JayB

Word. I guess we'll have to start a betting pool for that. My prediction is that the Muir Snowfield will be in good shape by the last week in October if present trends continue. You should still hit those lines on Quandary, especially the South Couloir if you are still there in late May/early June though. That might very well be the only continuously steep run with over 1500 feet of vert in all of Summit County!

Just make sure you are fluent in at least one Asian language by the time you finish if you want to use the degree to make a living or to gain admission into a graduate program. Shouldn't be too tough with all of the travelling.

How about we get back to the nuclear question.

With respect to climbing in Darrington, if it weren't for the actions of mattp and his friends - eg the other folks actively developing routes out there - the road that provides access to all of the climbing out there would have been decomissioned a long time ago.

Hey Jennie: In my experience, during the average winter in Colorado the good snow in Colorado comes in late November/early December and in late March/early April. There'll be a storm or two in between these times, but it's anyone's guess as to how long it'll last and how much it'll dump. If you are looking for good early season stuff, Wolf Creek usually gets hosed in a big way in late October/early November. But you probably already know all of this. If you are in Breck you should definitely check out the South Couloir on Quandary and the runs on the mountain on the south side of the ravine across the valley from Quandary in spring when the avy conditions chill out, and/or the East Ridge of Quandary during winter conditions.

Count me as one of the folks that's a bit confused by your conduct Matt. I've been on the same side as you in a number of disputes in the past, and have always appreciated your contributions with respect to ice climbing in the Rockies, have admired the way that you've helped out beginning climbers on a number of occaisions, and am still gratefull for the beta on the routes in Cody. Leaving the matter of the personal message aside for the moment, I have no idea why you would attack mattp and anyone else associated with the WCC, or what you hope to achieve by doing so. The organization's central goal is preserving access to the rock, and I can't imagine why any climber would take exception to that, or what one could hope to achieve by mocking its accomplishments two months after its inception. We've never met, but your tone and targets here seem very inconsistent with what I have observed over the course of three years of interacting online.

Interesting stuff about the isotopes. And speaking of isotopes... What about nuclear fuel? No greenhouse gasses and the technology employed today uses passive, negative feedback mechanisms to squelch the reactor if it overheats to a dangerous level and won't go critical even if the engineer falls alseep at his desk, the computer controlling it crashes, and an earthquake hits all at once. They produce power that is free of atmospheric emission, and our European friends are currenly generating up to 1/2 of their power with them. They would also help reduce the annual payments to the mullahs. The reintroduction of nuclear power would also require a rational public capable ofasessing the pros and cons in a reasonable manner, so I am not holding my breath, but I am surprised that the folks ringing the alarm bells on climate change aren't at least willing to consider this option.

Interesting stuff about the isotopes. What about nuclear fuel? No greenhouse gasses and the technology employed today uses passive, negative feedback mechanisms to squelch the reactor if it overheats to a dangerous lever.

Hey Crutch/Rollo: Thanks for sharing your story here, and I hope that you will continue to do so in the future , even after the reception you got. I am with Chuck in that while I think that people who seem to be boasting about a climb that could have ended in disaster had luck not worked in their favor deserve to be ripped on a bit unless they drop the triumphalist tone. The best example of this phenomenon that I can think of is the novice climber who had to be rescued off of the lower third of the Kennedy Glacier due to extreme errors in judgement and rank incompetence - then had the gall to start spewing about how rad the copter ride was, how he was destined become one of the top 5 percent of climbers - whatever that means - because he, in whatever he chose to do, was always a "5 percenter." Anyhow - the tone that you and Rollo used was totally different. You told the tale of a potentially life threatening cluster with the right mix of humility and dark humor. This brings to light one of my critiques of the typical TR posted here, in that seldom does anyone share their entire experience within one. No matter how desperate things were on the route, it seems that the only acceptable tone to recall the event in is one of ironic detatchment coupled with a hefty dose of understatement and reserve. While I appreciate that anything that hints of drama can veer into the realm of breathy self-parody pretty quickly "At this altitude even lacing my boots required an act of will that delivered me into the chasm that exists between sublime euphoria and otherwordly despair..." I can attest to the fact that in truly dire circumstances ironic detatchment is not the emotion that best characterizes the situation. What I have felt in the situations where I thought that my life was genuinely at risk were emotions more along the lines of terror, doubt, remorse, grief, anger, guilt, self-pity, and every combination thereof. I have been climbing with quite a few people, and I know that I am not unique in this respect - yet very few people include these feelings when they recall the event on the barstool or the website. I think I understand why this sort of editing takes place after the fact. The first is that exposing one's vulnerabilities to strangers - and what fits that definition better than a bunch of avatars on a website - is both scary and thankless. No one is really into sharing their deepest feelings if all that they can expect in terms of a reward for exposing them is a barrage of mockery and armchair quarterbacking. Another reason is that it's difficult to translate such things into words, and doing so requires a significant investment of time and energy. A third is that it goes against the standard model of what seems to be acceptable content in a TR. Anyhow - while I am a big fan of ironic detachment and understatement, I think that limiting the range of acceptable expression to them fundamentally distorts the nature of climbing, and eliminates many of the things that make it such a compelling pasttime from the picture. It's those moments of doubt, and terror, and remorse, and regret, and misery that make that authenticate the positive experiences.* So I hope that we see more TR's that include them now and then, and that when they do show up the folks that post here will think a bit more carefully about their own experience in the mountains, and remember the times when they felt the same way before hitting the "submit reply" button. *For my own part, I think I will fucking weep when I make it to the summit of Ranier after getting shut down three times and counting - even though I was expecting it to be hike - and to recall letting fly with anything more than a shrug upon reaching the summit is to invite several years worth of ridicule.

