ivan

it's a good'un, sure, but not as good imho, as: why don't you pour yourself a tall frosty glass of shut-the-fuck up?

why don't you go outside and play a game of hide n' go fuck yourself?

no woman is capable of using a sonorous voice w/ you, good sir

how can you not like tori amos you vile bottomfeeder? she's right up your angst-filled black-hearted little alley - a veritable singing shelob - her version of "smells like teen spirit" put cobain to shame! looking forward to seeing how your metallurgic prowess puts form to function, padre perhaps we can even drag you do to cali w/ us? mike was vexed w/ me as i wouldn't let him take the cheat stick after i did the route first w/o it

discovered the beauty of the grigri y-day too (just bought my first one, but in retrospect i'm cursing meself from not just swiping one from my gym, which has 5 that never are in use) - you can read a book while belaying! fun enough when you're on the passive end, but there was something unnerving about looking down at the top of the roof, nerves ajangle, to see my belayer totally oblvious, nose in a novel i recall pulling a trick i learned from layton - pulled out my smokes, mid-pitch, had a puff and took in the scenery would like to see those pix mark - i did indeed notice the many instances of crack-bolting on the bat wall - would be ballsy indeed skipping all the bolts though!

Trip: B-tons - Unnamed Aid Route(C1+)/Snap-Crackle-Pop!(A2) Date: 2/21/2009 Trip Report: no pix, but here's your complimentary soundtrack, taken from the oft-repeated jamble going through my aid-frenzied brain 2day: "wanna smash the faces of those beautiful boys Those Christian boys So you can made me cum? it doesn't make you Jesus" [video:youtube] got a kitchen pass to chunk another brick in the road to the nose today - now why are all these fancy boy sport gym rats fucking up the old-skewl aid route at the slippery, slippery broughton hot-spot?!? damn near so that i can't make heads nor tails of the guide book - so chockfulla .11s n' above and hardly a breath of aid info that i gotta wonder why the hell i bought the damn thing? i mean, have i LOOKED at my gut in the mirror lately? damn lucky i can see my cock! anyhow, miker n' i were looking for practicing aid-leading n' cleaning - dyslexic meeting at the park n' ride - wind n' cold at lewis n' clark at 0830 - 3rd cigarette of the morning... my first walk over to the bat wall - guess i musta missed the beacon-wand somethign fierce to skip the high-life over at the far-side on so fine a day - certainly picked a fine final route to mimic the obscure lines i've come to prefer at the big b- eyes thick w/ scum now - memories of smithsonian relic pins and freaky creaking 1/4 inch bolts flexing and flaking under my 16 stone frame - the very real chance of a domino-chain of fucking failures - pop-pop-pop-fuuuuck! we warmed up by each taking a turn leading the old "unnamed aid route" that became dracula - recognized the recent chop-job - laughed to see the doorknobs had put their first bolt at eye-ball level off the ground -wtf? the neo-dracula is still fun s an aid route (hey, look at me, i can aid 5.12!) - obviously you clip a bunch of bolts, but i found used several hooks, a thin aid nut, a yellow alien and a medium nut all plum necessary too - mike and i did the route in nearly the same time - if he took more it was only b/c he's a shrimpy-bastard and needed to use a few more pieces of gear, including a bird peak to make it go the highlight was the neo-superstition, once snap-crackle-pop - the first part goes fast for the sport-monkeys who appeared out of the blue after noon - the obvious signs, like the flooding tide - first the dogs - then the cute chicks - then the inevitable brawny, unhelmeted baboon-bastards! as an aid route, s'c'p starts fun - not wanting to free anything in my boots (lazy mofo) i found a birdbeak and some hooks n a blue alien required - once on the awkward ledge it gets much more serious - the old aid line is so far-removed from the start that if you skip the belay at the nice bolts there, which we did, you face a real chance of a ledge fall - the pins above are decades old - the first two are so levered out you need hero-loops - the 4 bolts are frightening spinners and really oughta be replaced - oddly, for a fixed aid line, the bolts end leaving you needing pins to finish (and at this point, 20 feet back from where you started, hanging and twisting like hell) - i needed 2 knife-blades and a funky-ass relic soft-euro-sorta-lost arrow i bootied from pipedreams this summer - the last pin required extensive cleanign before i coudl place it - i wouldn't be suprised if it had been a decade or more since the last time someone wandered up this way - it was a wierd time - bolt clipping hardman coasting up the .12s n' .13 on either side of me while i replayed a little piece of the ancient and neglected past - hanging like a phat worm impaled on a hook - the last pin was only a 1/3 in and on a horizontal ledge w/ a sling fitted as far down as i could get it, but still it bent damn near in half when i weighted it, frantically excating moss and dirt out of a crack above to get a green camelot in - the last few feet to the anchor an ectasy of fear, riven w/ the awful realit of taking a screamer back down over the roof onto the blades and the creaking antiques anway - good enough i reckon - just a cragging day but still fun - roaring winds up high, but nice n' calm and mostly warm at the base of the wall - the few short falls i took off hooks haunt my muscles - the sense of settling in a shower of sparks - time for another drink?

