JayB

I already posted this earlier in response to a similar query by Baron Von Haggis "I'm a big fan of the ideals enshrined in the constitution. The fact that the country has never fully lived up to them doesn't make them any less inspiring. Our history has been a chronicle of the struggle to do that very thing, sometimes regressing, sometimes advancing, but somehow always fitfully making progress towards a society that practices what the founders preached. The only major failing that this country has at the moment is that our immigration policy is far too permissive with respect to the Scotts. That could very well be our downfall if it continues for too much longer."

Nice - major props for the tele descent! Great photos in the gallery too.

We need the TR, homes. Change the names to protect the guilty.

Exactly.

I say it's put-up or shut-up time. You redpoint a 5.13 sport route of RuMr's choice and I'll give you $100. Anyone else who wants to see Dwayner prove his claim that anyone can climb 5.13 sport, by demonstrating that he can climb 5.13 sport, make a pledge and sweeten the pot.

Yeah, Matt. I would have made the case for the invasion differently myself, but I am not running the show. In any event, it's not like we were talking about Mother Theresa here. We, along with all of the nations of any significance in Western Europe and the former USSR supported this piece of shit in order to contain what seemed like the greater menace at the time. It is an irrefutable fact that he posessed an used chemical and nerve agents, and that he was using all of the means at his disposal to aquire nuclear capability prior to the Gulf War. This fact was so thoroughly documented during the first round of inspections that no one can dispute this point. During this time it was his practice to constrain the inspectors and curtail their effectiveness as much as possible, then he kicked them out. They were only admitted again under direct threat by US forces, and still attempted to limit the inspections as much as possible. Given the documented facts of his history, the various missing weapons, and the continued attempts to thwart the inspectors was it really rational to conclude that Saddam was telling the truth and disregard the assesments given by virtually every Western country with a modicum of intelligence gathering capability? If so, then the left has a case. If not, then what we have is an effort on the part of the left to salvage some credibility after their predictions about the war turned out to be grossly mistaken. There's also the minor matter of alternatives. What would you have done in the place of the invasion? Maintain the sanctions and prolong the suffering of the Iraqi people indefinitely and leave Saddam in power? Simply discontinue the sanctions and walk away? If we did so is it really reasonable to conclude that Saddam would have seen the light and spent his time engrossed in crosswords and needlepoint rather than attempting to restore his clout in the region and avenge 12 years of systematic humiliation at the hands of the West? If anyone in the administration falsified or fabricated intelligence, then the public should certainly be privy to this information, and the responsible parties should be held accountable, but I think that what any investigation will ultimately find is that the administration simply acted on the best intelligence that they had, which was decidedly less than perfect. We launched the Manhattan Project on the basis of the unconfirmed suspicion that the Germans, lead by Werner Heisenberg, were well on their way towards making an atomic bomb. After the war we found out that their efforts were far short of producing anything close to an operational device. However, few would argue that our assesment of the immediate threat posed by a Nazi atom bomb, while proven inaccurate, was in any way inconsistent with reason or the general interest of mankind.

Muy Bueno Lee. Nice way to get your alpine-rock-multipitch career rolling!

I know someone who works at the Seattle Times. Jarred - maybe you could PM me with some of their contact information and I'll check and see if this person thinks that anyone is interested in following up on this story.

Moderately interesting editorial on this subject by Fouad Ajami in the Wall Street Journal

Although I doubt anyone has bothered to log even a semi-offical record for the route, I wonder what the fastest RT time on the Frostbite-Sitkum circuit is. I think it would have taken us about 19 hours if we hadn't missed an obvious turn and taken the mother of all detours on the way back to the car, and our only humble (yet unattained) goal with respect to time was to try to get back to the car before dark. The route is in perfect shape for a solo effort right now, and in the right weather window someone could cruise the thing solo using running shoes, a trekking pole with a self arrest grip, and a windbreaker. I think that anyone that's fit enough to run a marathon right now could do the round trip in less than 8 hours without struggling too much. Whether anyone would want to bother doing such a thing is another question though.....

Same.

Insane.

I'm a big fan of the ideals enshrined in the constitution. The fact that the country has never fully lived up to them doesn't make them any less inspiring. Our history has been a chronicle of the struggle to do that very thing, sometimes regressing, sometimes advancing, but somehow always fitfully making progress towards a society that practices what the founders preached. The only major failing that this country has at the moment is that our immigration policy is far too permissive with respect to the Scotts. That could very well be our downfall if it continues for too much longer. That and we've got the geopolitical equivalent of a lamprey stuck to our Northern frontier...

I've got some Sabertooths that you can borrow...

