to be just eroded out columns. Some of them may have had a little help from some sliding. They represent several different flows of Columbia River Basalt so while one pinnicle looks pretty solid, another on a cliff band above may look like a horror show. Needless to say, the PG/R rating is probably well deserved for most of them. I didn't climb the 5.7 but looking at it from below its obvious that the summit of the pillar is shattered and only resting on the base. The 5.5 was not too bad and I got to the notch on another that looks even better. If I were to go back I would take a regular rack, nuts and cams, also a bolt kit and a few small pins for beefing up crappy rap anchors. The truth of the matter is that the rock in the pinnicles is kind of shattered but the stuff behind them doesn't look all that bad.

My guess from the pictures above and from haveing done the route is the West Face. It's the easiest route in that area at 5.6 and the guide paints it as a moderate route. As I remember though, it was under-rated, more like 5.8 or 9 and it was poorly protected, at least an R if not an X on the crux pitch. I have talked to others who have climbed it and all agreed. One person I know has climbed it 3 times and said that there is a way to make it 5.6 but it involves an inobviouse traverse at the start of the crux pitch. If it is the West Face this is the second accident involving anchor failure on that route in 4 years. It might be a good idea to get the word out that that route and the entire Mt. is a bit more of an adventure than the guide books would imply.

Bill. The guy who chopped your route claimed to have done it several years earlier without the bolts and with reasonable protection. The guy is a long-time Portland climber and I believe him when he says he did the route before you placed bolts in it. It seems to me that one way to avoid the "you bolted my route and now I'm going to chop it" bolt wars is to have some kind of acurrate list of routes with information on who climbed it, when they did it and where exactly the route went. Gee, that sounds like a guide book. I know that that's something that you don't like and I understand the feeling. Hell, maybe you climbed your old farts variation 20 years ago and really are the first asccentionist and you just forgot about it. My point is, is that it might be possible to avoid much confusion and maintain the limited boltting on the south face of beacon in the future if someone were to keep this kind of information in some more freely accessible place than Jim Opdycke's brain. It doesn't have to be a published guide book, a simple photocopied sheet of paper would work fine. I bet Jim already has most of it written down somewhere. Or of course you could just accept that someday the bolts you worked hard to place will be missing and the next day, the route you worked your ass off and risked your neck to free on natural gear is a "clip and go" sport route with a line gym rats at the bottom waiting to get the pink point. Don

Leave two. They're free!

A friend of mine showed me this real cool knot that he ties in with. Its really cool. I'm going to use it all the time now. Its called the Flemish Bend, has anybody heard of it before?

I did the Alpen Jager about 4 years ago and have talked to several parties who have done it since then. It seems like every one does some thing different on the chimney pitch. If you read Dodge's book it sounds like you should climb pretty close to the bottom of the chimney to the saddle at the top. Then climb the last 40 or 50 feet to the top of the pinnacle. When we did it, my partner climbed more or less verticly up the chimney from the crappy bolt in the bottom to where the chimney opens up. At that point there is a belay stance with 3 pitons. Then we climbed that last 40 or 50 feet to the summit. The summit is just a small field of grass, no exposed rock to anchor to. At the south end of it there is a bush that you can rap off of to get down to the saddle. It seemed like this way had good rock all the way up the chimney but almost no pro. Knife blades and RPs are the most likely pieces of pro. A friend of mine from way back says that they climbed to the right of the chimney and belayed at a tree. When I was there this looked pretty scetchy but he described the bush at the top exactly like we found it so I know he was there. It was a cool experience and I would repeat it but wouldn't recommend it to someone who was looking for a moderate climb.

Over the years I have heard that it was climbed and that it hasn't been climbed. From personal observation, even in the biggest freeze years like 1990 the falls has never frozen completely. That year I stood at the base on the frozen plunge pool. You could walk within a few yards of where the water was hitting the pool. The spray built up a huge mound about 15 foot high. Even with this huge mound the water had a long free fall, possibly 75 to 100 feet. With the way the wind usually blows during the cold periods and the amount of water coming down, it is really difficult to imagine the bottom part ever connecting. I guess you might be able to traverse in from the side but if you take a close look at that I think you would agree that while it might be possible it ain't likely. The rock is really bad, in places its not really rock and it never gets completely covered in ice. With the huge overhang at the base and the huge amount of water coming down I kind of doubt its ever been done. I could be wrong but you would have to have some pretty good pictures before I would believe it.

Sorry to burst your bubble but the photo of the guy rappelling is not on Multanomah Falls. It is one of the climbs in the Bridelveil Area by Bent Screw. Sorry.