JayB

Jesus. How terrible. I was inspired and humbled every time that I looked at his site, admired the way he lived his life, and amazed by the way he excelled at whatever he chose to do. I never met him, but this makes me very, very sad and I truly feel for those that he left behind. What a horrible loss.

Posted some more photos of the route in the Ice gallery.... Looking up at the first mixed pitch Paco leading the mixed pitch Paco manning the first belay atop P1 Paco heading up to the anchor atop P2

Check Paco's TR in the Ice Conditions forum for more details. He's far too modest to toot his own horn, but his lead up the mixed section was the boldest I have ever personally witnessed, let alone followed. After following the pitch and arriving at the belay I am not sure which was worse - looking at the anchor and moving towards the ice - or having Snoop Dogg and Warren G's "I'm Fly" stuck in my head....

Nice. Photos?

Looks like Kennedy Hot springs got covered by a debris flow during Le Deluge.Link

Classy.

Sweet early season weather-window, no holliday-plan conflicts to work around, and (surprise) no one's talking about their plans for the weekend for fear of generating the giga-gaper infestation on their chosen line. Use this thread to: 1. Talk about your secret line on Monday once the weather window has closed. 2. Vote for The Line Most Likely to Be Seiged by the Multi-Man Megacluster. (My votes: 1. The North Face of Hood. Hands down favorite. 2. NW Couloir on Eldo - a close second with a minumum of seven parties on it by noon on Saturday). 3. Any ice near the Coleman Glacier on Baker.) 3. Avenge past slights or poached lines of the past by making up avatars to disclose your enemy's secret project to the lurking hordes and watch as they descend upon it with lemmingesque abandon.

Just finished "Among the Believers" by V.S. Naipul - his tour through Iran, Pakistan, and Indondesia in the months just following the Iranian revolution. Waiting for "Anti-Americanism" by Jean Francois Revel - currently a best-seller in France and Josephson's guide to ice in the GWN.

Seems like some of the stuff in MRNP might be worth looking into this weekend as well.

Omega Pacific JC's are light (35g), cheap, and seem to work pretty well. I think you can get a 10 pack for around $60 at www.linkupgear.com

I was checking out the bulletin board outside of Feathered Friends today looking to see if anyone was selling some of the gear that I need for cheap, and overheard two guys talking about these lines in rather giddy (yet hushed) tones - until they realized that I was eavesdropping - at which point they shot me an annoyed look and took off. I didn't catch everything that they said - in part because on of the guys had a fairly thick accent that I couldn't quite make out (Czech?) but the guy doing most of the talking mentioned something about crossing private property so you might want to keep that in mind if you decide to check this area out. It also sounded as though they were saying that these flows are fed from seeps that result from a leak in an underground pipe of some sort that may have cracked during the recent cold snap, rather than a natural spring or runoff - so this flow might be a onetime thing as any pipe leaking that much water will likely be fixed by the time the next cold front rolls in. From what I gathered these guys were trying to keep this area under wraps so that the could keep it for themselves an their friends, so you might not get the warmest response if you crash their little "secret" stash of ice anytime soon. Sounds like the ice itself is on public property though, so they have no business hoarding it or pretending like they own it IMO.

Guess that depends on how you define in - looks a bit thin for my taste. Many thanks for sharing the photos.

I was thinking about this area earlier this week. There should be a ton of stuff in to the climber's right of the Coleman Glacier (pretty much what the photo is showing...), and I bet the falls that are about 1-2 miles in on the trail are in also. Bring on the Stampede!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Can they convert digital images to slides at those online photo sites like ofoto.com? Converting digital pics to slides might be the way to go for presentations if you want to preserve image quality.

Great Evening. It was good to meet some new folks, and the slide shows that I saw were killer. Major props to mattp, mvs, Polish Bob, David Parker, Forrest_M, wayne1112 and Alex for the sharing those slides. I wish I could have stayed around for Fern's show and all of the rest but whatever that beer was that they were serving absolutely put me under and I had to go sleep it off in my truck. Trying to sleep away the spins in my truck near the ave - another proud moment

I am pretty much in agreement with Matt that more civility and less anonymity would have a positive effect on this site, and chucK/Al_Pine with regards to the fact that communicating solely through the written word tends to generate far more misunderstandings than discussions in person ever would. If you have issues with the environment on the site you can always start by adopting the changes that you want to see on your own first and hope that you'll inspire others to do the same. I've always attempted to be conduct myself online in the manner that I would offline, but I'd be lying if I said that I live up to that standard all of the time.