actually, i thought this was gonna be about that species of frog they discovered that are like jesus - they can be frozen through, thus dead, and then later thawed and come back to life. if frogs are without sin, then clearly they have no need for j.c.? don't frogs sometimes spontaneously change sex too?

good observation. notice how they're all too big of dipshits to stand in any sort of order? no by age? seniority? party? wait! i found it...by shade of tie. yes, truly a cavalcade of sages!

[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15Spi_U66e0

"do you have to use so many cuss words?"

"you see, you can't say 'higher' on network, okay?"

cool actor/musician, but it's worth nothing, that president is craaaazy.

"why do i have to explain to you why i don't believe in an invisible man who lives in the sky again?"

well, he's double an asshole then for ruining the good name of the cool michael collins come to think of it, shit, this michael collins was pretty kewl too

could it be the same people who wrote this fucking gem that i had forwarded to me by half a dozen mofo's today?

America - fuck yeah!

it seems unfair that the volcanoes don't get their due. while most volcano routes are snow-slogs, these are quite nice: - hood: n face, yocums, illumination rock, black spider - rainier: ptarmigan, liberty

prezident, puh-leez!

i was thinking the pink route at my gym x 20

so....osama bin laden = emmanuel goldstein?

not funny/dumb and easily construed as racist, so not worth the ink

damn! wish i'd know that as it woulda saved at least an hour. hauling from the cave is easy as hell too.

no whiskey, but you did have a choice between red wine or beer i think it was too cold for the mice to fornicate - i certainly was expecting an encounter given the # of mouse turds, but i reckon they were off hibernating actually big-walling/hauling is kinda decadent - on my winter alpine trips i always suffer w/ my tiny sleepign bag and a skoosh of whiskey, but on this trip i could bring my giant denali-honking bag, tons of booze and cans and cans of decent food - no wonder aid-climbers are so fawking phat!

still got a long while to get ready there bill - reckon this sorta tomfoolery is to work out bugs - for myself the bolt ladder went as fast as possible i think, no inefficiencies to cut out and very methodical - hauling, on the other hand, i am far from wired on - i was using one pulley, one jug and one gri-gri - hauling from the cave was fast, but not at the second belay - thinking i need to carry a cordellette to rig a powerpoint, plus buckets to sort the two ropes - my first haul was a sad affair - i had everythign so cross-fucked i could only gain 5 inches of rope at a time - ack!

