Bug

It's a plan then.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGGGGGHHHH. BRING ER ABOUT AND RIDE THE WIND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

maybe you should do a little research and think about what your skills and abilities are. mount rainier can be fairly serious business. I've been up Rainier several times and would be happy to do one of the easier routes with you. I've done a couple "internet climbs" with people I didn't know. More than 50% end up staying below 11000 because they just aren't in good enough shape. If this is true of you, I will know after the first day to base camp and I will climb without you. I am not a mountain racer by any means but if we can't make a thousand feet an hour we should be close at least. I run about five mile every day for a month before a climb. That run includes a couple big hills. It is also important to hump a heavy pack up a steep hill a few times. The glacier skills can be taught at base camp. Read a few books though. There are a lot of good glacier skills books out there. Just make sure you have the concepts of self arrest, prussicking and the z-pulley extraction system down in theory. Practice prussicking in a tree if you can. Set up a z system on flat ground and pull a box or a lame dog. Do all this and post on this site. PM me when you are ready. It's not that big a deal if you are in shape. We can get another one or two off this site. I like June because the bridges are still intact. Disappointment Cleaver Route is too crowded. Emmons Glacier route is OK but still e few too many people. I would like to try the South Tahoma Glacier route. It looks real nice but would be best done as a carry over. Maybe camp on the summit? Cheers!

My hero. I'll bet she doesn't run into any five-year-olds.

Here here. My favorite all time footage of someone sliding down snow was of that cute Alaska girl ripin down the face of some huge deathzone dodging avalanches like she was waterskiing on glass.

You would be right about the static but not right about the effect IF you adjust your style. My point is that you would have to adjust your style to provide for the forces. When there are two, use a dynamic belay. When alone weigh the options of free soloing or using the rope as a swing line. This is almost always the way I use my dynamic 7mm anyway. There are time when I am extended beyond my comfort zone of a fall on the rope but I keep those at a minimum and can usually slow my fall by grabbing the rope and swinging or prevent a fall by leaning against the rope. It is really kind of silly all in all since soloing with kids at home is pretty selfish. But what can I say? I love what I love.

It is dynamic. Lots of stretch. Too much stretch. Compare 11mm to 9mm and extrapolate. Even if it were static, I would use it over nothing. A short fall with friction etc would not snap me like a twig. Do not assume that I would be leading out like I was on a normal rope with a belayer. I am soloing. Hemp ropes were used for a lot of climbs before our current technology. It was not as good but with the proper adjustments to style, it was better than nothing. If it is true that, as you say, "you WILL die" in a fall. Hemp rope would never have been used at all. When soloing, I always try to avoid using the rope. Too slow. When I have to, I use it for short pitches and place pro with slings that I can grab easily. The likelyhood of a freefall generating massive forces is low. The chances I do take are my own. I use the techniques after a lot of free soloing and soloing and normal trad climbing for many years. I doubt that many people would argue that free soloing is safer than climbing with a doubled 7mm. And it is certainly safer to rap on a 7mm than on a 6mm or less.

So you had a few drinks before you drove down? There goes another life. That reminds me of another time I almost bit it. A friend and I were driving home in the Red Shark, my 1969 Mercury Monterey hard top. The party favors were in full swing. I pulled up behind a car that was stopped and waited for awhile but he would not go. Finally I honked at him. Nothing. I honked again. Suddenly there was a man knocking on my window. I rolled it down and he asked me why I was honking at his parked car. When he saw my reaction he was rolling on the ground. He reached in, turned my car off and told me to come back for my keys in the morning. DOH!

uhm. isn't perlon static? This is a 7mm Mannut 1/2 rope. It is the only one I have seen anywhere. I bought it at a shop in Missoula. Cracked. When I lead on a doubled 7mm, it is with great care. First, I tie into two loops. Second, It is for soloing where the option is to go totally unroped. Third, Edges are the only real problem anyway according to the test data. But I try really hard not to test it. Fourth, Do not try this at home. I have been climbing solo for decades.

When my son was first learning to snowboard he side slid everything steep. He and his adolescent friends thought it was cool to "board the steep stuff" even if they side slide to whole thing. I used to give him a little crap about it but I am sure that has nothing to do with why he changed. He finally got better and actually carves now. So it is the newbies who are sideslipping which is easier to do on a board than on skiis which is why we are having this discussion. My pet peeve with boarders is that they keep hitting my 5-6 yearold and we are on intermediate slopes cutting downhill lines. If they are so out of control, why don't they ever hit me? I am always right with her. It's because they are wimps. They chose to hit the smaller obstacle. From now on, I am confiscating boards, I shit you not. It will be all I can do to keep from taking a head with it. Oh yeah. My other daughter has been hit twice and my wife has been hit once. None of us has EVER been hit by a skier. FUCK snowboarders and their unsafe attitudes. Good snowboarders should give bad snowboarders a hard time. It would promote the sport.

