Gary_Yngve

Yeah. There's an old Tieton guide that's long out of print. I don't remember the Smoot guide being that bad.

I've done only single-pitch stuff at Royal Columns / The Bend, but they're good stuff. The Smoot guide is decent. Some routes that come to mind: Ball&Chain, Inca Road, Orange Sunshine, Salmon Seed, Tiers The rock is andesite, which seems sturdier than basalt. Lots of small edges that you can use for footwork.

some more shots of the SW face:

Hey Pope, check out Pax's attachment in one of the previous posts. It shows our route overlayed with the B-S route. Here are some more pics: The beautiful LFC with the stuck rope: Pax on the second rappel.

I have six pair that I've rotated through the year. Suppose I've been spending 6 days in the mountains per month. Then you're saying a pair of socks is shot after wearing them a dozen times?

When it's dark, your vision is primarily through your rods. The peak luminous efficiency for low-light (scotopic) illumination is at 507 nm, whereas in normal lighting (phototopic), the peak is at 555 nm (known as the Purkinje shift). The luminous efficiency curves are roughly bell curves, and the scotopic curve performs considerably better than the phototopic curve in the 400nm to 555nm (violet to yellow-green) range. In other words, your rods are not as good at perceiving reds than your cones, so a red filter in low light would probably be a bad idea.

I bought a couple pair of Smartwool full-bootlength socks a year ago from Sierra Trading Post. I wear size 9-10 shoes, so I bought size 9-11.5 socks. Especially when I'm skiing or frontpointing, the ankles tend to slip down, leaving about 3-4 inches of sock bunched at the toes by the end of the day. I'm also noticing some thinning and tearing on the lateral ankle part of the sock that seems abnormal to me. I can't return them to Sierra Trading Post where I bought them because it's been a full year. I called Smartwool and the customer service lady jerked me around before finally giving me a shipping address to send the socks (but no guarantees on if I'll get replacements (in a better size?). Anyone had any luck with Smartwool's customer service? Or noticed any similar issues with their socks and sizing?

??? As far as I know, Luna Bars just contain soy. Coincidentally, Clif Bars contain soy too. So I'm not sure why Luna Bars are to appeal more toward women? For that matter, the amount of soy present in a bar should have no noticable impact on the "manliness" of a guy. Personally, I find Luna Bars to be drier than Clif Bars. If Luna Bar wants to appeal to women, why not use flax seed?

Clyde Soles has range info for the C4 cams on his website now: http://www.clydesoles.com/ClydeSoles/Front/Camsbrand.html

Part of what Wayne gets at is because of their size. MattP can talk about what I think is a relevant analogy -- Evergreen vs UW. Evergreen is small, so you get special attention and it may seem like you have more opportunities to succeed. UW is a much larger school. More bureaucracy, less of a chance to be an individual. The opportunties to succeed still exist, though you'll probably have to look harder for them. I think the same is true with the Mounties. There are Mounties who are climb leaders and who are active with instructing, committee work, etc., and they climb hard. An ambitious climber can learn a lot from such folks. That said, there are bureaucratic annoyances that one must put up with.

Climb: Prusik-S Face, not quite Date of Climb: 8/8/2004 Trip Report: We got off-route on the rightward-traversing pitch that leads to the base of the chimney system. Instead, we ended up at the base of a beautiful left-facing corner with a handcrack in the back of it. The crack fizzled at times, requiring insecure face moves above pro. We ended up on a ledge at the base of the final headwall of the SW face. Apparently we ended up on the 1984 S Face route, with the climbing above looking really damn hard. We bailed, discovering brand-new belay bolts going down the SW face... except they were 35 meters apart! After various hijinks and downleading the bottom pitch, we were on the ground again. We definitely want to go back and do the route (Burger-Stanley) for real... the advice we'd give is: 1) Nelson's description is a little misleading -- he describes pitch 3 (which is really pitch 2 with a 60m rope) as going up, tending slightly to the right. We went more than slightly to the right and thought that we overshot the going-right part. 2) If you look carefully from the ridge between Temple Lake and Lake Vivian, you can make out the ramp of trees that's the start of the traverse pitch, and you can make out the chockstone of the chimney. Keep that in mind to guide yourself on the route. Gear Notes: We cleaned the following off the mountain (we weren't the only ones to get lost up there): a stuck rope that we had to cut from a crack several biners half a dozen nuts bunch of slings There's a fixed 3.5 Camalot 20 feet off the ground in the 5.8 crack... we worked on it for a minute or two, but couldn't make any progress. Approach Notes: good swimming in Lake Vivian

