JayB

Yup - they've got a pretty slick system that plugs your measurements into a computer that generates a custom pattern based on these inputs, which then shoots the data over to a robotic cutting machine, and then they're sewn together by the folks that work there. Perfect fit with all of the mods I wanted for around $150 - at my door in a week with shipping thrown in for free, and no tax on the sale. Not sure why anyone looking for a new softshell would buy it elsewhere if they knew about these folks. Custom made stuff in the mid-100 range versus mass produced stuff in the mid-to-low twos. It was an easy decision for me. Also serious for the WB-400. First softshell fabric that looks like they it can serve as a stand-alone winter pant fabric for use in the PNW IMO.

I bought some WB-400 pants from them this fall and will buy from them again in the future. I had to make a couple of changes after I placed my order and they updated the specifications instantaneously - and ultimately I ended up with a pair of very well put-together, custom-fit pants for about $80 less than mass produced competitors about a week after placing my order. Definite

Gotta disagree with you here. If a company can manufacture goods or generate services less expensively elsewhere, a couple of things happen that are good for this country. The first is that the consumers of the said goods or services have to spend less money to aquire them, which leaves them with more resources to spend elsewhere on other products. When reducing manufacturing costs cuts the price of a given car from $25,000 to $20,000, the consumer can use the additional $5,000 in his pocket to remodel his house and provide work for contractors, business for the home improvement store, etc, etc, etc - the end result being that money that would have formerly been confined to those persons and companies involved in the production of a single automobile can now also generate effective demand (demand+the ability to put it to use with $) for a much broader range of goods and services. This is analogous to a farmer spending $5,000 to generate 20 tons of grain using antiquated equipment and dated production methods versus spending the same amount of money in conjunction with the most up-to-date equipment and production methods and producing 50 tons of grain. Which farmer is better off? Similarly - which country is better off - the one that generates goods and services worth 10 trillion dollars with a given input of capital and labor or the country that produces 15 trillion dollars with the same expenditure of both? The other good thing that happens is rather than squandering resources in industries in which the US no longer enjoys a competitive advantage, lowering production costs increases profitability and liberates capital for reinvestment in sectors in which the US can still compete effectively. Successful companies expand operations in the divisions which generate the most profit, which ultimately translates to more workers employed in these fields, and these workers are far more secure than their counterparts working in fields where workers in other countries can do the same job at a lower cost. The other factor to consider is that when measures are taken to protect workers in a given industry that is threatened by foreign competition, like certain kinds of steel production, the tarriff barriers enacted to help them end up doing more harm than good. In the case of the steel tariffs, the dwindling pool of steel workers benefitted, while the far greater number of workers in fields that consume steel and convert it into finished goods were harmed by an artificial increase in prices that rendered the goods that they produced less competitive by the exact percentage that the tarriffs inflated prices. In the end the result was a net loss of jobs in the US. Not to mention the damage done to consumers who paid higher prices, and all of the workers in other fields who suffered when consumers had less money available to buy their products or services. Ultimately, tarriffs and other protectionist schemes end up protecting a narrow sliver of the workforce while compromising both the purchasing power and the competitiveness of other workers. The effects are subtle in most economies where such protections are both inconsistent and incomplete, but one only needs to look to North Korea, the former Soviet Union for an example of the consequences such economic policies in their full glory.

Word. Way to scope and score! Thanks for sharing your find. When Paco and I were up on Shuksan in early November there were hundreds of frozen cascades visible beneath all of the glaciers. Just about all of them looked like low angle gulleys from a distance, but my guess would be that there are quite a few worthy lines like this that form up on the periphery of glaciers every year. -

I think that there have been a few folks keeping that aspect in mind since those photos were posted last year Matt. Hopefully Layton's goading will persuade someone to get up there and hit it. Wasn't there some mention of a washout that would cut off Sloan's would be ascenscionists a few miles short of the trailhead? That alone might keep all but the most determined away from the mountain this winter if it's true....

If only CO had better skiing...

Do you even lead ice these days, let alone mixed routes?

