JayB

Everyone can do things to reduce the amount of resources that we consume to produce a given output - be it heating or cooling homes, transporting ourselves from point A to point B, etc - but doing any of these things hardly makes any of us ecosaints, so I think a bit of humility should supplant the fingerpointing at the guy in the SUV. Odds are you'll consume just about as much energy over the course of your life as he does, and even if you don't you are still going to consume way, way more than the average occupant of this planet - so those of you who feel like ecosaviors because you drive an outback are like the priest who molested 20 choirboys loudly condemning the guy who molested 22 for the error of his ways. Public policy changes can have a dramatic effect on resource consumption and pollution - changes in CAFE standards and emissions trading are a couple of good examples, but so can supply and demand. If we really are running out of oil, then you should all be jumping for joy every time the price goes up by $1 a gallon, because that will do a hell of a lot more to change behavior than a million years worth of smarmy condescension. Ditto for every other natural resource. Supplies grow scarce, price goes higher, and consumers either make substitutions or consume less or both.

Even allowing for all of this, your lifetime resource consumption is probably around 10-20% lower than the guy with the F-350's, and for the average person who heads home to their poorly insulated $600,000 1920's home in Freemont - the difference is even smaller. For all of the villifying of the folks with large vehicles and suburban lifestyles that goes on, that's not a hell of a lot, and it probably still puts you a few standard deviations above the global average. Small actions that really involve little or no sacrifice on anyone's part can be helpful, but a little bit of realism and humility is in order. Even if you ride a Vespa to work and grow vegetables on your 4'x6' deck - with your central heating, electric appliances, etc, etc, etc over the course of your life you are pretty much fucking up the planet as much as the next guy and really in no position to point fingers. Sorry.

I hope some genetically-modified-artificial-food-eating lardass in a Hummer (that gets about 1/3 the gas mileage of a Subaru--hardly insignificant) runs you over on your daily commute, Mr. Bike Hero. With the way people drive out here, you may very well get your wish! Keep your fingers crossed. Funny you should mention genetically modified foods. Crops that are more drought and pest resistant, produce higher yields, and require far fewer inputs that harm the environment - fuel, fertilizer, pesticide, and less land under tillage have the potential to dramatically reduce the environmental damage associated with farming, especially in the third world, and reduce the amount of land under tillage, and the rate of deforestation [these all have implications for climate change] - not to mention human misery and starvation, and the diseases associated with both. So the next time you see a lardass in a hummer, instead of cursing at him under your breath, run over and give him a hug - you may have more in common than you think.

Wait a minute. After reading the ongoing commentary here for months it seems clear that if only people will trade in their SUV's for Subaru Outbacks and Volvo Cross-Country's with Free Tibet Stickers on the Back, shop at PCC and Restoration Hardware instead of Target and Walmart, and substitute organic fair-trade coffee for Starbucks, global warming would be a non-issue. I mean, this seems to be the extent of the "sacrifices" that most people are actually making in their lives, and clearly this entitles them to occupy a lofty-plane of eco-superiority such that they can condemn their environmentally challenged countrymen for destroying the planet - so lots of finger-pointing while getting an extra 2-3 mpg on the daily commute and paying extra for groceries must be the solution.

I just wonder when the world will run out of eco-narcissist candyasses that blanche when confronted with a bit of light drizzle and go scurrying back to the comforts of their......horrid, earth destroying, C02 belching mechanized transport I rode to work every day in a climate that's ten times as harsh as Portland's, so walk the talk or shut-up you sanctimonious pussy.

Snow tires are definitely the ticket.

Map, compass, GPS - and the ability to use all three effectively in whiteout conditions - and/or the willingness to bag the outing if conditions deteriorate on the way up. Snow shovel and/or assorted other gear necessary for digging in and surviving a night out. Snowshoes. You could have perfect conditions, and the outing will be nothing more than an incredibly scenic day-hike, or you could be in for a full-blown epic. In April the probability of encountering deep snow and foul weather is pretty high, so I'd err on the side of caution, especially if it's your first time there. One of the Dads from my old scout troop -who had been to Muir a half-dozen times and had all the overnight gear - died along with his nephew on the snowfield last year, so even though it's a casual trip for most people most of the time - be careful. Another option you might consider is posting in the partners forum and hooking up with someoneone - the odds are pretty good that you'll find someone to head up there with.

"Pope shit in the woods?" "You know, she to like, feed the monkey, man."

