G-spotter

Won't Romney have to have at least 4 VP's to satisfy the elders?

Anonymous originated when Chuck Norris roundhouse kicked a group of internet b/tards so hard their names fell off.

I suspect you could ski down Pan Dome Falls right now. The last dump was super deep. More on the way.

Linsanity brand frozen banana creamsicles. Yellow on the outside and white on the inside.

Get your ox quick. They are stopping making and distributing it this week, too addictive. Rush is going to go through withdrawal.

Deep fresh powder is much better than a bouldering mat when it comes to falling off dry-tool bouldering moves, and you don't have to worry about putting holes in the mat either. I did take a glancing hammer blow to the helmet though. Stemalot came off from a considerable height and went armpit-deep into a drift.

went in to Box Canyon with Stemalot today to try out some new toys 1m of powder snow over everything sunny side routes falling apart. constant entertainment. almost the full length of "festering toadstools" fell off, in a five-stage process, leaving wet rock behind we climbed/soloed about on the first pitch of grim reaper. mostly steep wallowing with about 6-7m of exposed ice. ice was aerated and funky. the second pitch through the notch seemed like it maybe wanted to avalanche. third pitch looked good from below, very featured but blue. had designs on seeing what was in on emerald wall but the view from grim reaper looked like the answer was "not much". the ski out in climbing boots was moderately amusing. more flotation for all the powpow would have been useful. with skinny old skis and whatnot it pretty much took a depth charge to get going.

The most recent time I flew in a heli was an A Star out of Port MacNeill in December and it was $2000 an hour then so that's some idea of fuel cost anyways. Probably more expensive by this summer especially if Iran gets bombed or whatever.

You can make a shitty belay from good gear, and you can make the best out of bad gear through careful equalization. the point is that a cordelette doesn't do a successful job of equalizing forces on bad gear. To say "I only belay on bomber gear, so I forget about equalization" and to say "The gear is bad so you better not fall" are both mistakes. Undoubtedly there are places where even the best equalization in the world won't help but there are also places where it can make a life and death difference. Blake is arguing that since cordelettes don't work it's better to use the rope and not carry cordelettes. I've been in enough situations where I didn't have enough rope left to use in the alpine that I find a PAS and a couple of long slings are very useful. Plus then I can leave the long slings behind for rap anchors on the way down. Or maybe I should switch to 80m ropes so I'll have more of the rope left to belay with after I climb a 70m pitch and find crap gear at the belay ledge I was aiming for.

Talking about bomber anchors is fine for cragging yet the reality is in many alpine areas you might be making do with anchors that are distinctly less than perfect.

I think the point Blake is making is that when tested during dynamic failure cordelettes actually don't equalize anything. see Will Gadd blog post from a year or two ago about going back to the sliding-X.

I don't trust anyone who misspells "suppression" in their link.

Oxycontin and morphine, dude

It depends on your gear weight vs. your gear bulk . a person weighs about 175 lbs in a compact package so if you go, say, 4 with no gear and 2 with lots of gear it may work out better than 3 and 3 with each a smaller amount of gear.

Thanks for the info.

ohmygodhow did this get here i am not good withinternet

It could happen

if you flip a coin 9 times and get a heads every time, there's one probability that you are at the long tail of a normal distribution, and the Bayesian statistician would also evaluate the probability that there is something wrong with the coin you are using (in which case the chance of getting another head might be 100%) If you enough to invoke Thomas Bayes, you know enough that a 'fair' coin is assumed. In climbing, you have to expect the unexpected. Diedre has been solid the last dozen times I climbed it, but if I assume that, I could be surprised by a recently exfoliated flake while soloing and pitch off for a 200m slab whipper. If the snow was awesome on Cypress and I assume it's the same when I drop into Suicide Gully, I could be surprised by a windslab and get avalanched. So no, you don't just "assume the coin is fair". Bayes is all about multiple hypotheses. A fair coin is just one of those hypotheses, and it is also possible to test that assumption. The more flips you make and the more consecutive heads you get, the more the assumption that the coin is fair becomes suspect. Of course you could just stop and look at it to see if it has two heads or if it's weighted or whatever too. There are other, more effective ways of testing fairness than just by flipping. But if you start off by assuming fairness, then a long run of unfair behaviour is in fact exactly one of the indicators that you might need to change your assumption of fairness.

if you flip a coin 9 times and get a heads every time, there's one probability that you are at the long tail of a normal distribution, and the Bayesian statistician would also evaluate the probability that there is something wrong with the coin you are using (in which case the chance of getting another head might be 100%)

"Why should I spend a couple of days kissing ass at a tradeshow to get a free rope when I can just work for two hours and then buy one?"

The Bow Hut area conditions report from yesterday probably describes the snowpack well http://www.acmg.ca/mcr/archives.asp

I guess she's never gonna guest star on Glee now.

My list is all climbers. Were your lost skiing friends all in the backcountry? It wouldn't at all surprise me if the stats for that game were pretty similar to climbing. Does a heart attack while giving a climbing slideshow in your living room count as a climbing related death? Yep. Mostly avalanches. One died when he lost an edge while skiing Liberty Ridge though. Now I should also disclose four friends lost to non mountain causes. One murdered by locals at age 24 while trekking the Annapurna Circuit. Two of cancer in their 50s. One in his 40s who flipped a boat and drowned in a lake while fishing. Add in a statistical bias to climber and skier friends and I am no longer sure if it really tells me mountain sports are higher risk or not. If I have more than twice the number of friends who climb to those who don't the two rates are pretty close? Everyone dies of something. I don't know anybody who died in a car crash though.

I know 10 people that have died in the mountains. 8 skiing, 2 climbing.

What's more dangerous, skiing or climbing?