Word. Jason: Relax. We'll be okay. I mean, if the Germans can murder 6-million people in death camps, and untold millions more outside their own borders, only to become the geopolitical equivalent of Mr. Rogers in the world's eyes 40 years later, I think that the rest of the world will eventually get over the fact that we drive big cars, make a lot of money, and occaisionally use our millitary to arrest a slaughter or two or depose the odd dictator every now and then.

While it would be untrue to claim that there are not elements of our foreign policy that those outside of our borders can be legitimately upset about, it would be equally untrue to suggest that all resentment of the United States, especially in Europe, is the product of a fair and factual analysis of every aspect of our role in the world. As others have mentioned, when it appeared that the Japaneese would be ascendant and displace the US atop the global economic hierarchy, the rise in anti-Japaneese sentiment had very little to do with the purported shortcomings of the Japaneese themselves, and everything to do with our own envy at and resentment of their success. First they build cars that last twice as long, use half the gas, and then they have the audacity to sell them to us at half the price! Damn them. You can't tell me that Europe's relative decline vis-a-vis the US and their consciousness of their rather staggering civilizational failures (WWI and WWII, Nazism, Fasism, Communism) have nothing to do with the way they feel about the US.

It's called the electoral college. Look into it. Seriously. Didn't they make you learn this stuff before given you that Green Card? Congrats on getting the card - seriously. Glad to have your kilt wearing, haggis eating, ungrateful Scottish Mofo ass in this country. Seriously though various private groups sponsored recounts and Bush came out ahead in virtually every one of the. I think the Miami Herald still has the stuff up on their site if you'd care to look into the matter further.

Plenty of running water in the gulley to the left of Kennedy ridge - the trail will take you right past it. There was patchy snow at this elevation, but pretty much everything is snow free until about 5400 feet, and I wouldn't be surprised if most of it is gone by the time you get up there. There's a great camp/bivy site at the last stand of trees (a clump of about 4 or 5) on Kenndy Ridge, that offers some shade and protection from the wind. Have a nice trip.

So did you guys go up and over on Friday, then head out? We didn't see a soul on the route until the Summit.