Not involved but maybe it was a "not what you say but how you said it kind of a thing." I agree with your thoughts though - everything about that ascent sounded like a cautionary tale to me. I am glad the guys made it down okay - and I applaud them for toughing it out - but I would imagine that neither they nor anyone they climb with will head into the hills with will tackle a such a route in anything other than textbook fashion for quite a while.

Nice Pics! Glad you had a good time over there. I never expected Mongolia to look so much like Wyoming. You could probably fool some people by claiming that the photo with the pile of rocks in it is a long distance shot of Vedauwoo...

I always liked "Soluble Fish" at Shelf Road. Sort of the same odd adjective-noun combo that you find in All Purpose Duck...

Under the current structure the poor get hit the hardest relative to their income, and commerce is discouraged in a manner that is directly proportional to the tax. I would support the plan, but only if the state sales tax goes and can never be reimposed. As an additional sweetener, I would also like to see a permanent, irrevocable ceiling put on city and county taxes to insure that they do not simply fill the sales-tax void by increasing their taxe rates, thus restoring the regressive effects of the sales tax, discouraging commerce, and increasing the tax burden still more.

I would be interested in hearing what people propose to do about the problem in light of the fact that a wholesale abandonment of fossil fuels would immediately result in a massive global depression that would make the Great Depression look benign in comparison.

I think the data extends quite a bit further back than you think, as is the case with the ice-core samples from antartica I mentioned. I am sure that there are others that people actually in the field could toss out there as well. But I agree with your point in that documenting climate change and understanding the precise mechanisms that govern it are two entirely different things.

Gotta love the internet where everyone is an expert. I am not sure why you are slamming me over this as I am in agreement with your camp on this particular piece of data. The fit between global temperatures and CO2 in the ice-core data is pretty tight. However, as you suggest, I am not the least bit informed when it comes to the precise manner in which ice-core samples are used to asses historical temperatures. Is it merely the thickness of each ice layer that serves as a proxy for temperature in each data point? Anyhow - my main point was that the Paul Ehrlich style missives from the Deep Ecology folks aren't going to do anything to wean the masses off of central heating et al. Gotta tether your agenda to concrete measures that will benefit the general public in some tangible way if you are going to achieve anything.

I don't think there's any real scientific debate about the connection between increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and increasing global temperatures. However, there also no real debate about the fact that there are clearly other factors - none of which humans have any control over - that also play a critical role in regulating climate change. Moreover, no scientist that I am aware of would contend that we understand all of the factors that influence climate change, much less their interaction. In light of these facts, and the reality that viable alternatives to fossil fuels are not availabe yet, it seems like it would be prudent to focus on modest, attainable lifestyle changes that appeal to the average person's self interest first, like turning off lights, buying energy efficient appliances, going a bit easier on the heater in the summer and the AC in the winter, sealing windows and doors, making it easier for people to bike to work, improving mass transit, using monetary incentives to encourage recycling, etc, etc, etc. None of this is sexy or new - most of this stuff has been around since the oil embargo in the 70's - bit it's a hell of a lot more effective than the usual enviromarxist critiques of capitalism and its concommitant demands for massive changes in human behavior and social structure and/or dark rumblings about the corporate state, etc, etc, etc. Incorporating realism and attainability into the agenda have never set-back any political movement that I am aware of. While we are weeping for the glaciers, let us tip a 40 of OE for the massive ice sheets that once cloaked a significant portion of the North American Continent, and have a moment of silence for all of Colorado's once' proud glaciers, the only trace of which that remains is the pitiful scrap near St. Mary's.

