Geek_the_Greek

No no. You have it all wrong. Boggle rocks. The noise of shaking the can of dice up is just unbelievable! Boggle is second only to scrabble in the world of word games.

Frenchman's - shirtless climbing in the sun. Nothing earth-shattering, but good to feel rock again after getting "gym lung" all winter.

Hmm. Early morning philosophy, grumpiness, etc. A strange part of me wants to pack all my climbing gear in my biggest pack, or maybe drag along a sled, and drag it all up Si, compas and GPS around my neck, checking coordinates every minute, and making loud commentary on current conditions and the likelihood on summitting. Wouldn't that be fun, to secretly laugh at all the great stares and looks from "wiser climbers"? Perhaps some of the gumbies up there were doing just that (but really, probably not).

I ridicule everybody, including myself. Life is ridiculous, climbing, even more so.

Beach, bar, .... or the lifts, mebbe.

That's 'cause there's less gear to place on slab alley, and the crux is bolted - all information that someone going to climb it will know anyway. Plus the ratings in Squamish tend to be softer than in Leavenworth, which would be more useful to know than III 5.9...

Toof?

I was referring to alpine routes, where individual rock and ice grades are usually given anyway. I don't have much technical ice experience, so I won't talk about that. But the whole numerical grading systems applied across the board are a joke, from a quantitative point of view. (That is, using the presumption that two items with the same quantitative measure, like a rock grade of 5.9 or whatever, are equivalent in whatever it is you're trying to measure - in this case difficulty, and sometimes seriousness and/or commitment, which YDS was never meant to do...) For instance, on rock, you assume that alpine grades imply longer runouts, more dirt and vegetation and looser rock than cragging grades. This you get from either 1- experience (generally) or 2- a description or a particular route. The discrepancies for pure rock climbing grades are bad enough (difference between slab and crack and face climbing, for instance, never mind protection issues...). So I just think it's not useful to assign a number that's supposed to represent the climb as a whole for what is essentially and by definition a subjective pursuit. Ok, Dru, so the grade says how sustained a climb is. Come on, you get more info from hearing "7 pitches, 1 5.9, 1 5.8, 1 5.7 the rest low to mid-fifth (Outer Space)" than from III 5.9. And anyone doing the route will get the info about the pitches anyway, so the grade is not useful, except for comparing to other routes, but as we already discussed, it's apples vs oranges.

Fern, I like your system best of all. Qualitative differences which exist in mountain routes don't have to be (can't be) quantified. These differences exist for other types of climbing too, but less so than in the heterogeneous alpine environment... Descriptions - good Numbers - innacurate and silly

I've actually seen a couple of guys skiing the She's Piste at lift areas. Apparently you can demo them at Steven's for $39 a day...

Hey Bone, I'm down at Crater Lake every summer these days, from mid-June until September. I'm always looking for climbing partners on weekends. Rattlesnake is about halfway between CL and Ashland, and I have yet to ski McLoughlin. It's not the North Cascades, but it is beautiful down there . Send me a PM sometime, or I'll look you up... -Dan

Once when I was young we were playing tag in a friend's yard and I was running and did a big leap-and-slide to avoid getting tagged and then I realized I had slid straight across a big pile of poo and then I freaked out and ran home screaming and crying with a shit-stain all the way up my leg. Life is good.

And to address the "serious" topic, anyone read Games Climbers Play? Classic essay by Lito Tejada-Flores, circa '70s (recently reprinted in the book of the same name) that basically addresses the issue very well: i.e. various forms of climbing are designed to offer a "reasonable" amount of challenge - why ladders across crevasses, having a doctor at base camp and other expedition-style shit is ok in the Himalayas but not for a day at the crags, etc; why nothing other than chalk and a crashpad is the rule for bouldering, while tents, aid-gear, radios, etc. are de rigueur for alpine walls, blah blah. "climbing: a sport/passtime/activity/lifestyle where you pick the hardest way up something and then artificially make it easier" This guy said it best:

Gym climbing is fun! The fact that it is peripherally related to other forms of climbing is just a bonus. Sport climbing is fun! The fact that it is peripherally related to other forms of climbing is just a bonus. Trad climbing is fun! ..... Climbing: the moral equivalent of golf. (a fun (I'm told-golf that is), self-indulgent recreational activity, of no use to anyone, moderately to severely damaging to the environment depending on the area, whose advocates take very seriously, spend vast amounts of money on, etc....) oh, and I guess, eh...

What I want to know is why you can't get Coffee crisp bars in the US??