I could still feel the psychic wounds inflicted by lugging a heavy-ass pack all the way to the base of the Kennedy Glacier last year, only to get beat back by a storm that unloaded about 16" on us overnight, so when I saw that the forecast called for deteriorating weather on Sunday, I knew that there was only one thing to do. Cancel and go sport-climbing. Unfortunately I had already committed to doing the $#@ing thing in a day over some beers earlier in the week, in order to capitalize on the good weather and avoid lugging another beast up the mountain as part of a three day trip. Not a big deal for some, but a surefire path into a quagmire of suffering for me. Despite these misgivings, and the fact that the route did, in fact, lead me into a quagmire of suffering, I actually enjoyed the route, and think it will go down as one of my best days in the mountains ever. Here's the TR and some photos: We left the car at 11:30 Friday night, and made it to the turn off for Kennedy Ridge (just before the Kennedy Hot Springs) at about 1:30, and were near the base of the Kennedy Glacier by about 4:30 or so. From here you can follow the trail to the base of the ridge that leads up to Kennedy Peak, or -at the moment - you can slog your way up a snow filled gulley. I'm not sure how much time we actually saved, but it looked like a shortcut to us, and since taking the path of leas effort has become something of a credo for me, we took it. We dragged ourselves to the top of the ridge just before 6:00, and I got the stove ready so that we could start melting snow right away when my buddy got there with the pot. However, in one of our many collective blunders we managed to forget the pot, and reverted to filling the bladders with snow and setting them close to our backs within our packs to melt. Thankfully the weather was in a forgiving mood, and we felt reasonably confident that we could get away with a blunder of this magnitude. From there we made our way up the ridge, passing a large nunatak (or is it nunatek?) and Kennedy Peak on the left. From there it was a short walk to the col between the Vista and Kennedy Glaciers, where we arrived at around 8:30 or so. True to my predictions, we were storming this mountain light and slow as all hell. We roped up here because: 1) We packed a rope the whole damned way up there, and 2) We packed a rope the whole damned way up there. There were no open crevasses visible on the route, with the exception of a few fissures on the Vista Glacier side. So you could actually ditch the rope with minimal risk at this point, but we are a cautious bunch, and the rope actually provided me with the opportunity to let others drag me up the mountain. We were all about two hours away from any sort of a second wind at this point, so the climb up to the Rabbit Ears - which actually look more like a rabbit horn from below - was deathly slow. The pitch here is somewhere in the mid-thirty to mid-forty degree range here I'd guess, and the snow was fairly icy, but ascended easily enough if you have mastered the freedom technique with your crampons. We climbed with a running belay in this section. We arrived at a small plateau about 100 feet below the rabbit horn at around 11:00 and took a breather until about 11:30, then headed up to the rabbit horn. We passed the horn/ears on the right, and once there discovered that while our route worked well enough, passing directly through the ears puts you on a marginally better path. We took a look at the final ridge to the summit and headed down the low third class choss to the ridge and made our way towards the summit. We looked back and suddenly the Rabbit Horn had magically transformed into the Rabbit's Ears. We took this as a good omen and continued on to the summit, and took the slow pace we set below to a whole new level, summiting at around 1:30 or so. About 200 vertical feet below the summit ridge there is a brief section of snow to the left of some blue-glacial ice that checks in at about 50 degrees I'd guess (just right of the cornice in one of the photos above), that you'll need to climb to make it to the top, and I'd imagine that the snow will last for another two weeks to a month. One piolet is more than adequate right now, but if it that dissapears a third tool and a couple of screws will make most people a bit more comfortable I imagine. I took a third tool along and regretted it, but used it on this section to because...I packed the damed thing all that way and would use it on a 10 degree slope just to justify all of the effort it took to get it there. As you can see in this photo, the euphoria that resulted from attaining the summit left me feeling pretty energetic. One benefit of descending via the Sitkum Glacier is the preponderance of bobsled worthy glissade paths that the teeming hordes on the Sitkum route leave in their wake. You can glissade right down to the camps in Boulder Basin on the moment. There are a gazillion convenience trails winding through the basin, all of which look more or less like the actual trail, but head to your right as you are descending and look for the john. Once you find that you are on the right path. Even with a light pack the descent down the trail that leads out of Boulder Basin sucked in a massive way, and pretty much every joint below my waist was killing me by the time we made it down. I was just about to sooth my aching feet in the frigid, coliform bacteria laden effluent that runs out of Boulder Basin when we noticed a couple of black bear cubs and a large brown furry thing that looked suspiciously like a mama bear nearby. Thankfully for us, bears reputedly have a since of smell several thousand times as strong as our own, and I think that one whiff of my feet sent them all packing. We went packing ourselves, setting the fastest pace we would muster, and cruised right past the junction that lead to Kennedy Hot springs. After just over an hour and three miles worth of steadily mounting denial, we confronted the fact that we were, in fact, a bunch of dumb-ass, no-sense-of-direction havin' mofos who had just tacked another 6.5 miles onto their day. It was just after 7:00 at this point, and had we played our cards right, we would have been back at the trailhead in just over an hour. As it were, we had close to four hours of suffering in front of us. After this point the most interesting part of the hike out had to be the nonexistent things that we saw in the woods. We'd been up for close to 40 hours straight at that point, and I am told that when you go for too long without sleep your brain starts to transform ambiguous sensory data into patterns that it recognizes, even if the setting it puts them in makes no sense whatsoever. Between the three of us we saw a cottage (small cliff), a bear (stump), a school bus (not sure), industrial pipes (trees), a sign two miles away from Kennedy Hot Springs that clearly said "Kennedy Hot Springs (tree) a cabin (surprise - trees) and one or two other things. We limped back to the trailhead at around 11:00 or so, and I concluded that had the truck been a half a mile further I would have thrown a tantrum, refused to walk any further, and reverted to the fetal position while rocking back and forth, weeping, and sucking my thumb. As it were I sucked down a warm Budweiser for the analgesic effect and passed out 46 times while trying to keep the driver awake and dreamt about clipping bolts that were about four feet apart on a warm limestone cliff... The End. P.S. Lilly - where were you? We were the only one's on the route Saturday, and there was no boot-track! We needed those steps......

Yah, you're right. I'm far too polite for the likes of this craphole. Bye Miss Normandy has been sausaged. The cycle continues.... The cycle continues....

Oops. Thought this was a long-lost poster thread but on closer inspection it looks like a Dru title-change thread. But still. Whatever happened to Smokey McPot? When he posted on the Muir on Saturday thread I knew that we'd be treated to a thoughtful, balanced meditation on all of the pro's and con's of smoking out in the Muir hut, and the nuanced perspective he brough to all issues involving Tha Kind have been sorely missed ever since...

...or Smokey McPot?

Good job up there. Glad you guys survived the shelling from the rocks. Post your full-on TR! I think that a lot of folks would like to read it, and those that don't can click past it.

I think that the "training cells to hold more water" theory is an out-and-out crock. The amount of water that any given cell will take is determined by the cell's maximum volume and its osmolarity relative to the aqueous environment surrounding it. If a cell is hypertonic to the solution is is suspended in, it will absorb water until it either reaches equilibrium or bursts. If it is hypotonic to the solution surrounding it it will lose water until it attains equilibrium or runs out of water and collapses. Other than setting personal records for the amount of urine you expend in a given amount of time, I don't the hydration training will produce much of a result for you. Spending a day or two at 10,000 feet or more will do a lot more to improve your performance. Good luck. Are you doing the Leadville 100?