ivan

it's a rare trip to beacon that you don't see something new - I still ain't seen a bobcat out there, but did see a sealion try to pork a goose once

I thought larry quit climbing years ago

9/19 - day 21 - steady mob'n'in'da morning - rocked the bofa the night before, waking up bright eyed n' whatnot, wrenching me neck a wee bit in the dawn - went to work for a spell, strange for a saturday, but sallied forth just a shade shy of noon n' noodled on out to the beacon-wand w/ geoff adam in the lot, then soon tim n' winter n' we hobnobbed a spell - shuffled on down to cruising w/ intent to check out cloud 9 - by the time we were there my time was shortish n' nobody seemed to relish the pg-nature of the newly cleaned route, so we settled for moving on up the normal way back in the lot started to build meself up into a towering jesus-based rage at the sight of a ticket on geoff's ride, me having scratched out the license # of the newly defunct red devil on my parking pass n' substituting his on in - walked into the ranger station, ticket in hand, feeling much like a feller rambling on into a liquor store in the depth of a meth-binge w/ a sawed off shotgun barely obscured beneath his grimy coat - all went well inside, in shah allah, n' happy i was as i had but 20 minutes to make a family photo-session in the 'couve n' had no time to dig deep holes in the woods or slip a 7-state man-hunt

in your highpt pic bill the terrain obscures the first 2 pitches, which are 80 meters or so combined - i think we're actually past halfway great pic of our boy - the last wildly overhanging pitch we fixed will yield an even wilder shot of a jugger i suspect, if'n you want to dare to hang yer ass way out in space to get it

i only place bolts made of mithril - hella better for hauling 600 feet up the route too

9/16 - day 20 - wow, all the signs show this'll be my least productive year at beacon since i rolled into the nor'west - only my 2nd solo lap since summer came - reckon i done been doing other things... squeeze job of a climb, 'twixt the regular end of the day n' back 2 skewl night - nobody about - grey, gloomy, still - lost some of the muscle memory of the route, occasionally stopping n' down-climbing little parts in order to do them right - free pink tricam if'n you want to pry it out of the 3rd pitch in the infamous nut-eating crack, i would but i already bootied 2 pinkies that i never ever seem to use... dead chipmunk gathering ants on the walk off up the ridge, poor li'l feller, but best to leave summer at it's end rather than suffer through the winter for no fawk'n reason, no?

short answer is i don't know - different materials, different ages, different exposure to water, was rusted when it was first placed?

do you mean why, if they're new, are they 1/4 inch and not something like 3/8?

cirith ungol's got good bolts - nice to know barad dur's in better shape as well gotta shrink them photos!

funny, I never made the connection between the crosses on top n' the jumpers suppose that makes sense, we saw the memorials long before the jumpers... that would appear to be the pt they jump from - jeebus, there's no real good diving board up there like on half dome

they're regular as rain up there, them flying boi's - thought it was gonna turn into live snuff porn Saturday though

love seneca, sure wish it was closer..

it's definitely worth looking at for yourself and there are some free climbing options i think, though indeed the simple truth is that this monolith has gone for so long unexplored b/c it's so different from traditional walls and crags - that is both cool and a bit of a conundrum the rock is great though not terribly freeable when good (wicked steep and largely featureless) and awful frightening at many other times - it's not so easy to sort out by seeing when it'll be one way or t'other anyhow, it's so close to vancouver it's worth the drive - if you're comfy doing easy aid, the current route is a worthy adventure

