Geek_the_Greek

I'm with Dru, sort of. The difference between +/- and a-d is moronic. Do you want three sub-grades between numbers or 4? It makes no difference, because of the bogusness of grading systems to begin with. Pick a system, and stick with it. Swain was on crack when he separated the two for the Red Rocks guide, and he started the whole damn trend. [Ok, this was a dying post, but I'm cruising for 100 posts today...]

I once played a drinking game involving words that "sound perverted but aren't". The crowd favorites were pinochle humdinger spotted dick angina any others?

Like: good rock up here in WA Dislike: hard to get to it until late spring Like: hard to get to it until late spring (keeps it a bit wild) Dislike: the mud they call rock in the Oregon cascades Like: Safer snow (mostly) than the interior

More good scrabble ones: ai, the south american three-toed sloth (Bradypus tridactylus). Aa, a form of lava. qat, qaid, qoph, qintar, sheqalim, qwerty, faqir - all the non-u q-words.

"The five men, aged 44 to 31...", followed by "Greg...19, one of the men rescued..." Air a little thin over at CNN?

I recall dropping some bombs from the loose slab on the upper third pitch of zz. They would sail all the way to near the crappers, actually. Climbers at MG were totally safe. As I recall, Karate crack is solid if you're strong (which, if you can trust the spray, DFA qualifies), whereas zz takes more technique - somewhat technical jams and such.

Riiiiiiight. So you pull out your palm with cell-modem, log on to cc.com, futz around until you manage to retie the knot just like Lambone's picture, hope - no pray - he was right about cutting that top strand, and hope you don't accidentally unweight the rope while rapping... (then you pray the dammed knot actually unravels when you unweight it, 'cause the only thing that sounds worse than rapping off that fucker is prussiking back up on it...) Whatever. You do half-rope raps and build anchors. You can always find something in 100 feet (jammed knot, shrub, chickenhead or whatever) better than some uber-sketch trick knot. You do pendulums or whatever until you find something.

Yeah, you got it right, Sloth. I guess what I'm saying is that if you're building an anchor and you will be belaying the next pitch and you really want to protect against an upwards pull, you might not want the leader to clip one of the anchor points as pro. In this case, you'll obviously have to be aware that a fall right onto the belay will come from a different direction and all that (so mind yer crampons!).

I'm sorry to have missed this thread! Back to the original nerdy physics discussion. Just to add to the explanation a bit here: What is missing so far in the two explanations is the belayer's anchor against an upward pull. If you assume the quickdraw biner has 0 friction, then you do not have a static system. Your belayer would have to suddenly exert 4.6 kN (460 daN) of force downwards to be immobile, which is impossible unless he is anchored to a separate lower anchor/piece of gear (anchored against an upward pull). However, in this case (a belayer perfectly anchored from below), you would indeed have the 2-1 pulley scenario; the belayer is fixed, the rope is free to run frictionless through the draw (imagine a really really good pulley), and the force on the draw is doubled. Otherwise, if you had a frictionless quickdraw and a belayer who is not anchored against an upwards pull, the belayer would be yanked upwards (a true dynamic belay!) until he "bottomed out" against the draw - and then we're back to the static factor 2 fall scenario, identical to the "no quickdraw" scenario. In sum, the only way you would have T (falling leader) + T (force on belayer) = 2T (force on draw) is if your belayer was anchored perfectly against an upward pull. Otherwise, the force on the belayer's end will be their own body weight (which is there to begin with, so you can ignore it in the calculation), and above that they will be pulled up (in theory, at the same rate as accelaration due to gravity) until they hit the draw and the system goes static again, with the force (T) remaining on the top draw. So in a real world scenario, with friction, stretchy ropes, and belayers suddenly changing position to resist a fall, I'd bet the two methods (belay right off the anchor vs clip one of the anchor pieces as pro) are within 1 kN of each other, unless you anchor against an upward pull (which makes it worse on the top piece/quickdraw!). The moral is that if the belayer is anchored tightly against an upward pull, the force on the clipped piece will be theoretically much higher, which is what we knew all along. So if you're going to clip one of the pieces of the anchor as your first piece of pro, your belayer is better off not being anchored against an upward pull in the event of a fall on to the belay (otherwise there will theoretically be a 2-1 effect on that one piece).

Nice post, Druesome. I'm with ya all the way. Nice how you worked in the bit about time in the bar (as long as you're "sharing the joy of the mountains") making you holier. How conveeeeeeenient!

In mountain rescue, SAR folks are climbers, usually good ones. The cops are around because they dispatch out the SAR folks. If it's at all off-road work, they're not usually there (it's not clear to me what happened to the deputy in this case). Frenchman's (sunshine wall) would probably be close enough to the road that some out of shape desk types would try to stumble their way down the trail, but I'm just guessing.

Come on, man, these are all totally grey areas, as I'm sure you know. Trundling? Ok, not bright if there's any reason to think there are people below. What about dislodging a scary loose block? It has to be done, sometimes. Accedental rockfall? Who's the idiot, the one dropping the rocks, or the one climbing under someone where there's falling rocks? Shitty anchors? Yah, I'm all for good anchors. Great. What about when there aren't any (and you can't/don't want to place a bolt)? Soloing at your limit to get the toprope? Well, I guess all soloing is dumb. Presumably you realise you were soloing at your limit when you fall and die. I guess Derek Hersey found what his limit was. Stupid fucker, clearly deserved to be left to bleed and die. Bad weather. Yeah, another obvious one. Don't climb during bad weather. Simple. Like, only climb in the gym - you won't get hurt that way. Whatever, man. Don't help anyone if you don't feel like it, but don't pretend you're on some higher ground for it. Do you get to judge how stupid the accident was? Who then? Iain, with the new format, as far as I can tell, you actually reply to individual posts, not the thread as a whole. So the post you reply to will show up on the bottom of the page. I just use the "quote" feature, and cut and paste within that.