Trip: smiffistani rawks - der monkey-mordwand - west face Date: 2/15/2009 Trip Report: First Hibernal Freak Ascent Photos (except the 1stIvan took it and T messed wit it) and Videos by Chez Tvash Tvash on pitch 4 the week's ration of adventure had ominious undertones at the beginning - tvash and me's GQ photo-shoot on yocums ridge was called off after the photographer called up and bitched about snow and fog and whatnot fucking w/ his lenses - demands for hard currency on the barrel-head and my dabbling in child-slavery still pending -hmmmm...back to the drawing board - well, tvash's done practically no aiding since before the first clinton administration and i'm planning on climbing the capitan in californication-land this july - what better way to tune-up than to freeze our asses off on an endless bolt ladder in hibernal smiffistan? the plan was near perfect, but to really give it the nelson touch we threw in my boy mike as a third, several thousand ounces of fosters (it's austraaaaliann for budweiiiser!), a couple of cans of corn n' chicken cowder, two packs of dromerdary-approved carcinogens and a bakers dozen of my dear wife's mutant blueberry/chocholate chip/dried cherry muffins in a bombproof tupperware case still, things can never can smoothly - tvash was abducted and waterboarded by 45 n'er'dowells while trying to convert them to the Godless ACLU Brain-Washing Agenda - i had advised him against dealing w/ any teenager interested in educational enterprises on a saturday, but its a well documented fact that that whiskey-tango motherfucker just won't HEED - so, after sodomizing him w/ a copy of the koran and the latest victoria's secret cataloge they dumped his presumably lifeless corpse at a 24 hour diner in pdx where a motley crew of strippers and meth-heads provided him with first aid and other special favors - his call came in at 5 a.m. that he wouldn't be at the rendozvous on time, so i threw my shit in the car w/ a gallon of black coffee and sped of to fetch mike and relocate our auras over the river in fabled or-e-gon the scene shifted to the flying j where they were practically giving away cigarrettes - i stashed most of them in my trunk in a pathetic attempt at rationing - pat had recovered well enough to drive his car and so, with a little help from an i-phone, we turned our helm hard to starboard and clapped on a full press of canvas towards government camp and beyond infinity! mike tried to sleep in the back-seat, and furiously vexed by this open sign of disloyalty, i loudly plumbed tvash's knowledge of obscure early 19th century nautical terminology (i had to as i was then 6 hours into a cold-turkey withdrawal from the patrick o'brian series and the monkey was carrying a sledgehammer high on my back - it was plum necessary i put the book down for awhile though - after tearing through 2 1/2 thousand pages in a little more than a month (as well as something like 30 gallons of a mixture of port/madeira/burgundy) and with another 3k more to go before maturin and aubrey can finally have the gay-sex required to bring the whole fucking enterprise to a just conclusion, i needed to give my brain a chance to breath) slow driving - snow in the sky and road - the miles creeped by - the descent into warm springs entailed more danger then merely being scalped or casino-plundered - the ostentiously remodeled safeway in madras another unwelcome site - can't madras just stay shitty? and now they wanna put a taco bell in firfuksakes?!? at the parking lot we pondered our crime - overnighting is verboten in the park of course, but based on the amount of neon green signage concerning dog-shit, i felt The Man would be indisposed - tvash and mike insisted on at least honoring the spirit of the law and actually paid the day use and campground bivy fee while i enjoyed the fantastic great leap forward made in the bathroom since my last visit (heat, a flush toilet and a urinal that doesn't cause a 50% splashback effect - holy shit!) at this point, if you're still reading this stream of conciousness hate-fuck speech thing i'm doing, i would have you question your life, your priorities and a number of other things and press on down to the pictures, but in all likelihood you've already done this and i'm just fucking talking to myself - anyhow... the trek up n' over misery ridge was just that, but for an added bonus throw in a 100 lb haulbag and super slick snow conditions on the backside (in addition to the fact that tvash's recent back-surgery (did i mention i got to change the yellowed dressing that against all the laws of nature was still partly stuck to the hair-jungle he calls his back?) and mike's recent hernia-surgery meant they got to carry practically nothing while i did the dirty work) monkey face always impresses, more so maybe when its covered in snow and wreathed in fog ("gorillas in the mist niggazzzzzz!!!) - we got squared away at the base and the crazy-train began its climb - greedily of course i wanted the first pitch, but i always leave mike getting the aid-belay suck and i figured he's more in need of practice then me anyhow, so i was willing to settle for the endless bolt ladder - mike made the rope go up and in a few mercurial days ended up at the anchor, hauled the pig and made fast for us the sun had deigned fit to shine its weak rays on us, enough so that before jugging i decided to switch over into my alpine superhero cape-mode i flailed miserably back in the fall when