Right on. Nice pics.

Once in awhile, you make a coherent point. This wasn't one of those times.

At this point, I am into multiples of nine. You have to live a little bit on the edge to get the most out of life. But then, if you want to survive, you also have to decide to never give up. I wouldn't say I have never been afraid. I would say that fear has never dominated my reactions.

Would you free solo it? It sounds like you pretty much did anyway. Nice TR.

Poor planning.

Misguided rewrites of a best seller. There is lots of money to be made there. They probably won't be dissappearing.

How about 1) Best technical shot. Washburn photos. 2) Best of each board on CC.com. Each winner gets to buy a pitcher at pub club and we'll do it quarterly.

I use 60 m of 7mm perlon for alpine soloing. It is light enough to not be a big concern. It is strong enough to double and lead on. It is long enough to rap off lots o stuff. It handles pretty nicely which has been a good thing late in the day/night a couple times.

Yeah but when you are old and demented like me you will look back at it as one of your favorites. In cases like these, "ignorance is bliss" means you were stupid enough to turn a mellow climb into a grand adventure and just "bad" enough to do it without injury. With epics, life would get boring.

Yeah. I used the orange bombers. Same regrets.

In high school, a friend and I used to get really stoned and go free solo stuff. One time we were on parallel cracks about ten feet apart. We got about forty feet above the talus when my crack ended. I traversed over to his crack which took a long time on very delicate face holds. When I was directly under him, he dislodged a large rock and yelled ROCK!. I reversed my moves in a split second as the rock went right by me. It would have peeled me off and damaged me before I hit the ground. Later that year, we were climbing a peak on some fairly mild halucena genics. I took a direct route up a face into the fog and climbed for about 30 minutes in mountain boots before topping out. When I went back a few years later and climbed it in climbing shoes, it was about 5.9 and I placed a lot of pro. The next spring, we were diving at about fifty feet in Fathead lake with some fairly serious halucino genics starting to kick in. We were cruising along a steep cliff underwater and I cut loose a big rock off a ledge. It bounced out of sight making very loud sounds that must have been heard by every maneating fish we could dream up.But none of them ever got us. When I started using ropes, we were in Ophir cave, rapping into the bottom cavern, free hanging for about forty feet. I had tied an atrie' in a 9mm perlon and put the first loop at the lip. When I climbed back up to it, the rope stretch had put the last loop about eight feet below the cieling.. I spent about two hours standing in the top loop tying a loop in the rap rope, then standing in that loop and tying a loop in the 9mm.When I finally topped out, my grip muscles cramped up and I couldn't help my friends for about fifteen minutes. Then I went to Yosimite. Never mind the muscle bound gay rapist I narrowly escaped on the way there. I was riding in a van with some guys from Modesto. They had some really good weed and I was totally ripped when we got into the valley. I found a bushy little spot and bivied. When I woke up, I was in a ranger's back yard. After a few weeks of climbing, I was doing a variation of the Royal columns that goes up a nice crack to a fixed hex. The crack keeps getting wider until it is rattly fists at the hex. I put my last piece in about half way up and decided to go for it the rest of the way. When I got to the hex, I peeled and fell 60 feet onto a ledge. I landed right beside my belayer and bounced off. I reached up and grabbed the rope and yanked and stopped myself with about a four foot loop of slack. I was pretty much unhurt except for a couple bad scrapes and a gashed knee, and blisters on my fingers where I had grabbed the rope. All of this took place about 800 ft off the deck. A few weeks later, a girl friend and I were up in little Yose valley when a bear wanted to rumage through our packs. I got between him and the packs and yelled at him. He left. Nice bear. Then I went to Alaska. They use really big pots to catch crabs up there. I learned that , even though those pots are big, they can bounce around on a boat deck like dice on a table. We were all lunging and jumping to get out of the way. It landed about a foot away from my feet after my second lunging jump. It didn't help that the deck was awash from the twenty foot swells and we were crossing them diagonally to retrieve our set. Then a drunk tried to knife me for knowing where the grooves were on the pool table in the Salty Dog. That was before I turned 20 and got really serious about climbing.

Eat an elk sausage and report back.

You scare me.

Be careful out there boys. Girl farts have been the worst I've smelled so far. I think it has something to do with all that dieting.

If we put a whopping big lie out here like this and hold the truth in here close.........................