I lived in CO for four years and got at least 100 days of skiing in while I was there and have to agree with Kurt. With the exception of A-Basin and Crested Butte, the terrain in CO is just plain weak. Add that to a heavy reliance on man-made snow, a skimpy-ass base, massive-overgrooming, three weeks between storms, and a preponderance of wankers from the Texas and the plains and you have the overhyped conglomeration of express-quad served dissapointment that is skiing in Colorado. Anyone who's idea of great skiing involves meandering down weak-ass groomers with their knees locked together in a neon-accented one-piece will absolutely be in heaven in CO. Anyone who values terrain, vert, and skiing on new snow more than once a season will be much happier in WA. The worst part of it is that just when the good snow starts falling, the wankers that run the resorts start shutting down most of the lifts. And as far as the snow is concerned, anyone who can't ski in the powder we get out here isn't much of a skier - and presumably has little interest in hucking. Hop off anything over 10 feet high and you'll be much happier landing a bunch of dense coastal powder resting on a 10 foot base than when punching through 18" of month old snow on top of dirt. I grew up dreaming about skiing in Colorado, but learned the cruel reality once I moved out there, and soon began dreaming about the day when I could get back on some real terrain in the Crystal backcountry or Blackcomb/Whistler. The sunshine was nice though.

I love discussions of peripheral aracana that have very little to do with climbing. Let's combine this with the "Dynamic vs Non-Dynamic Belay" thread for an all-time classic. If you keep both the height-to-weight ratio and the body fat percentage between a large climber and a small climber then the glycogen reserves per Kg should be approximately equal between the two, while the actual amount of work per-Kg done by the taller climber to do a single pull-up should always be greater by the difference in the distance-pulled-up-per Kg. Moreover, a given climber will have quite a bit more in the way of glycogen reserves a few hours after scarfing down a heaping pot of pasta, but that of course will not diminish the force necessary to do, or the work involved in doing a pull-up. I am not sure that one can really keep things constant in such a fashion as for tall people their surface to volume ratio is greater, and I imagine this has implications for skeletal-mass as a percentage of BMI, etc, etc, etc. In any event, all things being equal if I were choosing an optimal build for all types of climbing (including alpine slogs, etc) it'd be tall and thin with a positive ape-index. Carrying all of the gear necessary for alpine slogging has got to suck that much more when you are tiny. The only time when I think short people have a clear advantage is in moves that involved being scrunched up, as their compact physique seems to enable them to keep their center of gravity closer to the rock and helps keep them from levering off.

Another vote for option number three. I hope that everyone that wants to reduce RMI's heavy footprint on the mountain chimes in before the November 25th deadline expires.

I'm into the long day with a single run down sometimes, but I also like finding decent run and doing laps on it all day long. Any suggestions for places to go that feature a reasonable approach and some open, 500-1000 vertical foot runs to cruise up and down (other than the Paradise/Tatoosh area)? Many thanks.

Last time I checked there had been something like two times as many people have been waxed in the CO backcountry than in all other states combined. Of course part of that is simply due to the extremely high number of skier-days logged in the backcountry there, but even after accounting for that what the statistics reveal is a snowpack that demands respect. Reading through the chronicle of burials and fatalities here: http://geosurvey.state.co.us/avalanche/Colo_Accidents/accidents.html did it for me, and I more or less decided to wait until the spring snowpack showed up to ski anything but ridges and supermellow terrain. YMMV.

If I were to attempt to pinpoint the blame for the majority of the problems with public education today I would lay the majority of it on parents who send ill-prepared, undisciplined, and ill-mannered children in the classroom then expect teachers to work miracles in the limited time that they have with them. The incorporation of some of the more voguish nonsense into school curricula and disciplinary standards hasn't helped the situation, but when a child fails in school it is the parent's fault. Period.

Yeah - a route with a bolt every 3 feet isn't bold. No news there. I am not arguing on behalf of this sort of route, but the mere fact that a few of them exist doesn't bother me either. There's a wide spectrum of bolted routes out there, some of which are death routes, some of which are essentially riskless clipfests, most are somewhere in the middle. Yeah - a route with lots of bolts will dissapoint the person looking for long runouts, but by the same token a death route will take something away from the person who's primary interest is in the physical challenge. I think there's room for both, and easily enough routes out there to keep each camp happy. The solution for each camp is to restrict their climbing to routes that are consistent with their personal objectives. Easy enough. Just for the record - let me clarify what I consider reasonable guidelines for bolting. 1. No additional bolts on established routes without the FA's consent. 2. No bolts next to gear placements. 3. The best compromise when establishing new routes is to bolt them in such a manner that a leader who is competent at the grade can do so without a catastrophic outcome in the event of a fall on ground that is near the upper level of the difficulty they will encounter on the route. In practice this means that if you are putting up a 5.6 route there should be enough protection available for a 5.6 leader to do so without a catastrophic outcome in the event of a fall. If you are putting up a 5.10 route then an entire 5.6 pitch with no pro whatsoever is fine, as a competent 5.10 leader will not have any problem with that pitch. 4. Areas with a longstanding bolt-free ethic should stay that way and be spared the drill. Bolts in sport areas should be spared the chop unless rules guidelines 1 or 2 are violated. In short - local ethics should prevail. Static is Static, Exit 38 is Exit 38, etc, etc, etc. And to revisit a now familiar theme - what is up with this 'You don't understand what you are taking away" business? I've lead enough runout trad routes, slabs, alpine routes and frozen waterfalls to know a thing or two about risk and commitment - thanks - and hardly think I need a lesson in this matter from you. Sometimes I am looking for that kind of climbing you are paying rhetorical homage to, sometimes I am not - and I choose my lines accordingly. Not sure why anyone would do otherwise. As far as bolts being added to the route on Shuksan is concerned, I don't really have strong feelings about the matter either way, but would gladly defer to Paco if he did. I think that the odds of that happening are quite low given it's remoteness and the fact that taking the time to drill would eat up quite a bit of valuable daylight that would be much better spent getting up and off of the route.

