j_b

bivying on the route could be fun; however if your concern is to shave time on the 2nd day I am not sure that having to lug overnight packs back to the first notch is really a time saving tactic (I don't expect you to go for a light bivy at this time of the year). Moreover the enjoyment factor is much greater when one travels light. I'd camp at the notch before the pocket glacier and be ready for a long day. The trail from Thornton Lake down to the traihead is really easy (much of it on a former road). Anyhow, something to consider.

quote: MtnGoat wrote: So j_b, I meant to ask, when you listed those quotes from me, what was your intention? Is it your contention there is some hypocrasy in my position I am not aware of, or?? hypocrisy is one way to put it but the least one can say is that expounding on the virtues of democracy, freedom to think and choose for oneself, and the basis of guilt is not consistent with judging someone on appearances and truncated discourse. I quoted you to show that you did all the above in the course of this thread.

quote: we're hastening the time until the next PAGETOP you are pulling my leg aren't you?

perhaps someone could enlighten me: what is the reason for wanting to drown this discussion? If I am mistaken on your intent please feel free to explain.

"It's a very good question. Basically it comes down to the fact that while it it not permissible to be an initiating aggressor, once one is attacked it is permissible to defend oneself even if this means offensive actions." I am curious too! who was the 'initiating aggressor'?

"I ask what is more holier than thou than deciding *others* need to be forced to live as the proponent wants them to, by the proponents values." "Democracy exists whereever men have choice to order their own lives, it's institution as a method to force men to change their lives because a mob says so, does not represent democracy I for one am interested in furthering." "But until real evidence is shown that stands in court, it's all hearsay. I refuse to consider men I don't know liars until I see the actual evidence against them." .... "She made no mistake, the dumbsh*ts messing with her made the mistake. Would *you* simply allow someone to go on their merry way after hearing comments like she heard? I wouldn't." "Hypocrasy is not acting in concert with ones *own* stated values"

MtnGoat writes:"I agree that one's wants are influenced by culture, but this doesn't mean those wants, however derived, are not what creates a market to fulfill them. If you want firewood or a goat, you want it for your own reasons influenced by culture, and someone will be willing to trade you one." so the kid who wants the latest sport shoe or the Bellevue housewife who wants the latest suv, want it for their 'own reasons'? at best this is vague terminology, but more likely it is a blunt apology for our mass marketing dominated culture. 'however derived' is not good enough either, especially when those wants are derived from the marketing of those 'willing to trade'.

well it appears we are going around in circles. Anyhoo ... some people (in particular brewers) knew that good beer existed yet the only stuff available was piss beer and most were happy to drink it. What does it say about the influence of the economy/mass marketing on our wants? Did they start selling good beer because people were asking for it? no. Did they start selling good beer because they thought enough of us would buy it and therefore they could make a buck? yes. Ergo, and you'll forgive me for generalizing without providing other examples, innate "wants do not drive the train" for manufacturing suv's over mid-size cars, crappy beer over good beer. If that was not the case people would not have drunk shitty beer and coffee for as long as they have. We cannot "blame anyone but the consumer" because he is not first responsible for available goods. Producing said goods at the smallest possible cost and that will 'appeal' (thanks to mass marketing) to the greatest number of us 'drives the train'. I can assure you that if you went to a pig farm at feeding time, you wouldn't see a pig refusing to eat because it is not fed high grade, environmentally sensitive food.

"kinda, they didn't know they were drinking piss beer but they liked beer so they drank it and thought it was great. But due to the ever profitable search to sell more beer and advance the beermakers inscrutable yet honored art, someone invented microbrews, the regular brews became piss brews by comparison and there you have it." well nevermind that euros have been drinking good beer for centuries and that it only took for someone to figure out they could make a buck selling it in this country. What were we talking about anyway? the influence of the allmighty dollar on available culture? "I don't drink micros because I'm told to, but because they freakin taste good! I didn't gag down a McBurger at lunch today because I've been programmed, it was because it was not totally objectionable and it was on the way back to work and the drive through was empty, and the tradeoff was acceptable, indeed desirable." it's because the alternatives at your disposal are as hopeless. Good 'fastfood' has been around forever but it can't survive in this economy.

Dru writes: "Scientists say mankind will be replaced by giant bla, bla, bla ...." you know as well as I do they don't know what they are talking about anyway. I am not worried.

"When you don't know there is such a thing as electricity, you don't want it because you don't know about it. When you do know, you can want it, and this is not because the culture is forcing it's choices on you but because your values are used to decide you desire it." oh I see, this is like this country before microbrews: everybody drunk piss beer because nobody knew good beer existed and everyone wanted to drink piss beer anyway ...

I thought we had established those wants were conditioned by culture: "I agree that one's wants are influenced by culture". if your wants are different according to the culture you are exposed to, I just don't see how individuals make purchasing decisions "based on their own values and desires". That is, unless your understanding of english is very different than mine.

