Bug

With all due respect to anyone who makes any thought out choice, I would not be out amoungst those rocks this time of year. It is always a bummer when someone dies. Taking that kind of risk is not acceptable to me. My heart goes out to his friends and family.

A friend of mine had a packer pack in all the heavy stuff for a week. They hiked in but you could arrange to ride in also. Then the packer came back at the end of the week and picked up their stuff. Certainly not the stuff of which hard men are made but for a family with 7, 12 and 14 yr old it worked out well. They climbed Haystack and Temple too.

I'm in.

Clearly a fine day. Well done!

I'm looking for a long cruiser day via Ingalls. Or even a light bivy if only to take in a sunrise on the summit.... Friday/Saturday. Could be talked into something else too.

Nobody took my dung balls either.

quote: Originally posted by Fence Sitter: yeah bug...before unions bla bla bla...but now... all union leaders do is agitate otherwise content workers so that their pockets are lined with cash...true in the days of N. American sweatshops unions were necessary... but now they hinder our now stuggling economy... thanks proffesor, but i think you need to go back to school before you give lectures that you know nothing about... Do you think corporate America would pay the same wages if they knew that no one would ever strike?

At the risk of being called a moron by a moron, I just have to add a little history to this mix. Before Unions there was no retirement. Before unions there was no safe working place. Before unions there was no fair pay. so forth and so on. Do you think the Enron boys were thinking of the common worker as anything but a large homogenous cash cow? Of course you don't. That's what corporate fascists do. Does this mean I think unions are inherently good? Of course I don't. Jimmy Hoffa probably wasn't the first to rip off the American Union worker and he certainly wasn't the last. He was another F___ing fascist. As usual, the truth must lie somewhere in the middle. Shit. That means we have to learn to be civil with people we don't like and compromise our values so we can co-exist. Bummer dude. Because there are a lot of people I don't like. You know who you are. So do I work a union job? Hell no. Never have. Probably never will. Do I make union wages? Hell no. Poverty stricken rats. They lack ambition. Ambition is what inspires you to get involved with whatever you are doing. Union members do not have a recent history of being involved any more than the common American is involved in the democracy we live in. Do any of you armchair filosifers ever vote? Put your names out there and I can tell you wether or not you have voted in Washington in the last 20 years. That's public record. Most of you haven't if statistics mean anything. So here you are wanking on a climbing site about unions, polotics and beating up chicks when you could be reading your voters' pamphlet. Sounds like you have CHOSEN to buy into where you exist in the grand scheme of things. Stop wanking you blithering fools! Get off yer lazy butts and learn what you could be doing. Ptttthhhhhhhhhhttttt. Meanwhile, I work with Bhuvahna, Sunil, Lou Chen, Chui, and so forth. Where are all the white Americans? Who cares. I work with the Americans who will write this century's history and they ain't named Smith. They are just like the rest of historical American success stories. They came from some place where they had a choice to live in squalor we cannot imagine or work their butts off to get here and take over. They are an inspiration.

How about the poly pro they formed on? I think that makes them 00.

Lieback? Jam? Why not stem? It's like going up stairs. Effortless 5.7.

Anyone interested in a few old dried out dung balls?

Mangos, bananas, and my personal favorite, coffee, all come to this country at an affordable price because of the poor schmucks who work for pennies a day. That pay scale is also why you will never see clothing manufacturers come back to the US en mass. Without some sort of global awareness we will be peeing in our own soup. Dipshits! We can no longer pretend we are able to exhist on our own. Or are you as willing to go back to making 50 cents a day as you are to shoot poor people?

She rocks!

http://www-museum.unl.edu/research/entomology/sm-beetle.htm

Going to Montana soon. Blodgett beckons. Looking for a bug look-a-like to watch the kids and service the wife (take out the garbage, mow the lawn, etc...). I look like this;

Sorry, didn't open the PM. Send me something without frames.

Cassin Flame 65cm $50. Aluminum head, ultra light. Forrest Hammer 55cm $25, Old bugger. Straight shaft. PM me if you are interested.

A few years ago some folks were trundling boulders somewhere in Glacier or Yellowstone Park, can't remember which. Anyway, they killed a guy. They didn't know he was there. They were taken to court and convicted on some kind of manslaughter charge. I do not remember the sentence or any other details. How does this precedent bear on the scenarios mentioned above? Or does it at all. There seem to be some legal beagles out there. Fire away.