Nice Job. Now someone just needs to set up a spotting scope to observe the 46 separate parties that are sure to descend on that sucker like the mongol hordes this coming weekend.

"Baghdad Everywhere I've traveled recently in Iraq I've run into Americans, ranging from generals down to privates, who ask perplexedly; What are we Americans supposed to be doing here? Are we going to take over this place and stay here forever? Judging by reports received here from the United States, this perplexity of Americans in Iraq is matching by the perplexity of Americans at home. We have got into this Iraqi job without understanding what we were tackling or why. Imagine how incredulous we would have been if anybody had told us---even so recently as five years ago---that hundreds of thousands of Americans would be camped in the middle of Iraq in 2003, completely responsible for the conduct and welfare of approximately 20,000,000 Iraqis? How does it happened that even some of our topmost officials in Iraq admit that they don't know what they are doing here? The answer can be expressed, I believe, in one word---secrecy. . . .' This is actually an excerpt from an article originally printed in the the Saturday Evening Post in January, 1946 in which I simply changed the words from Berlin to Baghdad, Iraq to Germany, Roosevel to Bush, etc. The original text is below: "January 26, 1946 How We Botched the German Occupation By Demaree Bess Berlin Everywhere I've traveled recently in Germany I've run into Americans, ranging from generals down to privates, who ask perplexedly; What are we Americans supposed to be doing here? Are we going to take over this place and stay here forever? Judging by reports received here from the United States, this perplexity of Americans in Germany is matching by the perplexity of Americans at home. We have got into this German job without understanding what we were tackling or why. Imagine how incredulous we would have been if anybody had told us---even so recently as five years ago---that hundreds of thousands of Americans would be camped in the middle of Europe in 1946, completely responsible for the conduct and welfare of approximately 20,000,000 Germans? How does it happened that even some of our topmost officials in Germany admit that they don't know what they are doing here? The answer can be expressed, I believe, in one word---secrecy. . . ."

This gonna happen?

Greg: Just a couple of points here as I'm about to head off to dinner. The relative successes of Northern European peoples vis-a-vis the rest of the world is a relatively recent development, and there are a number of civiliaztions that have laid claim to the mantle of superiority relative to their counterparts - which your claim would have to address. Just think of the Chinese, the Hindus, the Persians, the Egyptians, and more recently the empires centered around the Mediterranean sea and the Arabian Pinensula such as the Romans, the Abbasids, the Umayaads, and the Ottomans . All of these people achieved a level of technical excellence, political organization, and millitary capability beyond the comprehension, let alone the reach, of the Northern Europeans - who were still barbarians in every sense of the world at the time. If they were inherently superior by virtue of their genes, this superiority should have manifested itself as soon as they became genetically distinct from other peoples - how can the theory of their superiority be reconciled with the fact that they were scarcely beyond a stone age existence while all of the other civilizations flourished around them? There are other points that I would like to touch on, especially the importance of the Arabs in preserving and expanding upon the Greco-Roman intellectual heritage during the Middle Ages, the European recovery of which served as the intellectual scaffolding upon which the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were erected. More later...

I thought all of this petroleum based stuff was too new school and poserish for you Perkins. I expected you to be scoffing at such things and touting the virtues of hides waterproofed with bearfat and beeswax!

Agreed on most of those things needing to happen before folks start to feel more positive about the direction of the economy.

Employment is a lagging indicator. Plug Econ101 into Google and learn why. Or maybe PLC will chime in and give everyone a brief once over on the topic. But I agree that the stats don't mean a whole lot to anyone who has been out of a job for a while and is still looking for one.

Dragontail as of last weekend. No ice visible in any of the gullies. There is ice forming on the sides of the water flowing down Asgard Pass, and ice just starting to form on the Lakes at the top of the pass though if you are looking to gauge recent temps up there. Need to fill the gullies with some snow and qet some serious melt-freeze action going before it will be worth making the hike to check things out IMO.-