I was out at Steven's yesterday too - ripped it up in Mill Valley. Andromeda face was awesome! I saw a few other pinheads out there, but none that looked beginner-ish. Perhaps you are being overly modest? Best advice I could give to someone switching from downhill to tele would be: in downhill you weight your downhill ski; with tele you weight both evenly while dropping the inside knee. Even pressure on both skis during the turn makes a big difference in smoothness and control.

I'll be there. Not really into protests, but this issue I feel strongly about. For others who might come, make sure to dress respectably, because if it looks like a circus it will be a circus.

Riiiiight. Well, maybe. But it was pretty densely packed, and in a stuff sack. I bet it's still there, sitting against an exposed rock somewhere on the snowfield. That, or someone picked it up and now has a spare thermarest.

The "green and brown" would have been more pleasant than all the CO, CO2 and BO from a packed little hut with 20 people melting snow for 4 hours straight. I'm sure this was commented on in prior discussions, but Muir hut struck me as a poorly designed shelter for a high altitude camp - way too small a beds:airspace ratio. John Muir would never have stayed there. Next time, I'll dig a cave and bivy. Freeclimb, do you know anything about my thermarest? Why would it be heading east?

Somewhere on the ski/tumble down from camp Muir yesterday my thermarest seems to have detached from my pack. It's a 3/4 length standard green/brown one in a nice black Cactus Creek stuffsack. It's probably gone, but what the hey? Maybe some kind sould picked it up and will hang on to it for me...

I agree. Especially things like encouraging local FS employees to view climbers in a positive (or at least fair?) way are really valuable, I think. I just think that if anyone's expecting any sort of huge change to FS mandate ("stop raping the forest" kind of stuff), it's the DC folks that need to hear it (including FS headquarters), not the local district or research station or seasonal employee or other small peon.

Volumes cut and sold per fiscal quarter are posted here (FY 2002: ~1.7 billion board feet cut nationally if you add up the 4 totals). The bit about every timber sale being challenged in court was verbatim from a professor of mine (and come to think of it, I don't remember what region he was referring to), so maybe I should have qualified that before posting it.

A few facts (and the odd opinion) to clarify some issues here: In the thirties and earlier, the big timber companies (with their own private land) pressured the forest service to limit cutting. They knew that they were competing for wood buyers and didn't want the market flooded. Later, during the fifties, the FS was under pressure from smaller companies (who needed access to the public timber), and increased cutting steadily, under the auspices of "community stability" (jobs for local logger-types). This was perhaps a bad move, since it was never mandated, and set a precedent that remains to this day (that the FS is somehow responsible for maintaining jobs for local loggers). The "high point" of logging on National Forest land came in 1989, when 12 billion board feet of timber were cut, much of it from around here (WA, OR, etc.). In contrast, about 2 billion a year are cut nowadays, a number the W administration is making clear they want to increase. Since 1897, when the Organic Act was passed, management of NF land was heavily regulated at the national level. In 1966, 1976, and 1994 (locally), additional national level acts were passed regulating logging practices and forest management on NF lands. None of these laws has ever been repealed, so that now, effectively, self-contradicting laws are under effect. The result of this is clear: since the passage of the NW forest plan in 1994, EVERY SINGLE timber sale in the NW has been contested in court. And yes, these days, timber sales, the framework for which are mandated by law, usually lose money for the FS. The take-home message for me is that, if you're concerned about logging on public lands near you, don't bug the forest service - they can't do anything about it. Contact your local member of congress, senator, or whoever. The big issues are out of the hands of the local FS workers on the ground, and has been for a long time. Of course they often implement the law in their own ways, and can tweak it here of there, but ultimately they answer to the folks in DC. The other thing to keep in mind is that we're not talking about big companies here. The Weyerheausers and International Papers don't give a shit about FS land - in fact, they were big supporters of the NW forest plan - because their dollars come from private land. If you talk about rules for manging private land (like the recent Forests and Fish agreement in WA), that's the stuff that affects them. The companies that log NF land are smaller and mid-size companies (like Simson, for example, out in the Olympics, who were hit hard by the NW forest plan). Note that I'm not talking about permit enforcement at all here, which I have little experience with. I buy permits now and then, and occasionally don't, and haven't had any real mishaps surrounding these. Don't get me started on fire issues. The type of thinning that works for forest protection is the type that costs money, and doesn't give any revenue (because it involves cutting non-commercial saplings and shrubbery and pruning low branches). Bush's plan for forest health is a total smokescreen for increased logging, which is mostly planned in the form of clearcutting and salvage, which do nothing to help forest health. [edited to change a few dates]

I've got an older (3-4 years) Casio Twin Sensor watch. Does what I want it to do - give me the altitude within about 100-150 feet or so. It has other features but I don't use them. I imagine there are better units out there, but I like mine just fine.

I think it got moved to spray.