If you find yourself in Los Angeles before February, be sure to stop by the Science Museum (on USC campus) and check out the BodyWorlds exhibit http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/pages/home.asp I spent half the day there as was totally amazed at the quality of the plastination and the choice of dissections to reveal various anatomical features. Highlights included: a very muscular basketball player an 8-month pregnant woman plastinations of just vascular structures (they inject the plastic stuff into the vessels, and once it hardens, they apply various processes to corrode/remove the surrounding tissues, leaving just the plastic molded to the blood vessels)

We didn't notice anything unusual on our daytrip up there this weekend.

Rainy Pass has done a good job on repairing the climbing club's oft-abused zippers on the Bibler I-tents. It ain't cheap though to replace on of those long zippers -- probably around $50.

And apparently C2 too, because my partner had no problems leading through those sketchy copperheads and the skyhook move. What's with you jackasses? Not too long ago, I was climbing with a guy who was complaining how he won't climb with any women because they are slow and weak. A woman who had climbed The Nose overheard him and gave him a piece of her mind. Oh yeah, and my mom can whoop your ass at math any day of the week.

Yeah, guess I'm a top-stepping weenie. I'm comfortable tensioning with the fifi through the gear placement, but having to tension with the fifi through the daisy scares me.

Here's a few: Gary leading the Lithuanian Lip. Ania jugging past the Lithuanian Lip. Ania at the hook move on pitch 3. The hammered-in nut on pitch 3. The copperhead with a tied cable. Gary stemming on pitch 6. Inverted cam left by a previous party. We cleaned it [and it held body-weight] -- it's pretty mangled. Crowded belay higher up. Shadow of the Early Winter Spires.

Josh, I need to call you on this one. Swapping (when you don't have enough RAM) is slow. At least 1000 times slower than using RAM. So a harddrive that's twice as fast is still going to swap really slowly. If you're worried about swapping, the real answer is to get more RAM. My laptop has 1G of RAM (I do development on it), and it is probably the most crucial piece of hardware in it (I could get by with lesser HD or CPU).

It all depends what you're doing on the laptop, as well as how old the batteries are. If I dim the screen and don't do anything too harddrive- and CPU-intensive, I could probably get four hours on one battery, but usually it's 2-3 hours.

The same Republican goons who are trying to trash Kerry's military record now are the same ones who trashed McCain in the Republican primaries and who trashed Max Cleland (double-leg amputee Vietnam vet from GA) in his Senate campaign. I have absolutely no respect for those Republican goons.

Ramuta did a good job on my shoes. Got a rand replaced last year. My other rand is pretty shot this year. Luckily I'm going out of town next week, so I have an excuse to send it in for repair. I tend to blow out the rands before the soles... If you know folks who climb at VW, they can drop your shoes off at VW for Ramuta (maybe same deal at SG?)... turn-around time is a week or two, depending on exactly when you drop stuff off and pick stuff up.

Looks like a Reverso. Which reminds me of an important lesson I learned the other day... make sure your ATC isn't in the wrong place when you go to sit down on a ledge.

And how many more cals for shivering through the cold, unplanned bivy?

Mussorgsky !

BE SILENT oh yee of tender years and little fat. I've had the calorie conversation with many of my climbing partners, and I think they were all in the context of, "I'm morbidly curious how many calories I burned, because I don't think there's any way I can eat enough in a day to replace them."