Ahhhhhhhhh. I love the smell of epics in the morning. Two mornings in a row? You guys really know how to have fun. That upper part seems a bit long eh? I remember counting pitches for awhile. Then we just simu-climbed forever. Its not the most solid rock but it sure gives you a good taste of the alpine experience. I much prefer the North Face route from the very bottom toe of the face. It is cleaner, longer, and has more exposure. Then follow the ledge across the face of the Fin and it is a great 5.7 route. If you are feeling inspired, do the fin for a 5.9 you will never forget. Exposed, a little run out, and just plain spectacular. You guys might want to plan a couple bivies though. Seriously, stories like yours are what makes climbing fun. If it weren't a bit of a struggle sometimes what would the point be? Slot-Tower 1982. Mikey called me about 7AM on a Saturday. "let's go climbing" he says. "Well OK" was my naive reply. Since we had been talking about climbing the choss on the Blackfoot from a canoe, I packed light. I had my hawiian shirt with the big huge orchids. I had my serrape' 100% sheep's wool except for the real Mexican lice. I had my blue jeans and my pile jacket. There. Now I'll pack me some of them hot dogs from the back of the fridge and a "couple" cans of beer and that bottle of JD my brother gave me. Throw in peanut butter and a box of grahms and I'm ready(Mikey has the stash). "Hey Mikey! Why is it already smokey in here?" "Do we have to make a stop at the Dr's?" Mikey's litte Honda revved up and we took off. After about ten minutes I realized we weren't heading upstream. "Uh.... What are we climbin maan?" His eyes gleamed through little slits and his shoulders hunched just a little as he half whispered "SlottttttTTTTTTower..ower owerowerower". "Sheeeit man.My Hawiian shirt ain't gonna cut it up there and I only have a sarrape' and a miserable little bivy bag...n.n.n.whiiiinnnnne". "Relax man. There's a high pressure ridge moving in." The next time someone tells me there's a high pressure ridge moving in I'm gonna put hand warmers in my undies. Well there's only a trail up SweatHouse creek for about four miles. Then, for the next four miles you are on your own. Literally. Because Mikey puts his headphones on and barrels through the brush like a bear after a bear in heat. "HANG LEFT". He yells. Right. I go right to the obvious snow pack through lodgepole and rocks. We get to the top of the canyon about the same time. He must have levitated throught that brush man. He points and half whispers "SlottttTTTTower...ower...ower..ower". It is magnificent. A sawtooth ridge of granite spires come up from two sides to crescendo at a large flat topped spire with a large slot clean through from north to south about 100' below the summit. The face is about 400' of clean granite. Draped over the treeless shoulders are huge blankets of white snow that roll down to the edge of 300' walls with water everywhere falling,..falling............ "shit dude. I don't even have gloves". "Relax I brought two pairs". "Got a light?" We bivied in the snow at about 7000'. I cut and maimed about a hundred trees to make a bed of springy delight. We built a "Smokey mother" and started roastin wheenies. Then we noticed the clouds. Huge cummulus building over the crest of the Bitterroot never means dry socks in the morning. The wind howled. The fire smoked. I froze my my er wheenie. I mean it. My breakfast wheenie was frozen solid as a rock. Couldn't get a stick into it. Couldn't fry it cause we didn't have a damn pan. Hell. We didn't even have a pair of gloves. Mikey gets stoned ya see. An when he gets movin towards the rock he just, well, he just keeps movin. The traverse over the snowfields above the 300' waterfalls was a little tense but the top kind of leveled off from all the rock fall. So we made it to the base of our proposed first ascent in good time. Mikey led up through a snow filled gully to where it ended and dumped him out on a ledge at the base of a very blank looking face. My turn was run out and a little scarey when I got into the wet section but I was never in danger of a grounder so I didn't dare whine. Mikey crested the wall and pulled his way up through snow to the base of the next face. It was what made it all worth it. Clean white granite with knobs and stemming everywhere. We made it to the notch in two pitches and looked out into the whole Bitterroot wilderness. One pitch took us to the base of the summit block and we spiralled around that to a spot just big enough for two of us to sit and spit. By the time we made it back to camp we were soaked from the wet snow and the temperature was dropping fast. We slid and barreled and sometimes flew out that drainage. I will never forget that cold miserable night in the Bitterroots in a "high pressure system". I will never have as much fun as I had on that, my first, first ascent.