So is the final date on this thing the 8-10th of October or what? 6 pages of random shiznit and no consensus date besides what Timmay posted. Let's close the deal....

Non-issue. If you leave the state, take the draws with you.

Ament's Piece on Eldo in Climbing 2-4 years ago was undoubtedly the worst ever.

Very sad news. The main thing I am feeling right now is shock - soon to be followed by sorrow, most of which will be reserved for his family, friends, and loved ones - but a bit of which will stem from the interactions I had with him here. He seemed like a good guy who knew his stuff and stayed on the classy side of any conversation that he participated in here. I will miss his company and contributions here, and regret that I never had a chance to meet him in person. I have never personally taken much comfort in the notion that someone died doing what they loved, as my thoughts tend to drift towards all of the experiences that they will miss out on and won't be able to share with the people that they care about now that they are gone. However, it sounds like he made the most of the time he had, and I hope that the people close to him can take some comfort from that. My sympathies to his wife, his family, and his friends.

excellent find, jayb. so, does this mean you are going to have to reassess you typically slanderous diatribes against the left in which you accuse it of condoning stalinist terror? Hello Comrade! I'm afraid I will have to tender a reluctant "No" in response to your question, on account of the profusion of evidence to the contrary, but thanks for asking. Here is a quote from Muggeridge concerning the manner in which his dispatches from the Ukraine were received by his comrades at The Guardian: "I saw in Orwell’s strong reaction to the villainies of the Communist apparat in Spain a comparable experience to my own disgust some years previously with the Soviet regime and its fawning admirers among the intelligentsia of the West as a result of a stint as Moscow correspondent of the Manchester Guardian.” “Later, when I got to know Orwell, he told me the story of how the articles had been turned down by Kingsley Martin, then editor of the New Statesman. I pointed out that, in the same sort of way, my messages to the Guardian from the USSR —for instance, about the famine caused by Stalin’s collectivization policy in the Ukraine and the Caucasus, and about the arrest of some British engineers on spurious espionage charges— had been either whittled down or unused when they were more than mildly critical of the Soviet regime." Source - Muggeridge's words. Your Pal,