trip the sixth - bryan n' bill - a week after a sodden deluge we returned, 4 pitches fixed n'all the shit already up there - had a union social i was in charge of on friday afternoon so arrived at the rendezvous dangerously deranged - i soon fell into a deep n' stupendous stentorious snoring sleep but rallied somewhere along the way to get groceries - we rambled on through the growing dark and reached the rv park after a good bit of bullshitting, my soul made right and brightly glowing whiskey and whoop-whooping ensued - demented dean our neighbor definitely added to the what-have-you - saturday morning arrived all too early and we roused ourselves from half-horrid hangovers and rallied on up the hill jugged to the top of 4, the last 2 not so bad w/ the 1-jug, 1-gri technique - i lead the jaunt up p5, all the draws still hanging on it since july - pumped in some more bolts about the high-pt anchor as the boys made their way up - a bit of a clusterfuck really, but what big-wall is complete w/o one every 200 fucking feet or so? dem white fellers, despite my urgent exhortations, didn't snap at the sincere offer to lead the new pitch 6, so off i set, rather tired n' sore already, truth-be-told - the good thing about being a bit gored was the bolt-spacing stays generous we'd set a 3 p.m. turnaround time as we needed to put in a whole new rap line, and i exceeded that by a wee-bit - was eager to end ascending after hitting supper steepness combined w/ loose n' hollow rock bill led the raps down, putting in surprisingly only 2 stations - the 2nd one being damn near exactly 60 meters, ending after a huge stretch of overhang ontop of a terrifying shattered tower saturday night a staid one by last week's standards - salami n' jalapeno bread - whiskey once again n' big batches of burgundy n' black n' green tobacco - moby dick goddammit - cave man tv, but bill checked out before it got really interesting - early to bed sunday broke gloomy, mist-fuck all-about, brain aching n' bitchy - we humped it back up the hill n' broke out into the big open of the talus field even as the wisps of cloud cleared the tower - it was to be 3 serious long strenuous jugs, ones i'd like just as well to forget - bryan clocked'em for what they were n' whittled away the hours instead getting whiskey-drunk down in the boulders, dodging the fragments i flung off the cliff n' building up a bonfire took a long time to regain the high-pt but after all that work it was insane to think of turning around, so bill being disinterested once again i took on the leading end - the bit of bad rock reached around the angle then returned to berserker attitude - the line i wanted turned out to terrifying to contemplate - a 50 square feet panel all hollow and horrid, rooflets w/ cluster-munitions abounding - the solution was a dead-horizontal traverse to a sweet ledge, but stil a few feet below the summit of the lower-wall bill to the top, a god-send for his shivering ass no doubt - it was the lord's day so we hadn't that much time to fuck-around, so he did a little recon, put in a bolt, then returned - we sorted out the shit best left behind n' bolted for the ground back down i discovered some of the sad fragments of geoff's torque wrench which had precipitated itself down from 600 feet up after it foolishly believed it could fly - we sat round the fire for a bit n' bashed back down the hill, rounded up the camp shit, paid pete his blood-shekels n' then blasted back home through the growing gravid sky

and the dem's best chance of victory - pretty certain the feller's who shot kennedy will come out of retirement to whack the donald if'n he persists in his behavior

how is this not going to ruin one of my greatest loves since childhood? http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/09/09/438853832/national-geographic-reshapes-itself-in-725-million-deal-with-21st-century-fox

if history's taught us anything, it's that you can't keep a russian down

pretty much what jim says - there's a huge diversity in special ed pops, from kids who'd you'd never think were anyway different from regular ed to kids w/ profound handicaps like down's syndrome the "high needs" kids usually are full-time in special-ed classes, but the large number of other kids w/ issues like aspergers, autism, dyslexia, brain-injuries, etc. etc. usually have a lot of "inclusion" classes, where they are like any other regular kid but usually have another adult assigned to help them out during class, plus a single period a day w/ a special ed teacher to get help w/ their regular ed class much of this is the result of numerous lawsuits centered around the american's w/ disabilities act and similar laws requiring public accomodation for people with a vast array of handicaps - the result, as mentioned, is largely positive as regular ed kids now are much kinder to the peers they used to never see and special ed kids are less stigmatized and have opportunities that didn't used to be open to them some of my more successful students have been special ed kids - the disabilities they have often cause them to learn compensation skills (like working hard and being positive about life)

anything that's offset is good - in truth, i don't think i could name the brand of any of my micro-nuts dmm's rock in the regular size though...

special ed law has come a very long way in 20 years, and arguably for the good - the inevitable truth of course is that special ed requires a lot more $ per pupil

our kids sound like they're in pretty similiar places (though holy christ, 6? i was doooone at 2 ) - we also largely home-school, but then that's a luxury simply not available to the vast majority of families - there are also plenty of public schools able to offer all kinds of high end programs

there's only a handful of charter schools in the state at the moment - i'd imagine that fact alone means they can't accept whoever applies - public schools get no such choice

sounds like back-pedaling to the old "separate but equal" idea?

interesting read, though i don't think its helpful to say its the student's entire fault for borrowing in the first place or that students would have way less debt if they worked more while in school - the modern american economy is a grim place for a non-college graduate, so there's huge amounts of pressure for kids to go there even if it means practically selling themselves into slavery in the hopes that it'll all work out in the end if they try their best - working a minimum wage job while wading through marx won't exactly put much of a dent in the debt either that said, of course, students need to value their education and thus need to have skin in the game, provided the work doesn't render them incapable of staying awake in class - and if the price-tag for an affordable education (that will actually translate into a middle-class job) is minimal extra-curriculars being offered, that's not the end of the world (though the renaissance dream of a university that offers enlightenment in matters beyond the purely practical would be sad indeed to see die and not be the kind of world i'd much want to live in )

seemed like, if anything, that i should be the aggrieved party