"Yes Bug, I can read, can you?" Yes. Quite well thank you. "Just because a river in the midwest caught on fire and fish died in a midwest lake 30 YEARS AGO does not mean all corporations will kill fish or pollute a river." No but it does demonstrate a need for regulation which is THE ONLY REASON those corporations that were guilty are not still dumping that way. Do you know how big Lake Michigan is? Have you studied chemistry? The amount of toxic waste it would have taken to kill all the fish in one of the biggest lakes in the world would bury Seattle and then some. This was not a small matter. "Do you really believe that ALL corporations will do this?" Nope. Just the ones that produce toxic shit. "There are many corporations that do not produce any pollutants - accounting, law firms, etc., and many others that manage their waste responsibly. To throw out two old incidences to smear an entire group within in society is BS." As much as I hate to admit it, Lawers' shit is not toxic waste. You lost all credibility asserting that that was what I was asserting. Your fear tactics are the only ones present. Do you really believe that those are the only two instances? I only listed those two because I saw them with my own eyes. Check your history. The fifties were a industrialist pipe dream. There were no environmental regulations to speak of because we had not reached critical mass yet. By the time we hit the sixties we were seeing acid rain across the Ohio river valley and into the north eastern seaboard. LA was having smog that you couldn't see a city block through. Most of the great lakes were dead or nearly so. Only Lake superior didn't come close to dying. The lower Mississippi could not be used for irigating at one point. It KILLED the crops. These problems were national. That is why political support for environmental cleanup was national even though the large corporations were pouring money into DC to fight the new regulations. I was not the only voter who saw these kinds of abuses. "There are a multitude of corpoations that have been in business during the last 30 years and no rivers have caught on fire and no lakes have spit out its fish on the shoreline." Only because of environmental regulations. The corporate world did not volunteer to clean themselves up. I have spent a great deal of time trying to keep them from pouring arsenic into the big Blackfoot, Hydrogen sulfide gas into West Glacier, and so on. Sadly, there are still many such demonstrations of contemporary disregard for natural resources. "If you are against drilling in ANWR" I most certainly am. "- fine, I can respect, but hysterical and obviously transparent BS scare tactics does a diservice to legitimate efforts to protect the environment - the ol cry wolf story...." Go to Alaska and see for yourself if I am crying wolf. You are ignorant of what is happening up there and being called "best practices". You are ignorant of what motivates large coporations. The environmental degradation I have helped prevent was accomplished by a lot of hard work, research, and careful communications. I would have gotten nowhere otherwise. Something tells me you will be hysterical when you learn the truth. It will mean you are sane. Best wishes for a long healthy life.

quote: Originally posted by Poseur: Naw, that's just me exhaling... Dude. Yur a bogart.

I'm a dung beetle. My shit is your shit. Spray on.

quote: Originally posted by The Anti-Twight: You mean the "Black Ice Couloir" on the Grand. Yup. Give me break. It's been almost 20 years and a few extra tequilas.

quote: Originally posted by Poseur: Let me try an understand your statement. If we drill for oil in Alaska the rivers in the midwest are goiong to catch fire and the fish in Lake Michigan are going to die? With all due respect, this sounds more like the typical hysterical scare tactics mainstream enviro organizations use to get people to send them some money so they can pay themselves and liberal politicans to fulfill their responsibilities as Democratic Party lapdogs. If enviros were serious about protecting the environment they wouldn't coward away from the primary cause and motivation for acts that have an impact on the environment - POPULATION! Until that root cause of all environmental impacts can be addressed maturely, rather than demagogued, I'm afraid the "natural" environment doesn't stand much of a chance over the long run. Too bad the Clinton Administration never tried to plug that beryllium loophole as part of its environmental program. Maybe he should get the enema? Me, I'll just take the oil thank you. Let me try an understand your statement. You can't read? What I read was: "That is what will happen again to any place we let profit motivated corporations have their way in." While Billy does diserve the enima, and overpopulation is clearly root of these problems, you seem to need some practice with reading comprehension. Your arguement smacks of what you accused KeithKSchultz of doing.

In the mid 80's the Blue Ice Couliour on the Grand was melted down to ice that was 1000 years old. The top two pitches of the North Couliour of the Middle was frozen mud and the "moderate snowfield to the summit" was a bone dry 600' first ascent on clean low angle granite.