Here you go: "Analysis: Shame of Duranty's Pulitzer By Martin Sieff UPI Senior News Analyst Published 6/2/2003 7:46 PM WASHINGTON, June 2 (UPI) -- As the U.S. media still digests the shock and lessons of the Jayson Blair affair at The New York Times, a far older and far worse journalistic wrong may soon be posthumously righted. The Pulitzer Prize board is reviewing the award it gave to New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty more than 70 years ago for his shamefully -- and knowingly -- false coverage of the great Ukrainian famine. "In response to an international campaign, the Pulitzer Prize board has begun an 'appropriate and serious review' of the 1932 award given to Walter Duranty of The New York Times," Andrew Nynka reported in the May 25 edition of the New Jersey-published Ukrainian Weekly. The campaign included a powerful article in the May 7 edition of the conservative National Review magazine. Sig Gissler, administrator for the Pulitzer Prize board, told the Ukrainian Weekly that the "confidential review by the 18-member Pulitzer Prize board is intended to seriously consider all relevant information regarding Mr. Duranty's award," Nynka wrote. The utter falsehood of Duranty's claims that there was no famine at all in the Ukraine -- a whopping lie that was credulously swallowed unconditionally by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and many others -- has been documented and common knowledge for decades. But neither the Times nor the Pulitzer board ever before steeled themselves to launch such a ponderous, unprecedented -- and potentially immensely embarrassing -- procedure. Indeed, Gissler told The Ukrainian Weekly that there are no written procedures regarding prize revocation. There are no standards or precedents for revoking the prize. The Ukrainian famine of 1929-33, named the "Harvest of Sorrow" by historian Robert Conquest in his classic book on the subject, was the largest single act of genocide in European history. The death toll even exceeded the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people a few years later. In all, 10 million Ukrainians, most of them peasants, died as catastrophic, stupid and cruel collectivization policies were imposed by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin on the richest, most fertile, wheat-exporting breadbasket in the world. In the decades before World War I, its annual grain exports regularly vastly outstripped those of the American Midwest. The enforced collectivization of land and the unbelievable death toll were deliberately whipped up by conscious policy and malice. Stalin was determined to crush the slightest remaining glimmer of Ukrainian national identity and also to liquidate the "kulaks" or wealthy peasants, which in practical terms meant any family with the expertise to raise a decent crop on the land. Mass shootings of entire families, or so-called liquidations, were commonplace. The production of food collapsed. Yet the mainstream Western media was virtually blind to what was going on. And in the United States, serious newspapers across the nation took their lead from the then-revered and utterly trusted Duranty. As Richard Pipes, a leading U.S. authority on Soviet history, noted, "It has been said that no man has done more to paint in the United States a favorable image of the Soviet Union at a time when it was suffering under the most savage tyranny known to man." British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, London correspondent for the left-wing Manchester Guardian, scooped the world by fearlessly going into the Ukraine and defying the Soviet secret police -- then known as the OGPU -- to expose the true horrors of the famine. He also knew Duranty well and observed him closely. Writing 40 years later in his classic memoirs "Chronicles of Wasted Time," Muggeridge concluded that Duranty was a sociopath without a grain of professional integrity or human decency to his name. He described Duranty as "a little, sharp-witted, energetic man" who liked "to hint at aristocratic connections and classical learning, of which, I must say, he produced little evidence. One of his legs had been amputated after a train accident, but he was very agile at getting about with an artificial one." Duranty may well have been blackmailed or bribed or both by the Soviets, but Muggeridge concluded that his real motive in lying outright about what he knew to be true and helping the Soviets in their unprecedented, astonishingly successful cover-up was a far simpler one: He loved and revered Stalin precisely because he was so colossally murderous and cruel. "He admired Stalin and the regime precisely because they were so strong and ruthless. 'I put my money on Stalin' was one of his favorite sayings.'" Indeed, Muggeridge related that in one conversation they had, Duranty even admitted to him that he knew there was a catastrophic food shortage, even famine in Ukraine and that he knew the Soviet authorities were prepared to kill large numbers of people there to keep control. As Muggeridge described the conversation, "But, he said, banging the sides of the sofa, remember that you can't make omelettes without breaking eggs -- another favorite saying. They'll win, he went on; they're bound to win. If necessary, they'll harness the peasants to the ploughs but I tell you they'll get the harvest in and feed the people that matter. The people that mattered were the men in the Kremlin and their underlings. ... The others were just serfs, reserves of the proletariat, as Stalin called them. Some would die, surely, perhaps, quite a lot, but there were enough, and to spare." An appalled and a fascinated Muggeridge listened to all this and later recalled, "I had the feeling, listening to this outburst, that in thus justifying Soviet brutality and ruthlessness, Duranty was in someway getting his own back for being small, and losing a leg, and not having the aristocratic lineage ... he claimed to have. ... Duranty was a little browbeaten boy looking up admiringly at a big bully." In his own lifetime -- he lived to the age of 73, though he died broke and forgotten -- Duranty was never called to account. Indeed, as Muggeridge also noted, "He came to be accepted as the great Russian expert in America, and played a major part in shaping President Roosevelt's policies" towards the Soviet Union. The Pulitzer Prize board's re-evaluation of Duranty's award therefore comes late in the day, to put it mildly, but it is still a welcome, indeed necessary gesture towards American journalistic integrity and to the hecatombs of dead whose cries were hushed. "

I just can't help but wonder if anger or nostalgia is the stronger of the two emotions driving the protests in NY...

Jackson Creek Dome has some dope slabbage if you are into that - and I never saw another party there when I climbed there. If you head back to the headstone area - Topaz is one of the first lines on the left as you arrive at the rock from the trail. It starts out on slab, transitions to a dead-vertical crimpfest on incut chicken heads, and climbs over an amazing roof on the way to the anchors. The last climb on the right side of the Headstone goes at 10a, and has an incredible position. There are a couple of worthwhile trad lines in between these routes as well. Post the deets if you head back there or to McCurdy. Not exactly in the Platte - but check out 11 Mile Canyon for moderate trad as well. I hear that Mueller Canyon State Park has come formations that might be worth a visit as well.