Set a strawman up, knock a strawman down, set a strawman up, knock a strawman dow...hey wait you actually just set them up in this post! I think some people on this board have reasonable gripes versus some bolts. This thread was a pretty fun way to talk about them. Making up over-the-top bogus examples to mischaracterize others doesn't help much though. Did anybody talk about escalators up El Cap yet? Once again I see you here as the one that doesn't want to discuss things in a reasonable manner, much more than new and improved JKassidy/Pope/Dwayner. Yeah Chuck, those are caricatures of arguments against bolting that I find both disingenuous and rediculous. Reductio ad Absurdem. It's what happends when you take positions like "bolts are wrong because they modify the rock" to their logical conclusion. You can articulate counterarguments, or you can call them strawmen and walk away. The fact of the matter is that people have argued that bolts are unacceptable because they permanently modify the rock, without making the qualifying statements necessary to render this a sensible basis upon which to discuss when using bolts is reasonable. If permanently modifying the rock in order to render an ascent possible is out of bounds, then there's a whole slew of other practices that will have to be abandoned as well - as well the idea that bolting on lead is okay but bolting on rappel isn't. Not a logically sound proposition if rock modification is the litmus test. Similarly, people have suggested that the addition of bolts to a line automatically diminishes the risk in such a way that the said line no longer presents any significant risk, and no longer retains the adventurous character it would have had otherwise - again without qualification. If we are talking about bolts next to gear placements, or bolts that are unnecessarily close, then I would agree with such statements, but a blanket condemnation of bolting on these grounds isn't persuasive because it just isn't accurate. Yeah - bolts a few feet apart reduce a climb to a purely physical challenge, but so does sewing up an easily protectable trad line with gear every few feet. And as far as bolted sport routes are concerned, with very few exceptions these are lines that no one had ever climbed before the bolts were installed, so I honestly can't understand the "bolts tarnished the experience" argument as without the bolts, the experience in question would not have existed in the first place. Some bolted routes are bolted thoroughly enough to remove all but eliminate the likelihood of injury should the leader fall, some are death routes, most fall somewhere inbetween, with groundfall likely on a significant number of routes if the leader falls before the second or third clip. On those routes where the bolts are close enough together to eliminate the likelikhood of a long fall, any leader who wishes to can simply decline to clip what they deem to be superfluous bolts, or stick to routes that are bolted more to their liking, or decline to climb bolted routes altogether. Why people choose to do otherwise is beyond me. Perhaps you can explain. If you find Pope's position on these matters more to your liking, then I suspect that has quite a bit to do with the fact that it is consistent with some of your long held beliefs, and very little to do with anything that I have said or the validity of the objections that I have raised to his assertions. And finally, spare me the "Some of us don't want to entirely eliminate risk from climbing," business. I'm not sure how one could take that from my comments, but if that's what you think I have been arguing for, you are mistaken. If this is some sort of passive/aggressive variation on the trusty "climbing bolted routes makes you a coward and I am a tough guy" theme, then muster some of the boldness you purport to admire and say so in concrete terms. Last weekend's line will be my first counterargument, but you are welcome to try going down that road if you feel like it will get you somewhere.

True enough. I would have to interject a bunch of qualifiers to make the assertion non-bogus, but I would have to agree with you on the merit of the essential point. And to digress for a moment, one thing that has always confused me are the folks that go to an area that is known to have a sport ethic, rack up their draws at the base of a line that obviously features bolts that are X feet apart, may even look at the guidebook and notice that there are Z bolts in Y feet - then proceed to climb the thing and complain that it wasn't adventurous enough for them because the bolts were too close together for their tastes. Sorta like intentionally going to a gay bar, looking around, then complaining loudly about the lack of women IMO. If the place doesn't offer what you are looking for, why go there in the first place?

