Raingoat

There are also large cracks on the White River Glacier that are fun to climb in. The Timberline chair lift will carry you and your gear part way up the south side for $6 or so (family pass of four for $24), then just traverse up and over to the lateral moraine and run down the scree to the glacier. You might consider bringing an inflatable raft to go water caving at the bottom of the crevasses. There's got to be at least 10 feet of water in some! Tim

No pickets for the abseil, just the bollards. We did carry a few for running pro on the climb up. Driven in with a hammer, they would have held an elephant's fall. Tim

Gumby Direct TR The Gumby Direct, a new route put up two weeks ago saw the second and third ascents this weekend. A 500-foot grunt above open crevasses, the route follows a direct line up the south face of White River Glacier. Slopes graduated from 40 degrees to vertical. At the base of the final headwall is the dreaded Moat. Climbing out of this overhung soft snow cave is the only challenge on the route. I took the liberty of two knee placements to clear the hurdle, and then a delightful vertical pitch to the top. Thankfully Kip led the moat move. The only recommended descent is a double abseil on questionable bollards. If the top one fails, you'll only fall into the moat, but if the bottom one goes you’ll likely end up in a pool at the bottom of a crevasse. Conditions now are questionably perfect: Hard and soft snow, intermittent ice, and some running water. The route will only be in shape for a short time, until the moat collapses into a jumble of dirt, rocks and ice! The only nourishment we had for six hours was a bit of monkey chow and glacial ice to quench our thirsts. (The third team climbed slowly weighted down with full overnight bivy gear, headlamps, a gallon of water, and a rumored hacky sack.) The approach follows “climber trails” across and up 1800 feet of the nastiest scree slopes on the mountain (one hour and 10 minutes, some go slower). At 7800 feet, traverse down the crumbling lateral moraine onto the glacier. Good luck, go fast, and don’t look back. Tim [ 09-09-2002, 05:02 PM: Message edited by: Raingoat ]

quote: Originally posted by The Anti-Twight: I'd do it to help PMR and Climb Axe, but NEVER for the Mazamas OR Mark Twight. Why don't you get a better guest speaker, like Julia Childs. Weh, weh, weh. Cry. Moan. Sob. Would you have your Mark Twight slide shows to write about if the Mazamas weren't around? The group introduces climbing to hundreds of people a year, promotes safety and education for climbers, teaches the best mountaineering first aid around, continually trains its leaders, takes leadership roles in local preservation and access issues... If you don't like clubs, don't join them. If you like to climb, stop your bitchin and climb. Raingoat

Sorry for not posting earlier. I was the leader of the eight-person Mazamas group on Washington last Sunday (wearing the sparkling, disco helmet). First a positive note: We all got to climb the summit pinnacle with literally hundreds of Monarch butterflies fluttering about. Must have been passing through on their migration. Our party had a couple of less experienced, timid climbers. That's why we set up the middle rap station, which the Cascade Mtn. club from Bend also used. Those rap stations suck up lots of time. I warned our party repeatedly throughout the day about stepping carefully so as not to cause rock fall. Despite that, I'm sure we let some fly. We did not, however, knock the television off the middle section. We saw it (and its twin right next to it) and carefully stepped around it. I'm gald it didn't hit anyone, though it sounds like it came far too close. I will certainly be more selective about who I take on climbs like this. I will also avoid that mountain on busy summer weekends. There was far too much rock fall, and it's really quite amazing that no one got hurt. I also will never go down that scree field again--too much rock fall and too destructive to the plants trying to survive. Tim

