ivan

b'dass! thanx.

no worries 'bout sleeping through trains - beacon's more than prepped me for that (but not the meth heads, not regretably ) how is it that brown beckey has none of the index big routes? i don't have topos for any of the climbs mentioned above 'cept town crier and city park - any place i can get them fo'free as i am very, very poor

good ideas too joe - i already figured i could go cheap-skate and use chopped up sections of garden hose as rope protector - i actually had ducktape and used that on subsequent pitches where it seemed right underworld - thanks too - i did in fact notice the appalling tendency the higher i went for my gri-gri to pay out huge amounts of slack - i'm intrigued about the prusik system you describe and need to go find somewhere to put it to the test as i'm generally too retarded to understand anything simply by description bill - wtf? how did you shred your rope at the anchor? did it have anythign to do w/ how shit-faced you look in your pic: was that the farside?

clearly you didn't read #5?

quarry?

planning on going to the valley this summer to do a wall living in vancouver-land, i've only cragged at index twice looking to be dry this weekend - what would be good routes to get some fun practice not only climbing but hauling, penduluming and spending the night in a ledge? i've got the nelson topo for town crier and city park of course and they both look good - what else is there and is there any easy beta to be had on it?

the impetus for my tr title, incidentally, came from my freshly shorn head and framed-out look on life from late, so well rendered here (and goddammit, i can't decide if only being able to find a kraut version of it on the 'tube is annoying or really kinda cool - lord knows the nazi's oughta be able to dig on "fight club" big time, eh?) [video:youtube]

no man showing in the company of a partner fo'so - then it's eyes right motherfucker! feel free to link it wayne, though it's a trifle lame w/o pix? maybe the moby dick links (which if you skipped, you made a serious mistake) will serve? i particularily like howling the first shanty while hauling!

was he naked? emotionally? deeeeeeeeeply.

also useful - leaving 3-4 meters of extra rope below the tie-point for the haul bag to use to lower the pig out with - the image of the bag swinging out into space was fantastic one - like releasign haley's fucking comet! this giant, bright thing, totally at the whim of newton, whipping aroudn in great predictable arcs through the vacoum of cold, dark space

wtf?

Trip: Smiffistani Rawks - A Space-Monkey's Solo-Creep on the Monkey Face Date: 3/30/2009 Trip Report: so, with several days to myself aid-soloing round der monkey wand, starting on the west face i had occasion to compile the following: WHY CLIMBING ALONE IS BETTER THAN WITH A PARTNER 1. you get to climb with your favorite partner, the one you can't hear snore 2. you never have to turn off your mp3 player 3. you don't have to share any of the 3 liters of merlot you brought 4. no one casts greedy glances at your smokes or your goddamn ham and bacon and chicken and black olives and peppers and dijon sammy 5. you don't end up your trip with a 1000 pictures of your ass (or of anything else for that matter ) 6. you get to lead all the fun pitches 7. you can gut-sing toto n' phil collins songs w/o fear of being buried in a dumpster shortly thereafter 8. you can turn the part of the west face cave that would normally hold your partner into a fire-pit 9. you can get pissed and pass out at first dark, only to wake up feeling totally refreshed at 230 a.m., light up a giant fire, howl at the moon and generally just Get Wierd and finally... 10. when you get to the top of your jug line, just underneath the bivy cave, only to discover the entire kermantle or the rope has been cut and several of the inner strands already ground through, the girlish shrieks of surprise and horror you emit in a machine-gun stacatto rhythm don't get remembered and why not a #11? you don't have to worry about totally man-showing it when attempting to shit into a plastic bag lessons i learned: - when solo-aiding in strong wind, divide each lead/haul rope into 5 sections, clove hithc them to a biner, then clip them to your harness, one rope per side, stacked with the end of the rope the furtherst back (this also works well in strong wind when trying to do a giant double-rope rappel) - as you get higher up a pitch in strong wind, periodically clove hitch the haul line to gear in the wall (leave slack in the system so that you can rap the climbing line later, undoing hte clove hitches as you descend) - for christ's sake, find some way to protect jagged edges from cutting the rope and killing you! - carrying emergency prusiks alwasy a good idea - upon seeing the horror show that was my jug line i put a bachman knot on the swinging haul-line so that it would catch me if the jug line failed suddenly - rappel w/ the pig on runner girth-hitched to your harness and dangling between your leg - when clipping in on overhanging bits, use a long runner instead of a quickdraw so that its easier to clean - using a swivel on the haul bag is nice! - a traxion device makes hauling a breeze - hanging your shit-sack off the bottom of the haulbag when lowering doesn't work (donny doesn't like to recall what happened afterwards - it made donny sad, very sad) fun memories of the trip: - strooong wind and sharp cold - i felt guilty of shirking the alpine this spring break, until i found myself in a deep, steely gray place, blustery and grim, remote-feeling and scared - catching the mouse i shared the cave with on 3 occasions, picking him up by the tail and gibbering at him in russian, only for the little bastard to come right back again after i set him down - watchign the farmers across the river burn their fields - wherever they walked, sheets of fire would spring up beside them - a coyote chorus at 3 in the morning - hooooot, hoooooot owls - finding a single wedge of well seasoned fire wood left by some previous party, then warming myself up in the morning by reducing the whole thing into kindling with a nut tool and a hammer - reading the exciting conclusion of "the 13 gun salute" which ends w/ an apocolyptic pirate battle between jolly-tars and godless malays and dayks - listening to this tune over and over while gearing up in the roaring gale to get off the monkey with all my shit - kinda gloomy, eh? [video:youtube] - screeching sea-shanties like these: [video:youtube] [video:youtube] [video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ5Lupkvgfs - miracoulsy driving 100 miles on an 1/8 of a tank of gas after spacing on the refill before entering The Wilderness Gear Notes: volume 4 of patrick obrian's aubrey/maturin series (which it is pages 4143 to 5353 of "the 13 gun salute" "the nutmeg of consolation" "the truelove" and "the wine-dark sea") - incidentally, this large, sturdy book held up well to being crushed and made a most excellent platform for setting boiling hot cans of ravioli on 1.5 lt of water 3 lt of merlot a pouch of drum tobacco a gaint sammy 2 cans of chicken n' corn chowder 2 cans of kung fu panda style spaghetti-o's 2 cans of mandarin orange slices in syrup 2 dozen homemade chocholate chip cookies Approach Notes: using asterik pass with a 100 lbs of shit on my back was essentially a failed suicide attempt

