Gary_Yngve

use any ol' printer but spray your maps with some acrylic spray to protect them. print them out in pieces and then cut and tape them together. (i've done this for maps as large as 20"x30")

In Will Gadd's book on ice and mixed climbing, he mentions using a spectra sling to "catch" the perlon and fish it out. I played around with this a week ago, and found that it works well in the following situation: 1) Your holes intersect nearly perfectly. 2) You can push the perlon roughly an inch past [through] the spectra sling. Having a hook is certainly a lot less sketch (and lets you thread webbing and other stuff), but it's a good trick to keep in the back of your mind nonetheless.

Yeah, there was a dude [can't remember the nationality] who had a much better rings routine. The Greek dude, along with the rest of the competitors, would hold their poses for barely the required two seconds. The dude who I thought should have won was holding his poses for at least three seconds.

No way, dude. Paul Hamm earned his medal. Yeah, there was a scoring error against the Koreans, but they didn't catch it in time. For that matter, the Korean's routine had a mandatory deduction that got overlooked by the judges, which would have cost him more points than the 0.1 he lost. Sure, had the competition been on another day, the medalists could very much have turned out differently -- such is the nature of gymnastics. What if Paul Hamm didn't fuck up the vault? Would he have won by a landside then? Or would he not have had as incredible performances on the parallel and high bars? Paul Hamm is no reason to be ashamed to be an American. If you want to be ashamed to be a Russian, look at cry-baby sour loser Svetlana Korkhina, who insists she lost the competition because the judges planned to give it to the AMericans from the start. I bet she's blaming her fall on the uneven bars on the Americans.

I've been waiting for this moment ever since I saw Kurt Thomas when I was a little kid. It may not have been the prettiest victory, but America now has its first Olympic mens gymnastics champion. On a completely unrelated note, I totally wasn't expecting his voice to be an alto-tenor. On another unrelated note, those dudes good at the rings could probably do some wicked stuff on crazy sport mixed routes given a little practice with tools, In other Olympic news, Tyler Hamilton won a cycling gold today. And the American women's freestyle 800m relay team won, breaking the world record. Damn, those women have some huge latissimi dorsi.

I think Sept-Oct is a perfect time to visit Tieton. The temps have dropped, and at sunset, the desert glows red. One of my strongest memories in the outdoors was when I added some sagebrush leaves to my cheese sandwich. That pungent taste sticks with me, and when I eat anything with sage today, it brings back memories of sunset in the desert, with everything glowing red. btw - a great campsite is to go to the parking lot across from the crags (where they have all those signs showing deer livers), and drive on the backroads uphill for a mile or two until you're on a plateau with solitude.

That .10b is apparently rated 10c in the newest guide? French-free that pitch is 5.8.

They're not going to be hogging the route. Nor will they be fixing ropes from bottom to top and let any leftie weenie jug it. Folks who are competent (myself not included) will be climbing it, whether they are with C4K or not. If they are not with C4K, someone from C4K may offer them some paraphernalia to take with them on their ascent. That's what I gather from reading the C4K site. And kudos to the gang going down to the Valley for offering to do some garbage cleanup.

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.

Long story short, Outside Magazine was half a year late in making a donation to the UW Climbing Club for some help we did for them. They gave me some tickets as a way of making it up to me. It's showing at the Neptune (45th and Brooklyn) tonight (Thurs) at 7:00 PM. The tickets will get you in for free but do not guarantee a seat, so it would be best to show up half an hour early. PM me if you'd like a ticket or two.

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.