This is always an option... http://www.bumperdumper.com/ Tim

Only tangentially related to climbing, but related nonetheless. How would you like knee surgery that doesn't help, except to make the medical industry richer? Tim http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/10/health/10CND-KNEE.html Study Casts Doubt on Value of Popular Knee Surgery By GINA KOLATA A popular and expensive knee operation for arthritis does not work, researchers report. Their study, comparing it to sham surgery, found that patients who got the real operation did no better than those who got a placebo procedure. The operation is used to treat people with osteoarthritis — the type that occurs with aging — who are having pain and difficulty moving despite treatment with drugs like those that reduce inflammation. It involves making three small incisions in the knee, inserting an arthroscope, an instrument the size of a ballpoint pen, to see the joint, and then either flushing debris from the knee or shaving rough areas of cartilage from the joint and then flushing it. At least 225,000 patients have one or the other of these operations each year, at a cost to the nation of more than $1 billion. Now, in a study published on Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, investigators at the Houston Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Baylor College of Medicine report that while patients often said they felt better after the surgery, their improvement was just wishful thinking. "Here we are doing all this surgery on people and it's all a sham," said Dr. Baruch Brody, an ethicist at Baylor who helped design the study. The 180 patients who participated were randomly assigned to have their arthritic knees flushed clean or to have their knee joints scraped, then flushed, or to have placebo surgery in which they were sedated and while surgeons simulated an operation, making cuts in their knee so the patients would not know if they had the surgery. After they recovered from the operations, all the patients, on average, said their knee pain had improved. They continued to say they were better for the two years that the researchers followed their progress. But tests of knee functions revealed that the operation had not helped. And those who got the placebo surgery reported feeling just as good as those who had had the real operation. "On the self-report scales, everyone was better," said Dr. Nelda P. Wray, who is chief of the section of health services research at Baylor. But, she added, "on the objective scale, no one was better at any time point." Some orthopedists, like Dr. Kenneth Fine of George Washington University School of Medicine, said they had long wondered about the operation and now the study shows they were right. Dr. Fine said that while he did the operation, he had doubted it because it seemed to do nothing for the underlying arthritis. "There are pretty good success rates in terms of patient satisfaction, but I have always been skeptical," he said. As for other doctors, he said, "I hope it helps them to think about what they are doing." Dr. William J. Tipton, Jr., who is executive vice president and chief executive of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, also said he had questioned the operation. "I'm both a patient and a physician," Dr. Tipton said, explaining that he himself has osteoarthritis. "My knee is buckling now, but I'm not going to have arthroscopy done. I recognize that it's not going to help." But, Dr. Tipton said, he would hate to see insurers refuse to pay. If that happens, he said, orthopedists will protest. "This is where eyebrows are going to be raised," he said. "There's going to be a certain group of physicians who are very upset. This is another example of managed care at its lowest, with payers calling the shots. I think it's not good medicine." Dr. Tipton said he would like to see the study repeated a few times and then let doctors decide whether to do the operation. "Gradually, physicians would say to their patients: `I know you've seen a lot about arthroscopy, but you know what? It doesn't work very well for osteoarthritis of the knee.' " For now, said another orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Douglas Jackson of Long Beach, Calif., "I don't think it will change how we do things." Dr. Jackson, who is past president of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, said the study's population was not typical of what he sees in his private practice but that he would tell his patients about their experience. "I will inform them of the study and what it found — in this group of predominantly men in a veterans hospital, it wasn't any better than a sham." The study began when an orthopedic surgeon at the V.A. center, Dr. J. Bruce Moseley, who is now the team physician for the Houston Rockets and the Houston Comets, approached Dr. Wray suggesting a study that would compare washing the knee joint to washing and scraping in patients with arthritis. Dr. Wray had a bolder idea. "She said, `How do you know that what you are seeing is not a placebo effect?' " Dr. Moseley recalled and Dr. Wray confirmed. "My response was, `This is surgery.' She said, `I hate to tell you this, but surgery may have the biggest placebo effect of all.' " But placebo studies of surgery are almost never done. Many doctors consider them unethical because patients could undergo risks with no benefits. Working with Dr. Brody, the ethicist, the group attempted to make the placebo treatment no more dangerous than daily life. At the V.A. center, patients could not get the knee operation outside of the clinical trial. But, of course, they could go elsewhere and since most were elderly, Medicare would pay. To be sure that they understood what they were agreeing to, the patients in the study were required to write, by hand, that they knew that they may get placebo surgery. Out of 344 consecutive patients who were asked, 144 declined, a 44 percent refusal rate. For those who agreed to participate, the day of surgery meant being wheeled into an operating room while neither they nor any of the medical staff knew what their treatment would be. When they were on the operating table, Dr. Moseley, who did all the operations, opened a sealed envelope telling him whether the patient was to have his knee flushed, flushed and scraped, or whether he was part of the placebo group. Those in the placebo group were given a valium-like drug that put them to sleep to the point of snoring but unlike those who had the real operation, they did not have general anesthesia. Dr. Moseley made small cuts in their knee so it would look like he had done an operation. He bent and straightened the knee and asked for surgical instruments, just in case the patient was partly conscious. There even was an assistant in the room who sloshed water in a bucket so it would sound like the knee was being flushed clean. And when they woke up, Dr. Wray said, virtually every one of these patients thought they had had a real operation. The paper on the study is accompanied by two editorials. One, by Sam Horng and Dr. Franklin G. Miller of the National Institutes of Health, asked if it is unethical to do placebo surgery. The controversy, they wrote, comes because doctors assume that patients in clinical research should not be put at risk if they cannot benefit and placebo surgery would seem to involve risk. But, they explain, clinical research is different from medical therapy — it is a tool to decide whether treatments are effective and its aim is not to help those in the study but to help future patients. To be ethical, a study with placebo surgery must not place patients at undue risks, the benefits of finding out whether the surgery works must be worth any potential risk to the patients, and the patients must give informed consent. In this case, they wrote, all those objectives were met and the study "exemplifies the ethically justified use of placebo surgery." In the second editorial, Dr. David T. Felson of Boston University and Dr. Joseph Buckwalter of the University of Iowa, note that if there were large beneficial effects from the surgery, the study should have found them. "Although the study may not have been large enough to permit the detection of any small effects, the data presented do not suggest that there were any," they wrote. In a telephone interview this week, Dr. Felson, a professor of medicine and a rheumatologist by training, praised the research. "I think it is a wonderful study," he said, adding that he was surprised by the absolute lack of benefit from the operation. But, he said, it remains to be seen whether doctors and patients really will abandon the procedure. "There's a pretty good-sized industry out there that is performing this surgery," Dr. Felton said. "It constitutes a good part of the livelihood of some orthopedic surgeons. That is a reality."