MtnGoat writes: "The *want* drives the train, because the want creates the value for something others will try to provide. IMO you cannot blame anyone but the consumer. You can blame the provider for doing things in a way you may not like, sure, but they can't do that without a market anyway." that would be true if we lived in a vacuum and our wants were innate to being on this earth. But we all know that individuals living in a culture without contact or knowledge of the modern industrialized world have very different wants from our own (besides the basic ones). This points to our wants being the result of culture. I don't need to tell you what generates the dominant culture.

imo the Price is best just before snow begins to fall in earnest. Early to mid-October is often perfect, with enough newer snow to make the ice less slippery but not enough to cover the gapers. A little snow in September followed by a dry spell and a thaw-freeze cycle should do the trick. Of course you run the risk of too much precip in September. Travel on the lower glacier was trivial for an experienced 'glacierist'. The shrund is usually the crux. We passed it on the left hand side (~50' of vertical ice) following with a couple of pitches in a steep gully (no rock involved at the time). I believe the right hand side of the shrund involves some mixed climbing. Definitely carry over via Fisher's Chimney (plant a bike at the Lake Anne trailhead to get back to your car).

Michael - sorry I was not clear. My understanding is they climbed a completely different line up to the major bench half-way up the climb. It is supposed to be to the right of the regular direct start.

"Shall our nation now break the bank on debatable science?" well, hopefully all science is debatable. Research is a constant process and there exist few certainties. Climate research is no different than any other field in this respect, and this include scientific theories that we successfully use in our everyday lives. "I've heard estimates as high as 1 trillion dollars to implement Kyoto. What other environmental programs would we sacrifice to pay this?? Would a nation broken by economic depression put environmental protection aside completely? Absolutely." what are the real costs of using petroleum energy? what costs will we incur if the effects of climate warming are anywhere close to those predicted?

"After all he does research in the field" I apologize if I gave the impression this was the case but I only do research in a closely related field.

the upper buttress is stellar climbing on high quality rock. I'd compare it to the NR on Stuart except it is much better. someone did a different start on the lower buttress ~15 years ago. Has it ever been written up?

"Any suggestions on other ways to the west ridge? " ~2 4th class pitches in a gully system on the buttress to the left of the couloir. You do not want anyone above you (this includes people at the notch). It is also a rap route.