Then you are talking about the extent of bolting that's appropriate, which something very different than the: -Bolts are anethema because they modify the rock. -Bolts on uprotectable lines mar the experience that largely nonexistent climbers would have on sections of unprotectable rock featuring nonexistent routes. -Bolts neutralize or render trivial all risk in all cases on all routes no matter how infrequently they are placed. ...arguments that seem to constitute the gist of people's objections to bolting. These are the sorts of bogus assertions that come up time and time again on this board, and I am both delighted and relieved to learn that you don't personally ascribe to them.

I was addressing Pope rather than you, and haven't ever argued against your point as I don't happen to disagree with it. As far as camps are concerned, though, which camp do you consider yourself part of Chuck? I personally climb alpine routes, trad routes, ice routes, the occaisional section of mixed junk and bolted routes as well as combinations of all of the above - and I'm quite familiar the whole package that you speak of (thanks for the heads up though) - and I take the protection that the climb offers. If it's blank rock - that means bolts. You know as well as I do that it's not the simple presence of bolts on a climb that determines the level of risk that climbing a given route entails, its the frequency with which they are placed relative to one another and the hazards lurking below a falling climber that do so. I can't think of a single bolted line that I have ever climbed that would have been anything but a freesolo without bolts, and the number of ethical purists that are clamoring to freesolo most of the bolted face lines that I bother climbing is pretty small. Moreover, there's litterally hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine, bolt -free, unprotectable face lines out there that they can free solo to their heart's content without ever having the experience tarnished by the presence of a bolt within a 10 mile radius. Moreover, the very experience that you are talking about tarnishing would not even exist with without the bolts, as it hadn't occurred to anyone to attempt those lines before they were bolted. Some may claim otherwise but I'd love to see an example. So if things work out so that the one or two people in the state that can only be satisfied by free-soloing face routes in popular cragging areas have their respective experiences tarnished by the presence of sport bolted lines a few feet away then I think I can live with that.

Yet you constantly rail against bolts and not pitons. Both damage the rock, so its either rail against both or none at all if rock modification is going to be the litmus test for what's acceptable and what's not. If this is the best argument that you can make against bolting otherwise unprotectable lines it's time to go back to the lab. Other favorites: -Top roping a sport route and leading involve equal amounts of risk. Love that one. -Bolting is okay if it's done on lead but not if they are placed on rappell - because one creates a permanent 3/8" hole in the rock and the other creates a 3/8' hole in the rock - and rock modification determines what is an acceptable practice and what isn't. -Bolts are okay on slabs because no other protection is possible but they are not okay on face climbs because.... Good stuff. Keep it coming.

Matt: I was only thinking of free climbing in my previous post, namely those situations where someone can't physically make the moves necessary to climb a route and chops a hold in to make it possible for them to do so. As far as aid climbing is concerned, I don't think that there is quite the distinction between modifying the rock with pins and modifying the rock with bolts that those pushing rock modification as the ethical litmus test to end all others would like to believe.

This business about permanently modifying the rock being the ethical yardstick by which all climber's actions must be measured is an out and out crock. Ever climb sandstone? I've modified the hell out of a couple of routes just by climbing them. Ever clean a crack? Ever place a pin? The first pin I drove off of the belay this weekend made the flake I was placing it behind expand a bit with every blow, and I suspect that when and if someone comes along and wants to use it for pro it will be gone after a couple of taps. Installing a bolt in decent rock would have had far less impact than the pin I placed, but even if we had bolts along I wouldn't have bothered because it would have just taken too damned long to install and the pin was good enough to do the job. That, and the fact that it was the only pro available, cemented the deal. But driving pins is okay and placing bolts is wrong because one modifies the rock permanently, and the other - also modifies the rock permanently. Makes sense. That's a logically sound argument you've made there. IMO modification of the rock is less relevant than the purpose for which it was modified. Modifying the rock to make it physically easier to ascend has never been acceptable and never will be. Modifying the rock with a piton or a bolt in order to reduce the risk of being injured or killed in the event of a fall is. Attempting to conflate these two fundamentally unlike things in an effort to discredit bolts and bolted routes is both false and utterly unconvincing.

Nice. Always get their violent delinquents, those mounties.

Getting used to the fact that you have to embalm your scalp with sunscreen if you are going hatless in the mountains or out on the water, but otherwise the low maintenance aspects are a definite bonus.

Thanks for posting the link Dustin. I am going to make it a point to write in support of the preferred alternative ASAP.

That is pretty sweet.