seconding geoff on pipeline out at beacon, and in the interim i'd seen another way of jugging that i found worked like a charm - my rei-duckets bought me my first jumar and a gri-gri and those and a pulley slayed Mike on pitch 1 Clusterfuck Mike on pitch 1 Mike and Ivan on pitch 1 Mike and Ivan on pitch 1 Ivan jugging pitch 1 i got the second pitch, the interminable bolt ladder and i enjoyed it thoroughly for what it is - a brainless way to go up an insanely steep chunk of stone at a remarkably rapid rate - kinda an outdoor musuem too, given the 30 generations of bolts that appear to have been placed, oddly chopped/smashed, then replaced - for a mammoth human being like myself, the spacing is laughably easy and i rarely needed to get even into the third step of my etriers - to give the aid-dicky to mike, i was sure to only clip every 5th bolt Mike jugging pitch 2 Haul bag in space it appears that w/ a 70 meter rope you can actually get into the west face cave? i wasn't sure, but at any rate the haul line was only a 60 - i skipped the first belay station as it lacked a decent ledge and pushed on to the next, which as mentioned in a previous tr is in fact so rigged that it makes attaining the anchor bitchy - luckily i had recently made a half-assed stick clip out of spare pinball parts lying around my garage and was able to make it work we'd dicked around for long enough (in no small way my fault as i had a hard time rigging the haul and fixed lines on the 2 closley spaced anchor bolts) that it was clear we wouldn't be reaching the cave till dark - no worries - i put on my headlamp and while pat stayed at the lower anchor, mike belayed me as i surmounted the steps in an etheral setting - drunken teenagers across the river screeched and hooted like demented capuchin darwin-dads as mist swirled and swooped in the crepuscular gloaming - at the last bolt, where the mandatory choss placements sapped my confidence, i looked down to see in the dark my compatriots two bobbing headlamps, and suddenly infused with the power of mao zedong thought, i stormed into the commodious cave to find the Mother of All Pimp Stations holy fuck the west face cave is stupendous! the entire swedish bikini team and their fucking tubs and all the prophalatics likely required to underwrite such an venture could all easily be accomdated...as the night turned into a complete white out we hung our gear from the dozens of bolts overhead and moved into the anasazi castle that has been constructed there, deep in the cranium of The Kong - the chowder was produced and cooked - the meaning of the word "chunder" was contemplated and discussed, the defintive definiton ultimately derived from drunken versions of "the land down under" and "i'm gonna be 500 miles" artlessly thundered out by your friend and humble narrator, already dangerously hard pressed with a charge of australian beer and bad american cigarrettes - undaunted, i progressed into my merlot and made cruel work of my goddamn ham-sammy - ensconced in the -20 sleeping bag on a bed of ropes and fine sand, i wondered if, like in a miller light commericial, could it possibly get any better than this? Cave panorama Mike all warm and cozy a ghetto blaster was produced - mike's indestructible random was shifted through and ultimaly dispensed in favor of my own trite tunes - i tried, futiley, to impress upon the crew the deep and abiding coolness of morphine and tori amos, but failing, found common ground w/ the pogues and chieftians and even a little canadian bluegrass having managed to piss out most of the small lake i'd consumed in alcohol, i settled in for the night - the acoustics of the extraordinary accomodation wrecked havoc on my senses - i clapped on headphones to drown out the snoring, but i was informed the next morning that i was the offender - ah well. given that it was a new day, we thought tvash needed to pop his aid-lead cherry - what better way than on a ridiciously overhanging bolt ladder with 400 feet of exposure? he trimphed however and it made for fine photography - while the boys were at this august task, i kept warm by adding to the castle's walls Tvash on pitch 4 Ivan and Mike from pitch 4 the summit was covered in snow and puddles - i jugged alongside the pig and we enjoyed the cloud-ambiance - our descent was easy enough, despite the haulbag - everyone knows the virtue of the monkey's fantastic giant overhanging rap, but it was amplified by the snow-crusted slopes at the bottom - getting the gear to the trail switchback required more advanced motor-skill coordination than ordinarily i can muster Mike topping out The Big Rap Swinger Bootcam the trip complete, we wandered back to the car as contrite sinners can, mindful of somethign that since i have lost but i'm sure must have been awfully meaningful at the time - famished, we plundered madras - i ran a savage burn on burger king while pat, outraged at the bald-faced lies of a local octogenirian, had to settle for fare from mickey-d's, where he found that his car critically lacks an ice-cream cone holder - somewhere past warms springs i drifted away into a cold, laconic place that even camels could not touch, but satisfied with our adventure de jour, feebly made plans for the next great outing, the one where i find god and tvash fills the void that violates the moral code of most first world nations - in short, we set ourselves up for the next strange trip, whenever that maybe [video:youtube]WE2_aE6ez34