JayB

Zee car ees full. If you were considering Tieton - please climb elsewhere.

Heading to Tieton tomorrow, most likely concentrating on routes at "The Bend," but may also spend some time at Royal Columns. We'll be meeting at 6:45AM, and heading out at 7:00AM, most likely climbing until it gets too dark to continue. There's three of us going - and we're looking for one more. We'll supply the racks and the ropes, so all you would need is a harness, shoes, and the ability to belay safely. Send PM or give me a ring at two zero six nine two zero nine four three four.

http://www.freeride.nu/content/643/

When you've got skis on...bdump chink. What about the straight-line-to-lincoln-loop-over-the-cliff sequence at the beginning... Last video clip - best of them all for sure. http://videos.skipass.com/ci2005/day-hi.mov

Some dope-ass jib action from the same site.... http://www.freeride.nu/content/571/

My take is that if his trajectory had been slightly different he'd be dead but trajectory/Faith-In-The-Lord/whatever - insane. Next time you're about to do a 50 meter rap think about what it would take to peer over the edge and jump off of something that high with skis on . Puts this video into perspective, I think.

http://www.freeride.nu/content/517

The adoption or rejection of this law? You guys still accept paying for the privilege of having someone pump your gas and buy the notion that it leads to a net increase in jobs in the state so...

If the legislature is ever misguided enough to attempt to pass it into law. Soak the Green Oregon mulls a new tax that environmentalists and privacy advocates will hate. BY BRENDAN MINITER Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT As gas prices continue to top $2 a gallon, all those drivers of fuel-efficient cars may not have reason to gloat for much longer. Oregon is worried that too many Honda Insights and Toyota Priuses hitting the roads will rob it of the cash it expects out of its 24-cent-a-gallon tax. So the Beaver State is studying ways to ensure that "hybrid" car owners pay their "fair share" of taxes for the miles they drive. That means allowing the taxman to catch up to hybrid owners just as often as he catches up to gas guzzling SUV drivers. And if Oregon goes ahead, it won't be long before other states follow. Oregon won't complete its study until 2007. But it's already clear the state is looking to influence behavior in addition to raising revenue by implementing a "vehicle mileage tax." Under a VMT a motorist would pay a tax for each mile driven, probably around 1.25 cents. To administer this tax, a global positioning system would be mounted in each car. As a driver fuels up, the device would relay mileage information to the gas pump, which would calculate the VMT. A simple electronic odometer-reading device would do the trick, but Oregon is looking at GPS devices because they would also allow for charging higher VMT rates for miles driven in "congested" areas during rush hour or to exempt miles driven out of state....

Definately a "Scarlet Letter" for the 21st century. When I saw the headline on the Seattle PI this afternoon I thought a new band with an ironic name played a sucessful concert in Spokane.

Word.

I think in order geographically correct variant of the question what you should be asking is did she "CTR?"

Thanks for the photos, Luke. Looks like an amazing trip so far.

i don't understand this. on the one hand you regularly castigate environmentalists as "backward nincompoops against progress", and on the other hand you seem to have no ability to foresee that science would sooner than later provide sound technological alternatives to fossil fuels if we gave ourselves the means to reach such goals (and we'd easily have at least 200billion dollars to sink into it if our choices were different). i certainly don't have ready made solutions (although it is obvious that investing in infrastructure would allow to use already existing technologies to our advantage), but would you have asked what percentage of information exchange was fulfilled by fiber-optic cable 20years ago? nuclear has many problems: dangerous, not flexible, demands quantities of water to cool down the core, waste disposal is unresolved, etc ... so i don't see why it should be favored over hydrogen technology for example. Must be those pesky thermo, physics, and chem courses I took during the course of my nonscientific education. Generating the energy necessary to produce the hydrogen also requires energy and produces waste. Moreover, every time you convert energy from one form to another you lose quite a bit of efficiency. Presently - the only two economically feasible methods for producing hydrogen gas involve electrolysis or the conversion of methane and water to hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide. The latter can be forced to react with H20 to form carbon dioxide and water - but the net result is still one unit of C02 per four units H2 produced. The portability of hydrogen is a point in its favor, but looking at hydrogen as an energy source without considering the the processes necessary to produce it is sort of like touting the enironmental benefits of an electric car that you charge with a diesel generator. Neat stuff but no panacea.

Exploratory mining in the Rockies, Sierras, et al didn't seem to have much of an effect on people's opinions concerning gold, silver, lead, molybdenum, copper, or gemstone consumption. All in all - oil drilling would probably have a far less significant impact than timber harvests. This hypothesis would really get interesting if the tax revenue generated by the said drilling was slated to fund social and environmental programs...

Ever looked at the maximum percent demand that could be satisfied by wind, solar, and "other?" Low single digits at best. Neat stuff but hardly sufficient to satisfy global demand. Increased efficiency and nuclear generation are probably the two areas that will see the greatest increase in funding/interest as a result of any fossil fuel shortage or desire to curtail CO2 emissions.

