iain

http://www.apple.com/trailers/lions_gate/fahrenheit_911/

behold the web lackey

yeah they are not too popular with the general public, but are used by meterologists all the time, so you have to go to university web sites to get the data usually. Here is one that has all the soundings: http://twister.sbs.ohio-state.edu/ Go to the "upper air" section. There are a bunch of universities that have this info out there. The skew-T is not a very friendly diagram, but once you can read it, there's a ton of info crammed in there.

Here's an example from that site I mentioned, again, Salem, OR in October: According to this diagram, you would break out of the clouds around 12,000ft, and the winds would be about 35 knots out of the west. So in Oregon, you wouldn't break out of the clouds.

Here's a great description of a skew-T diagram: http://meteora.ucsd.edu/weather/cdf/text/how_to_read_skewt.html Basically every skew-T has both a temperature and dewpoint tempature line drawn on the chart. The dewpoint temperature is always even or lower than the air temperature, which is the dewpoint depression. When the temp lines are close together, the air is becoming saturated, and clouds form. When they are far apart, the humidity is low. When the lines are close together at low altitude, you are likely to be in a cloud bank getting wet. If you see the lines split apart at say, 8000ft, you might be treated to a nice cloud sea. The wind barbs on the far right of the skew-T give you an idea of what the winds are doing aloft. Very valuable for climbing. Hope that helps. Here is the current skew-T for Salem, Oregon: As you can see, the dewpoint temperature and temperature lines are far apart and evenly-spaced, so things are relatively dry out there throughout the upper air column. Pressure in mb is on the y-axis and temp in °C on the x-axis. So for example, with today's Salem morning sounding you could expect clear skies at 10k ft (10k ft is usually about 700mb) with winds out of the ENE at 0-15 knots and temps around 4°C. Pretty cool, eh?

Yeah it looks like Jefferson always has a huge avy event in the spring like that. The full avalanche track goes way down below the PCT. We were thinking it might date back to when the Milk Creek Glacier collapsed back in the 70's. Yeah based on your TR it looks like the good stuff is on the north/east aspects. The guys on JPG were saying they were not hitting that crust at all. This weekend should be good to go for skiing on all aspects again, I would guess. Still plenty of snow out there.

Climb: Mt. Jefferson-West Rib Date of Climb: 6/15/2004 Trip Report: Hoping to ski the West Rib of Mount Jefferson, Mr. Hal Burton set aside his oil war obligations and we headed to Pamelia Lake. We left the trailhead around 1:30am. After a short run through the woods, we found ourselves at the toe of the avy debris of Milk Creek Gully. The enormous debris had melted out to some extent, but there were some huge scouring marks along the canyon walls with splintered trees way up there. We followed this snow up the southern gully to the shoulder of the West Rib, and gained the ridgeline there. Right away it was clear we were in for a slog, as we were postholing through a nauseating breakable crust at 2:00am. The ridge itself was a combination of loose scree, stacked talus, and postholing. It's bad news when you seek out scree as the best climbing option. The snowpack was totally trashed. A crust sat on top of about 0.5m of slushy rounds. It seems there had been no refreeze here in awhile, and it continued up the ridge with no letup in sight. Disgusted with the conditions, we decided to bail around 7500', aware of the brutal ski descent awaiting us below. We were also concerned that it would not take long at all for all this slush to activate once the sun came around the SW ridge. The skiing was challenging, involving jump turn after jump turn to get out of the snow, tedious kick turns, and combat skiing through huge avalanche debris. This is the stuff nightmares are made of: Looking up: The avalanches that come down Milk Creek must be truly enormous. Here is some of the destruction: The so-called "knife-edge" ridge on the JPG route looked quite rimed-up. It might be challenging for a few days, but the sun is surely cooking away any rime left from the storms. The SW ridge route still has a healthy amount of snow on it. The PCT is snow-free in this area. Perhaps this weekend will provide good skiing after the sun cooks that crust into submission. Right now it is combat skiing. A group turned around on JPG due to high winds and poor visibility at the saddle by Mohler Tooth the same day. Oh, and we skied right by the tent of the infamous Richard Pumpington, a true cc.com legend from back in the day. Hope we didn't ruin your beauty sleep with our sideslipping and cussing.

I'm ready to switch out of Denalis too, after 2 seasons on them. I need something that doesn't make me climb like a drunken walrus. I am eyeing the Dynafit products. I'm still interested in the scarpa F1 but have not tried them on yet. I'd really like to experiment with some kind of homemade "spoiler" for my scarpa invernos. P.S. Apparently the Denalis are going back to red next year instead of baby blue. Sorry Tim!

Yes, those free-air levels come from the soundings that are released each day from weather balloons around the world (in fact they are all released at exactly the same time each day!) This generates data that can be found at places like: http://weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/sounding.html A SKEW-T diagram is generated from this data. They are pretty helpful to determine if you are going to break out of the clouds at a higher elevation, or if you will be socked-in at the summit. Pretty cool, and entirely free for the public.

f'ing amateurs. north sister in september. you can pick up up boulders and break them over your knee. You could package them in a honey maid graham cracker box and no one would know the difference. I have chiseled footholds out of almost elemental sulfur on mount hood. three fingered jack is totally solid on the standard route. In fact the rock is pretty damn good in my opinion.

Snow level is generally considered to be around 1000' below the forecasted freezing level

I think poplar has been used for just about anything at this point. There are some serious poplar farms out I-84 these days. Seems to be the way things are headed.

might!

hah, I

I, for one, am not proud of my spray volume

blatant post count builder

behold...the cc.com peanut gallery in all its glory.

oh yes, how rude of me. MCTFAF as well.

I thought they just took the average girth size of the bellies of people entering the lodge and called it good.

I don't know where the heck they are measuring that but there are patches of ground showing all over the place below the Magic Mile.

If sir michael atiyah started a thread on string theory, harpell would be in there trying to act like an expert. I am particularly entertained by this new "voice of reason" angle he's working now.

Fact is, I don't think I really understood the whole pledge of allegiance thing when I was in elementary school. I just thought it was an annoying thing teachers make kids do for no reason, so I don't see it as a big deal, just a silly thing to make kids do. I do think the "under God" portion is a lame addition.

Yeah I wouldn't actually be concerned about it unless someone I knew had HBV/HCV and had just bled a bunch in a crack. I would also be concerned if an HAV carrier dropped coils on my head as I climbed.

hiv is not really a concern. I would be much more concerned about a hep. infection. It is much more durable.

Ugh what a heartbreaker.