Well, all climbing accidents are the result of a stupid judgement call - the decision to go climbing, clearly a dangerous activity. Ever gotten hurt climbing? Even had anyone help you out?

Ah, the grand... I'm thinking of the grand too, but there won't be anything fun about it! A battle, all the way.

Next year I would like to spend more time posting on cc.com because it looks like a great way to make new friends!

So, along the lines of the original post, I was just at Stone gardens this morning, and the new bouldering area has some very finely sculptured cracks. I think I'll be doing some laps on at least two of these, both variations on the hand crack theme. So in this case, climbing in the gym could certainly help your trad skills (otherwise I think the crossover is generally minimal).

I was originally told that that level was somewhere in the low .10s, but of course it depends on the climb. Now I'd say that there are some people out there climbing 5.11 who do it mostly through muscle. Back when he was still the 15 year-old boy wonder, Chris Sharma was always criticized for have useless footwork, but he managed to claw his way up all sorts of hard .13s with a lot of raw power and will. Technique makes it feel much better, safer, more solid, and more fun, I think. I had that "5.10 ceiling" thing going for a few years. Then I had a few bouts of climbing more regularly, and broke into some sport 11s, eventually up to .11c or so. Then I had some bouts of climbing less and am back in the 10s! There's no secret. If you're motivated enough to make time for climbing regularly (like, more than once a week), you will get there. If you slack off, the strength fades quickly, and technique fades more slowly. If you're mostly looking at progress in terms of grades, though, I'd say forget it, because it's not a means to an end. The means IS the end. Have fun.

Indeed. If you want to get better at climbing, go climbing. Don't equate totally different climbs of the same number grade as equally difficult for you to do. Grades, at least letter grades, are pretty much all crap from any sort of objective point of view.

Take I-5 to Canadian border, continue up Hwy 99 into Vancouver. Once the freeway ends, you're on Oak st. You can take that all the way to Broadway (9th Ave), but it's usually quicker to turn right on 41st, then left on Cambie. In either case, turn right onto Broadway, go three blocks past Cambie to Columbia, turn right and immediately left into the alley and parking. Make sure you have a loonie! (That's a Canadian $1 coin) . If you go straing from the US, you have to go to a 7-11 or something first (there's one at Broadway and Oak) to get change for the parking meter. The parking attendants are nazis and I have gotten two tickets because of that. That $1 loonie will clear you for 2 hours of MEC madness...

Well, ok, look for yourself. Central cascades west

So there seems to be a crazy temp inversion going on. Forecasts are saying freezing levels are at 12000 feet every night this week, even though it's below freezing here in town! Like, Snoqualmie pass, 24 tonight except 55 above 5000 feet! Those heading to the hills this weekend, be prepared for some serious slop underfoot...

I think this debate is missing the point. Mtn Dude, you asked which of two systems of tying a rope around a tree is better, one with a biner (which kind of sounded like a lasso slip-knot or girth-hitch kind of thing, where the 'biner is the "pulley", until Iain mentioned the very legit high-strength tie-off. But I don't think that's what you had in mind...) and one which just sounded like a rewoven figure-8 around the tree. Yeah, for single anchors, if you happen to want to use a rope rather than some webbing to build the anchor with, they're probably both ok. My preference would be for the rewoven figure-8. The bigger question is why you want to anchor a rope around a tree in the first place. As I understand it, the high-strength tie-off is mostly used for rescue work, and works very well to secure a rope without weakening it with a knot. If you actually want to climb with the rope, though, you're not going to be wrapping it around any trees (except maybe for the odd emergency rappel, and even then, slings are better if you have them, or you face the risk of a stuck rope). You're especially not going to be tying it off in one of the methods you described and then top-roping off of it. Ask someone who knows about the basics of building climbing anchors, or look in the John Long book mentioned by Glacier. Building good anchors for climbing is not a trivial skill. And don't try to toprope with your rope around a tree - very bad for tree, very bad for rope, very bad in general.

Good answers, good answers.... Hmmm - the whole "how many days out" thing seems like a bit of a drag to calculate once you go back a couple of years. I guess I could dig up all my guidebooks, read through all my ticked route notes, try to figure out which ones I did more than once, and get some sort of approximate value of days climbed, and sun exposure. Pffft. Whatever. I guess I'll wait until the next time I'm at a gear shop, see a nice helmet, and feel like dropping some cashish. Then I bring out the flame paint and stickers again! As an aside, I've always figured water-based acrylic paints to be ok on plastic. (Anyone else have old Games Workshop miniature paints lying around??)

A buddy of mine recently asked how long I'd owned my helmet. "Seven years or so" I answered, and he said I should retire it, because of UV damage (that it would be seriously weakened by now). Anyone else heard this? I'm kind of attached to my helmet at this point, and would prefer to keep it. Obviously, exactly when to retire a helmet for UV reasons must depend on how often you climb (in the sun?) with it on. Given that, any ideas?

Yep, MEC rocks. Biggest pain in the ass, though, is that they will only ship their own brand stuff to "foreign" (as in, outside Canada) addresses. So no cheap Arc'T packs by mail - you have to drive up to the store to get them!