Sorry to hear about your accident, Radon, but I'm glad that you are okay. I'm hearing about more and more of these accidents as terrain features get bigger and bigger - there's been at least 3-4 deaths - if not more this year, and probably a quite a few cases of paralysis as well. Your story definitely brought back some memories for me. Back in '98 I overshot the final jump in the Blackcomb terrain park so badly that I had the instant ejection + hardpack crater, plus tearing the bases off of the tips on both skis, blowing out one of the edges. The impact even knocked both of my gloves off, and tore the watch off my wrist. I remember slithering down the slope on my back, lying still for a moment, then wiggling my fingertips and then my toes - meanwhile the kid running the lift shut if down and started running uphill towards me, joined shortly thereafter by the kid running the hotdog stand (late in the day towards the very end of the season, so not many other folks around) - I managed to stand up and wave them off - but I've never forgotten the impact, and how lucky I was to walk away with no permanent damage. Between that experience, and the fact that Ice Coast landings are not much more forgiving than concrete, I've become way more careful. Work up from big to small, watch the folks hitting stuff and the kind of speed they carry before taking the jump, multiple straight airs after that, and follow with another round of straight airs the next time I'm there to double check the speed on the inrun and the landing. Anyway - good luck on your recovery, and buy some lottery tickets!

Found in a Canadian Magazine of All Places... MARK STEYN Michael Adams had a big hit with his last book, Fire and Ice, about the differences between America and Canada. My cousin always keeps a copy to hand and tells Americans, "If you want to understand the difference between our countries, read this book." And there's the rub. A couple of years back, I began some generalization or other by saying, "The difference between America and Canada is . . ." And the American I was imparting this insight to interrupted me with: "The difference between America and Canada is that Americans don't care what the difference between America and Canada is."

Wow. I will join the ranks of those who believe that Karl Rove has supernatural spinning powers if he can figure out a way to make this one go away. Pretty bad. "Claude Alexander Allen, age 45, . . . was charged with theft scheme over $500 and theft over $500. . . . On January 2, 2006, a Target store Loss Prevention Manger observed an unknown man enter the store located at 25 Grand Corner Avenue in Gaithersburg. He was observed in the store with an empty Target bag in a shopping cart. The man was then seen selecting merchandise throughout the store and placing items in the Target bag. He put additional items in his cart. The man then went to guest services where he produced a receipt and received a refund for the items he had just selected from the store shelves. After receiving the refund he left the store without paying for the additional merchandise in the shopping cart. He was apprehended by the store employee. He would buy items, take them out to his car, and return to the store with the receipt. He would select the same items he had just purchased, and then return them for a refund. . . . Throughout 2005 he obtained refunds for items ranging from clothing, a Bose theater system, stereo equipment, and [a] photo printer to items valued only at $2.50. " What makes this interesting is who Claude Allen is. Last month, as the New York Times reports, he resigned as the White House's top domestic policy adviser, ostensibly to spend more time with his family. Earlier President Bush had nominated him for a seat on the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but he withdrew his name after Democrats filibustered the nomination."

Hopefully you'll be able to meet some local women through this board, but the demographics here tend to be a bit skewed towards the Y-chromosome, so it may be worth contacting an outfit like www.sheclimbs.org or putting up notice at Stone Gardens or Vertical World as well. Good luck finding partners and enjoy the PNW.

I think gear has gotten progressively better for the past 100 years as a result of market competition, and any guy working out of a garage, a la Burton, that's making something that's better will probably find himself scaling things up quite a bit. Are you sure that you moved to sunny Socal and not Kacynski's Cabin? Time to ease up on the "Industrial Society and It's Future" stuff, Kemosabe.

Is the point to enjoy the outdoors with equipment that works best or to devote all of your time and cash to producing it? As a consumer it's all about the person who produces the best product and sells it at the best price, and I am not terribly concerned about the methods or the scale that that they use to make it. If it's a guy in shop in his backyard - great, but that's just really not likely to be the case. I tie my own flies as a hobby, and like to make furniture, and there's definitely something satisfying about making something that works with your own hands, but there's a limit to how much of this you can do if you ever want to have the time to actually put the stuff to use. This seems a case of transference - hostility towards mass market consumerism transfered onto the mass of consumers who happen to share your hobbies.

mid90s (pre kitesurfing) windsurfing really tanked. Too specialized, too bro-brah, too difficult to learn. There was a WSJ article circa 2000? about it. I'm not sure kitesurfing is really taking off.. more popular, but aside from a few special locations, not terribly popular. steep learning curve, $$$$ Climbing, and the general outdoor industry, are seeing intensification. Low user # growth, rise in user days. Same people doing more, in more places, at a higher level. The ski industry is a perfect example of this. Also see adventure tourism growth. Frankly I could give a fuck about innovation and manufacturing... you can always make shit yourself. As long as there's someone with half a brain and a milling machine you'll have climbing gear. And a hydraulic press and vaccuum pump, voila you've got skis. Yeah - there's an element of truth to that, but I have that the bindings that came along with the last set of alpine skis that I bought sure seem like a serious improvement over the last generation of bindings - and I'm not sure that Tonto working in his garage could produce them - much less on the scale that I could afford or the kind of quality that I'd expect - so there's a limit. Ditto for cams, clearance shaft tools, click-shifters, clipless pedals, graphite fly-rods, floating fly-lines, fluorocarbon tippet material, rotomolded kayaks, goretex drytops, softshell fabrics, modern ice-screws, screamers, sticky-rubber, etc, etc, etc - pretty much all of the equipment that I have that's substantially better than what was available 20 years ago is the result of someone catering to the mass-market. Doesn't mean you can't go the buckskin and stone tool route if you want to though.

