iain

no one has a keener understanding of the Irish political situation than the PNW climbing community!

check out the mac thread.

It's almost worth a lift ticket to do laps in the boots for a day. Does wonders for your confidence. If you can set the ego aside for at least the first few runs... It's also a lot of fun to ski them when you get dialed in to the movements, you really feel the snow and how subtle movements affect the turn. Then you get cocky and wipe out.

there's a checkbox to "mark as edited" or not, but only chickens use it.

I pretty much assume I won't be releasing from my 500's either.

yep, some people have made their own before. The brandname is pretty well-made though. Here's a bit of discussion on the booster strap on Powder Mag.

very much so. It's several bands of elastic that keep the cuff of your inner boot pressed around your ankle. It stretches with your foot movement.

The Booster Strap they're extra weight but they up the performance a notch.

I find it just takes a little while to get the feel for your climbing boots. There's no question it is really hard to ski w/o any upper leg support, but it is definitely doable after time. It is frustrating because you feel like a beginner again, and it's usually skiing after climbing something (you're tired) and you have a pack on (always fun). I find if I really focus on keeping my body facing the fall line and keep an aggressive lean into the slope I fair reasonably well. If I get spooked, it's all over and back to pizza/fries/pizza/fries. I think it's all in the head. KNOW you can make the turn and it will be there.

The Denali XT is quite the AT boot. I climb like a braindead walrus in them though. Leuthold Couloir is about the extent to which I want to climb in those things. The skiing, of course, is phenomenal. I recommend booster straps too. Fun to strap those on once I've been skiing in my Invernos. I do like skiing in Invernos to because I can't cheat on technique (they dump me on my ass if I look at them wrong).

you two are always lurking in the wings, waiting for your moment to shine

hahaha it's not quite as liberal as it once was, the admin sees it getting in the top 10 by becoming more mainstream. Whatever

Grew up in Corvallis, went to college in Minnesota, came back to Portland.

nothing wrong with a sunny weekend at smith!

my advice is to contact black diamond directly. I had two pairs of bad ascensions (glue came off in chunks on my skis). They treated me like royalty, advance replacing the skins immediately and asking constantly if I was satisfied. BD may be the Microsoft of the climbing world, but they treat their customers very well from my experience. Now if they would just stop releasing bindings on the market that have not been beta-tested....

The commitment heuristic, btw, was applied to choices made by avalanche victims in a very interesting avalanche seminar the other weekend up on Hood.

This over-the-top concept of college brainwashing is amusing. Of course I share values with my parents, and they had a firm grip on me when I was a kid. However, political clout through financial embargo was not one of those values, so perhaps I can't relate.

I agree we share some common interests (enjoying our national forests, as you mentioned). There is a point at which politeness doesn't quite cut it at times. My case study is Dutchman's Flat outside of Bend, Oregon. Snowmobilers there are polite and courteous as well, but with the sheer amount of them distributed throughout the area, it becomes a touch intolerable. Yes, one can avoid them after about 5 miles, but those first 5 miles can be a brutal ordeal of smog and constantly checking your back (they have groomed track, but frequently are off it at great speed). I have trouble seeing them as allies at these times. Anyways, I think both sides of these issues are frequent victims of the commitment heuristic, where we have a desire to be consistent with ethical commitments and decisions we have made in the past. I'm as guilty as the next. Instead of viewing the information objectively and case-by-case we make the same decisions again and again about each other because we want to appear consistent with our beliefs. It makes life's decisions a lot less complex, but it doesn't get us anywhere. Good to see a so-called "liberal" breaking out of it, though I have some fundamental issues with the ARC, of which a great many members are motorized recreationalists (dare I say all?)

sounds like she's already under political "indoctrination". and "to be fair" I went to Macalester College, alma mater of that "whining liberal" Kofi Annan.

Matt I don't disagree with that idea. Where do you think members of the ARC and the typical hiker/climber/etc can find common ground? I'm skeptical, because these two entities seem to have an entirely different worldview.

well he's right about that andinista that thing sucks!