that was the worst storm in a decade? what does that even mean? so did you read the book silly? did it include new jersey boy asking for safety tips here and then getting pissy when he got them? the actual posts dissapeared into the memory hole back in 06 of course, but they were classic!

all the cool people have climbed steins....

never trust a junkie?

ah, the search for truth! much like the search for the black ghost of a black dog on a dark night after a few drinks

is it possible to click on a thread w/ this title and not be at least a latent homosexual?

that's actually easy -you can have all the tight guns laws you want, but if your large industrial neighbors don't, and you have shitty border control and a law enforcement culture that's entreprenurial in nature, and a giant commercial opportunity that can be only realized w/ planes, helicopters, ww2-era diesel submarines, and machine guns, then the weapons will be present no matter what they're also more fucked up b/c it's hotter than here - seriously - what nation near the tropics isn't fucked crazy 10 ways to sunday? the swedes n' icelanders are perfect 'cuz they have to spend 10 months indoors eating lute-fisk just to MAINTAIN man! which are our craziest, nuttiest, most annoying fucking states, eh? texas, california, the whole south-east? b/c its 100 billion degrees out all the time and baby's-mama didn't pay the goddamn powerbill and so we gotta chill on the porch - shit, there the incentive to create weapons of pain is ever-present - they make machetes WORK, 'know what i'm saying? so yeah, at any rate, i'll trade you, eh? you can buy bazookas and i can buy my marlboro-blues

i could not readily make myself a home-made bomb of ok city fame - the inconvenience is itself a deterrence - if you could buy 500 lb fragmentation bombs at walmart, per your view, i would imagine we'd see them getting used...

even though 1 bad apple w/ a tank could kill hundreds, if not thousands, but 1 dumb junkie can't do more than ruin his family and mug a couple folks? to my mind, both freedoms need some slight restrictions: - weapons for hunting/defending yourself but that don't let you take out an entire school full of kids in 5.7 seconds - all drugs for all adults, sold w/o advertising in state licensed locations, w/ taxes to pay for health-care, anti-use adverstising, and restrictions on their use when flying, driving, etc. an update - friday's are current event quiz/discussion days in my classes - since this was a big one for the week, i did an informal survey after we'd chatted for awhile - the results - about 75% kids said it was easier to get a joint than a bottle of whiskey!

i forget bill, but remind me - are you fine w/ any and all forms of weapons being sold in the usa, from a black-powder musket to a m1 abrahams tank?

we could solve all these problems if we just started using one of these sweet puppies on everybody at age 30! carousel! renew! renew!

wow dude...you're an asshole... Anyone who skiis, deserves to die(?). x2 at least i feel this way whenever down-slogging on hood i'm surprised more folks don't die skiing each year - i damn near do everytime i go out!

its seem unrealistic that any drugs will be legalized - but i think it should be an "all or nothing" type approach if the problem is to be fixed much

the total ban on any commodity that large numbers of folks desire is dumb/doomed to fail telling a sane/adult man he can't smoke a joint is as big a crime to me as telling the same man he can't buy a gun telling the same guy he can't buy meth is more of a crime to me than telling the same guy he can't buy a machine gun (as in the latter case the abuse of that freedom could hurt a great deal more people) for drugs and guns, i think they shoudl generally be available to citizens, but of course w/ sensible restrictions