"the usual portrayal of environmentalists as stupid hippies. basically, it is indeed "too easy" to show that apart from a limbaughesque ability to insult people by association and following closely the rightwing book on "how to not discuss the environment and how to demonize environmentalists", I am clearly trashing the very notion that conservation has any benefits at all here: "Conservation is great, and there are plenty of good reasons to live as efficiently as possible, but I think it'd be more effective to point out the tangible benefits of doing so - such as the fact that changing your habits so that you consume less energy is generally healthier and less expensive - rather than pointing to oneself as the sin-quo-non of eco-righteousness and condemning those who fail to reach the dizzying heights of eco-perfection that you have attained by consuming 3% fewer BTU's than the family next door and scrupulously recycling the bottles left over from the six pack of organic wheat-beer that you bought at the post-consumer harvest collective - aka upscale grocery store - down the street. If the guy next door with the F350 double-cab and massive gut and skyrocketing trigliceride count learns that he can fend off the heart attack, the gallstones, the ulcer, and the collection agency by changing his habits a bit that will be much more effective than any left-wing-tent-revival style denunciations from the dude in the Volvo-X Country" I think you are conflating my mental picture and verbal depictions of you* in particular with my general impressions of people who are concerned about the environment. How's the mileage on the X-Country anyways? *Probably completely inaccurate but still personally amusing.

Increasing cafe standards will certainly lower C02 emissions in the US, but where it gets tricky is trying to figure the extent to which a given increase in CAFE standards will actually reduce trend C02 emissions on a global basis, and how much this trend reduction will actually affect global temperatures - and that's assuming other factors affecting the climate cycle stay constant over the duration of the interval under consideration. Increasing the fuel efficiency of the car that the average American drives will certainly decrease CO2 emissions - but when Xing Mi and Pradeep start commuting home to the ranch style home with the AC and the plasma screen TV the net effect on the atmospheric C02 concentrations brought about by this change in the US may not be as significant as some are suggesting. Step in the right direction - yes. Panacea. No.

Just too easy. I rode my bike to work today, like I have for 80% of my adult life - the net BTU savings from which allow me to increase the sanctimony with no net increase in the BTU-to-sanctimony ratio - thereby keeping it a safe distance below your own....

"just frikin classic! the only ones sanctimonious in this thread are those who attack folks for their choice of vacation and issue the usual blanket demonizations of the order of "environmentalists are stupid hippies" that JayB is now famous for. Do you always have to dumb down a discussion when you feel you are not getting any traction with your arguments?"

I took this photo last June while doing a conditioning hike and caching some gear for an attempt the following weekend - and the crowds in this photo were light compared to the megacluster we witnessed next weekend. So - in good conditions routefinding shouldn't be a problem - but I've been up there in spring when some wicked weather has blown through and even familiarity with the route, map, compass, bearings - GPS, etc and experience using them in low visibility conditions navigation was still quite a challenge. Sounds like you are doing your homework and preparing so you should be fine. Enjoy yourselves up there.

Asking her what kind of ascenders she used to do so.

I think it's all about moderating one's sanctimony-to-BTU ratio a bit in accordance with the reality that even if you are making a laudable effort to conserve resources - it's impossible to live a normal life in this country without using an amount of energy that's several multiples of what, say, a nomadic goatherd in North Yemen does, and using/consuming marginally less in the way of resources than the guy down the street hardly gives one license to mount the pulpit and villify anyone with a V-8 engine or a three car garage. Let he who is without sin cast the first "I'm Changing the Climate!" sticker. Conservation is great, and there are plenty of good reasons to live as efficiently as possible, but I think it'd be more effective to point out the tangible benefits of doing so - such as the fact that changing your habits so that you consume less energy is generally healthier and less expensive - rather than pointing to oneself as the sin-quo-non of eco-righteousness and condemning those who fail to reach the dizzying heights of eco-perfection that you have attained by consuming 3% fewer BTU's than the family next door and scrupulously recycling the bottles left over from the six pack of organic wheat-beer that you bought at the post-consumer harvest collective - aka upscale grocery store - down the street. If the guy next door with the F350 double-cab and massive gut and skyrocketing trigliceride count learns that he can fend off the heart attack, the gallstones, the ulcer, and the collection agency by changing his habits a bit that will be much more effective than any left-wing-tent-revival style denunciations from the dude in the Volvo-X Country. FWIW I would be willing to wager that my household consumption is actually less than that of the more strident posters on this site. Since 1992 a bike has been my primary mode of daily transport for all but 3 years, I've always shared housing, recycled, left the AC off, worn sweaters or grabbed a blanket instead of turning off the heat, let the lawn go brown in the summer, mowed by hand, switched to the compact flourescent bulbs instead of incandescent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The primary motivator has been that doing so is cheaper and healthier, leaving me more fit and more able to squander money on gear than I would be otherwise. The enviro angle is nice but my habits hardly leave me in a position to deify my lifestyle choices vis-a-vis the guy next door.

FW - you should really read the CBO report I linked to. In the absence of the regulatory cluster described therein, there would have been far fewer structural defects in the power market for anyone to exploit.

And I - for one - am certainly glad that no one has gone into the riff about how many people in a villiage in Bangladesh could be fed and housed using the resources consumed in a single European climbing vacation - and how this sort of selfish excess illustrates the wanton resource consumption and reckless disregard for the well-being of others and the climate that has been the major factor in generating the global hostility to the United States, not to mention the manner in which it lines the pockets of the repressive Middle Eastern regimes, who will in turn use the money to finance terrorist activities inspired by our behaviors. That would bring the discourse on this site to a new low - and it's a relief to find that no one has sunk to such depths. FWIW - I hear that Ed Begley Jr. managed to convert self-righteous contempt for those who use no more resources than he does - but do not currently own or operate electric go carts in the place of automobiles - into an energy source potent enough to meet 33% of his total energy needs. If could follow his example and get a couple of selected posters to adopt this technology, we could easily light up half the West Coast, and the only emissions would be the ongoing torrent of disdain and condescension on threads pertaining to the environment and/or SUVs....