JayB

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....

"Don't cry for me, Argentina!" Ok....I've gotta side with the paranoid libs on this one. I ate some serious crow back when I actually believed that a western US generating capacity shortage was underway....when in fact Enron was manipulating the market. If you want to read a good synopsis of the factors which precipitated the power crisis - there's a good summary published by the CBO here: http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=3062&sequence=0 Manipulation of the spot market seems to have played a role in boosting prices, but the structural problems brought about by the manner the energy market was regulated in California were far more significant factors in precipitating the crisis. At its worst - a significant part of the supply shortage was due to generators withholding power, not because they were trying to manipulate the market to their advantage, but because the geniuses in Sacramento capped retail prices but allowed wholesale prices to float. When demand increased along with the economic activity, and an extremely hot summer led to a seasonal surge in demand, and a commensurate increase in prices, the utilities could not pass along the increased costs to their customers, nor were they allowed to stop selling power at a loss - so they were forced to borrow money to buy power, and continued to do so until their finances eroded so badly that generators who had power to sell them declined to do so for fear of not being paid. In the end - California elected to lock itself into long-term power contracts that, once the crisis had passed - resulted in consumers and taxpayers getting stuck paying for power at above market rates, thereby enhancing the profit margins of the very same entitities that the state was attempting to put in check. The Sarbanes-Oxley act that congress enacted after the audit driven corporate scandals has done much the same thing for the accounting companies, nearly all of which are recording record profits this year.

"The point that was being discussed was the validity of criticism of complex science issues by folks who can find the hole in the ground." Surely this condescension must be based upon something more substantial than a degree in ecology, or the professional practice thereof.

Most of the majors have stated that their goal is maximizing profit, rather than reserves or production, and have thus declined to accept the terms that the states with the most oil are giving at this point. Quite a few of the deals are going to the smaller, more aggressive oil companies who are willing to take on more risks, or to state companies owned by countries that are getting concerned about energy security - like India or China. There was a good article about this in the WSJ recently, and perhaps in the economist as well.

Speaking of Doomsday prophets from the dwindling twilight of your glory days - how many of your boy Ehrlic's predictions came true? You are surely old enough to recall the publication of "The Population Bomb," the bet with his nemisis Julian Simons, and the outcome of the said bet. BTW - how'd you get broadband in the yurt? And how many revolutions of the hand-crank generator are necessary for you to peruse the internet for 1/2 hour?

Yeah but JB aren't you forgetting the Republican admin's ability to manipulate the market to keep prices/profits artifically inflated for their campaign donors/corporate bitches? Can you specify the precise mechanisms by which they are doing so? And if you knows them, it stands to reason that that the folks who are involved in energy trading would know them - and develop strategies in the futures markets and elsehwere to profit at the governments expense. Maybe you can take a moment or two and plot moves in the futures markets versus known interventions in the markets by the administration - undertaken of course, as part of a secret-yet-public-enough-for-you-to-know-about-it agenda to line their donor's pockets - to substantiate your case here. Should make for some good reading.

Unequivocal in the sense that a warming trend has been empirically confirmed, or that the model that stipulates that the said warming is solely the result of a higher atmospheric CO2 concentration has been proven? I think that most of the people that you are writing off probably have a bit more nuanced take on the evidence that you give them credit for. Very few would look at a table of emperical data which documents the phenomenon and dismiss it out of hand. However, if they are displaying some of the critical thinking that you praise elsewhere, their thoughts will probably turn to the icecaps which covered a significant percentage of the land mass in the Northern hemisphere - at the very least - and conclude that their dissapearance was probably due to something other than the Clovis people's wasteful and self-indulgent lifestyle. I personally don't think that people who want to know how much of the observed warming is due to increased C02 concentration due to the combustion of fossil fuels, and how much is due to natural cycles that we simply have no control over before taking drastic action are behaving irrationally at all. Even once this information is known it would probably be a good idea to attempt to calculate the costs and the efficacy of making the changes required for maximal reductions in C02 emissions versus the benefits. If a massive cut in CO2 emissions will result in, at best, a net difference of 1 degree farenheit - but the costs would drive global economic growth below the levels of population growth - then the tradeoff might not be worth it - as the resultant poverty could very well lead to quite a bit more misery and environmental damage than the climate change itself would produce. You and j_b ditched the cars and moved into the solar powered yurts yet?

Most of the oil companies are enjoying record profits at the moment for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most important is that most of the oil that they are pulling out of the ground comes from fields that were aquired when oil was at the $10 a barrell range, and they were able to negotiate relatively high margins in exhange for making the investments necessary to develop them - so you've got a resource that you are extracting at a low fixed cost while the price climbs to record highs. That's a recipe for record profits no matter what it is that you are selling. This situation may last a while longer, but certainly not indefinitely as anyone sitting on top of an undeveloped oil-field is driving a much harder bargain with anyone that wants to develop it - so at some point the oil companies margins will go down, and costs per barrell will increase, and profits will decline accordingly.

I heard that same story with only a few details changed about 8 or 9 years ago. I suspect urban myth. Yup. http://www.snopes.com/weddings/embarras/bothered.htm

I think the real root of all the hostility and tension between the US and the Euros as of late has as its root, our parochial inability to understand the profound attachment that our European brethren have to their speedos and their one-piece ski suits....

I think this is the book he was referring to:

Looks like it's here: http://www.questalb.com/about.asp

Way to dredge up a classic. This has to be my favorite cc.com dogpile of all time.

www.nwog.org Anyone know where it went?

Word. Actually, I kind of thought the idea was cool but I wouldn't want anyone to see me using it or carying it around. Sort of like a stick clip....

You are probably a bit hypoglycemic in the mornings if you are working out before eating. Having a glass of OJ and a bit of coffee before I head in seems to make me feel better during a morning workout, and I try to eat shortly after I'm done.

All I want to know is, where are the vector diagrams, topological theorems, and appeals to various mathematical postulates to reinforce one's points. The last conversation that we had that had the same techno-wankage to relevance ratio was the discussion of normal forces on ice-screw loading with floating versus fixed handles. FWIW I'm not sure how to resolve the shock-loading versus equalizing conundrum with a cordalette, but it probably involves sizing up the pieces you've got and the overall situation that you are in and deciding which approach is less likely to result in death.

Alternates: Mortise is to Tenon...

As Chuck mentioned - Chris posted a pretty sweet TR and some other stuff before ever mentioning a book. I'd say his contributions are at least on par with Joe's. Admit it - you are just upset because the publishers rejected your 11"x17" Vantage/Zeke's Boulders coffee-table book with the Haiku's and interperative essays, and you are taking it out on others. Even the add on multimedia feature which included the shirtless guy with the goatee doing the interpretive dance based on the base-of-the route pantomiming of the moves on Skip-Em-Or-Clip-Em wouldn't make them bite...

No one seemed to give JoJo any flack for pitching his guidebook here, and his level of participation in the site was the same or lower than Chris's, and I was glad to get information on Don's updated Guide to West Coast Ice, and learn when Jason and Alex's book would be hitting the shelves. I think there's a balance one can strike here. It's obviously not my site, but I think there's a big difference between someone using the BB to get the word out about a small print-run guidebook that covers an area that cc.com users regulary climb in, and Norton logging onto the site to shill Sandy Hill Pittman's tell all expose. And in the case of folks like Don, Jason, and Alex - I think it's cool that long-time contributors can use the site to get the word out about their books, and exchange information with their readers.

Nice looking book Chris. I may pick that up just to keep the fires stoked until the time comes when I can head down there for a climbing trip.