How big has the collapse been? Kind of interesting - never heard of that happening before. Any thoughts on the reasons why? Did everyone convert to kiteboarding? If the mountains are actually getting less crowded, and there's enough of a market to support innovation, and good manufacturing - seems like the best of all possible worlds to me. Better gear, more price competition, and less folks in the way when you want to use them. Seems like old-schooler Valhala as long as the bolting is confined to Exit38esque areas.

I don't think that the spiritual vs. fun side of outdoor stuff is mutually exclusive. Lots of folks who ski-tour one weekend and hit the resorts the next, do some hairball creek boating one weekend and go playboating the next, etc. Maybe the equilibrium has been shifting towards the fun side for the last 20-30 years, but there's plenty of dudes from the scraggly-beard era who have made the shift along with the rest of the population.

Seems like most people who climb in the gym will eventually want to take things outdoors. Some will stop at bouldering, others will be attracted to heavily bolted sport routes - others will be attracted to the big stuff. If I'm not mistaken Caldwell and Rodden came out of the gym and have done okay for themselves. I think what kind of climbing that people aspire to has a lot to do with what they were into before climbing. Most people I know that were into backpacking, mountains, etc before getting into climbing tend to be drawn to alpine routes, and look at sport climbing/bouldering as the first leg of that journey. People who weren't into the mountains beforehand aren't as likely to go this route.

Nope. A house is an asset like anything else. I think that recent rates of return have convinced everyone that home values only go up, but most people who believe that have never looked at the data, and have a very hard time differentiating between real and nominal returns. Robert Schiller has compiled one of the best - and only - long term data sets that account for inflation, house quality, etc - and it hardly supports the proposition that pouring all of your money into this single asset class and leveraging yourself to the hilt is a surefire path to a secure retirement. It was hard to go wrong in the interval between 96 and the present, but there's certainly no guarantee that this this will always be the case.

That explains at least some of it. I know of numerous people who've taken out home equity loans, or taken out equity when refinancing. Some used it to pay off credit card debt (probably wise) others used it for boats and cars (not so wise) I've seen some data concerning how much the latter of the two accounts for US economic performance since 2000. I think there's some equally alarming stats on how much of the job-creation since '00 is tied directly to an increase in real-estate spending. I guess we can hope that the constellation of factors that's keeping bond yields low at the moment stays in effect and the 1 trillion worth of adjustable rate mortgage debt that's set to reset before the end of '07 won't have as much impact on the economy as some people fear.

I think that quite a bit of the negative savings rate can be explained by the rate at which home values have been appreciating in the past few years. There are quite a few people who looked at the difference between their purchase price for a home and it's appraised value, and concluded that they didn't need to save any money, because if things got bad they could always take out a home equity loan or sell the house and use the difference to compensate for whatever they hadn't been saving. Works out nicely in a booming market where asset values are uniformly rising, not so well in an environment where home values are flat to negative - even in nominal terms. I'd expect to see the savings rate trend in the other direction if the market changes and home values flatten out.

What's the relationship between the WDOT/ODOT and the NWAC? Seems like the data that the center generates would have a pretty significant value for assesing hazards to freight and travelers over the passes, etc. Do WDOT/ODOT kick in any funding for the NWAC? If not they should.

Logging one and two over-par scores is actually pretty impressive, especially for someone in that age group. Even when I was playing somewhat regularly, I could never break 100. Where is that "crying" emoticon when you need it.

Not bad, but you'd have scored higher with a "hitherto" or "erstwhile" in there somewhere.

I think the lamest part about the story is the manager using the low-level folks as flak-catchers, then cruising over and acting like they weren't acting in accordance with his instructions. I would be surprised if part of this isn't part of a larger problem, where they advertise the 100% satisfaction guarantee, then tell managers that part of their compensation is tied to the number of returns that they accept. If the membership-sales thing is any indication, I'd be surprised if something like this isn't going on. The bottom line is that if REI has made a business decision to guarantee something as nebulous as "100% Satisfaction," - and someone must have looked at the cost-benefit metrics of this one a million times by now - they are going to have to expect people to take them at their word, and bring stuff back when they are not 100% satisfied, even if the customer's definition of satisfaction doesn't jive with the manager's. In this case, I can't help but think that most people aren't going to be pleased with a full-use helmet that cracks after anything less than a full-on impact. That being said, I have been amazed by the stories of people returning boots after hiking the PCT with them, or deciding that they are no longer satisfied after 10 years of using a tent. To me that's more or less tantamount to strolling up to the counter and saying: "No - as a matter of fact, I don't have any integrity whatsoever, and I am willing to compromise whatever's left of my ethics over a $20 pair of sandals." "Hahaha. Yes, yes, I am that shameless - really - and moreover, I am willing to taint myself further by pretending that it is you - rather than I - that am in the wrong here." "Wait - it gets better. As a matter of fact, If given a chance I would make change in the Salvation Army bucket. Too bad about the lids on those suckers, hehe."