I was with a private party (although most of us are Mazamas). Leader treats: Any kind of food bribe to get on future climbs or reward for taking you along. A Mazamas tradition to entice leaders to stay involved with the club. Tim

I climbed Unicorn Peak in the Tatoosh range on Saturday, along with 20 of my closest friends. Okay, so there were only nine in our party, but at the trailhead we ran into a party of 12 Mazamas heading up, too. Many of us knew each other, so we joked about who was going to kick steps for whom. The Mazamas got out in front by about 15 minutes and navigated a nice path to Snow Lake. Our groups passed each other a couple of times in the snow chutes and upper saddle, and we arrived at the summit pinnacle around the same time. We set up two top ropes for adjacent ~5.4 routes and a fixed line for an easier ~5.1 route. It was an efficient and safe process getting the 21 people up to the summit, many of who were beginner climbers. We all baked in the sun for a while, shared some good leader treats, and then descended on two rap lines. While on top, a Mountaineers group of 7 or 8 arrived at the base of the rock. They ate lunch and waited patiently for us to start descending before starting on the rock. I was pleased to see that we could all have a great day in the mountains with two large groups climbing in such close proximity. No accidents or injuries, and everyone made the summit. Conditions: soft but stable snow, and great glissading down the upper bowls and through the chute to Snow Lake. Tim

I'll send a TR upon return. Hadn't thought of down climbing the ridge, though I suppose if the couple of steep sections are not too bad for the group then we'll consider it. Thanks all for the input. Tim

We are planning on descending Avalanche Gulch, after climbing the ridge. Getting back onto the ridge to return to camp at 10,000 ft. is the challenge. Did you descend the ridge or the gulch? (I made it to about 13,500 ft. a couple of years ago on the ridge and didn't carry a rope or harness. I think the same is in order for this year.) Tim

Yeah, we're planning on checking with the rangers, but I thought someone here might know better. What route on the north side are you doing? Something off the Hotlum Glacier? Tim

Does anyone know what elevation you can re-gain Casaval Ridge from Avalanche Gulch on Mt. Shasta? I hope to climb the route in a couple of weeks and was looking for some alpha on how to get back to camp on the ridge (without going to the base of the ridge). (GPS coordinates would be a bonus!) Thanks. Tim