Climate scientists don't formulate basic opinions about climate warming and our role in it, based on numerical model results. Elementary current understanding of global warming rests squarely on fundamental observations such as trends in levels of atmospheric CO2 and air temperature. But since you want to talk about models, let's have one of the major player in the field talk about models and their use. It is a little long but well worth it. Climate models and their uses according to Richard Somerville (climate modeler at Scripps): "In a way, a model is an incorporation of our best current knowledge about the climate system. And, so, you might think that an ultimate goal of this science would be to produce a completely realistic model. At that point, we will have essentially completely understood the climate system. We'll make weather forecasts as accurate as they can possible be, and so on. That goal's a long way off. That's not reason to regard present day models as useless, or to hold them in contempt. In a similar way, you might say that the goal of medical science is to cure all disease. And the fact that that's not yet been done doesn't mean you should treat your physician with disdain. Models can do a lot. As I said, the foundation of climate models is the atmospheric model that we use in the daily weather forecast. And although meteorologists have thick skins because their predictions are sometimes wrong, and nobody ever forgets it when they are, nonetheless, weather forecasts are pretty good. They're a lot better than they were only a decade or two ago. And as the same physics that's in the weather models gets incorporated into the climate models, the success of the weather models gives us reason to, in part, trust the climate models. Their veracity and their reliability is higher because, although we can't yet wait a century to see what happens as the greenhouse effect strengthens, we've seen successes on shorter time scales--not just the daily weather forecast but predictions of El Niño, for example, which are also made with coupled ocean-atmosphere models. The ability to simulate variations in the seasons, the fact that not all summers or winters in a given part of the world are alike, is another example where we have partial success. So the trick, I think, in climate models is to interpret them wisely, to have a feel for what parts of the model are trustworthy and what parts of the model are shaky, and, therefore, to be able to use the model results as guides to policy and really guides simply as to what to expect as climate evolves over coming decades. I suppose the quarrel that mainstream atmospheric scientists like myself have with the people who've come to be called skeptics --the ones who essentially pooh-pooh the prospect of man-induced climate change--is that although there are uncertainties in the models--nobody knows this better, in fact, than the people who work on the models all day, every day, none of whom are the skeptics--although the models have their imperfections, it seems to me it's unlikely that every imperfection in the model is going to be one that makes the model more sensitive to greenhouse gases rather than less. If I were skeptical about models, it seems to me a reasonable position would be: Well, climate change is going to occur, and changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere is going to affect climate; the models can't predict it perfectly; but that, to me, means that climate change might be either less severe or more severe than the models, and the models give you, at any moment, you might say, a mainstream estimate--our best guess of what the climate's going to do in the future." And, "There's a difficulty in reproducing the past, which is that we don't know where to start things off. We don't have measurements of what the whole climate system was doing in 1890 or 1912. And so that keeps you from replicating the climate of the twentieth century perfectly. And there are other theoretical reasons for thinking you might not be able to replicate it perfectly, even if you had a good knowledge of the initial state. For example, you don't know with perfection how all the forcings varied during the twentieth century, which volcanoes went off, and how much of what kind of matter they put where, and how the sun varied. Nonetheless, these models are able to reproduce, in broad outline, the climate of the twentieth century. That is to say, if you start them off at a reasonable guess of what things were like 100 years ago, and put in reasonable estimates of these forcings, you can produce something like the climate of the present time. There are many other examples of partial verification. A good one is the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines. These very same kinds of models were used to predict that we would see a global cooling in the neighborhood of one degree Celsius, and that it would last in the neighborhood of a couple of years. And that prediction was made before the climate changed, but indeed a climate change very much like that was observed. So there are lots of means by which we can gain confidence in the models and, at the same time, learn about the aspects of the models that still need improvement. So neither I nor any other climate modeler would accept a blanket statement that says, "Models are useless, they can't reproduce the past, and we can't trust them for the future." That's just not true." And, "Even if you had a perfect model, and even if you had a very good estimate of what the climate was like at the beginning of the period of interest--say, 1900--then in order to simulate the evolution of the climate over the past 100 years, you'd still need to know some things that we don't know well and may never know well, which include how the sun has varied over that time, and the production of aerosols in the atmosphere--both natural aerosols, such as from dust or volcanoes, and manmade aerosols, such as sulfates from industrial products. You'd still need all of those forcings that we have reason to think can influence the climate over decadal time scales. And lacking that, there's a limit to how well you could even hope to predict the climate. We're still learning what that limit is. That is, it's still an object of active research to go back and say: Well, if we think the climate did this over the last century, and if a model says it did that, how far apart can this and that be for us still to trust the model? That's still active research. But the basic concept is important to keep in mind, which is that we don't know the predictability of climate perfectly. That is, climate, like weather, can surely vary naturally on its own, independently of forcings. So you could imagine a climate system in which the sun were absolutely constant, there were no changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere or the surface of the earth, and that climate might still vary. And it might vary in an essentially random and unknowable manner. But quite aside from that, the part of the climate that's predictable potentially, if we knew the initial state and the forcings well enough, is still imperfectly predictable if we have errors in the initial state and the forcings, quite apart from errors in the models. So there's a whole slew of reasons why we can't expect to "hindcast" the climate of the recent past perfectly. " http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/warming/debate/somerville.html

Shuksan: "I took this thread as an excuse to educate myself about global warming research, and to play devil's advocate for MtnGoat and Fairweather's position, as <snip> "devil's advocate"? Well, I hope it does not mean you think you appear as an impartial observer. You claim to educate yourself and here you are, already smearing the IPCC process. "The task of the Intergovernmental Panel is to assess the scientific and technical information about climate change in a comprehensive, transparent, and objective manner. The reports of the Panel are made possible through the cooperation of the scientific community around the world. Hundreds of scientific and technical experts were involved in preparing the Panel's 2001 report, and literally thousands more were engaged to provide objective peer review. The participants were drawn from academia, from private and national research laboratories, from industry and from non-governmental organizations. The Panel makes a concerted effort to include the broadest possible range of valid scientific opinion. Indeed, the credibility of the Panel in the eyes of both governments and the scientific community rests on its commitment to providing the most up-to-date, balanced scientific information that truly reflects the state of human understanding of climate change science." i.e. whether it makes you happy or not, the report is the basic reference that summarizes what we know about climate change. If you have any disagreement about specific points you'll have to provide the supporting evidence. Critics of the IPCC process are an extremist minority that has yet to show it is credible. It is often heard that global warming skeptics produce little science being quite busy criticizing (with little basis) that of others. As to the piece found at the link you provided: the people mentioned have little credibility with respect to the IPCC process. Fred Singer and the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP): "Founded in 1990 by widely publicized climate skeptic S. Fred Singer, SEPP's stated purpose is to "document the relationship between scientific data and the development of federal environmental policy." SEPP has mounted a sizeable media campaign -- publishing articles, letters to the editor, and a large number of press releases -- to discredit the issues of global warming, ozone. Funded by conservative foundations including Bradley, Smith Richardson, and Forbes. SEPP has also been directly tied to ultra right-wing mogul Reverend Sung Myung Moon's Unification Church, including receipt of a year's free office space from a Moon-funded group and the participation of SEPP's director in church-sponsored conferences and on the board of a Moon-funded magazine." Global Climate Coalition: "Founded in 1989 by 46 corporations and trade associations representing all major elements of US industry, the GCC presents itself as a "voice for business in the global warming debate." The group funded several flawed studies on the economics of the cost of mitigating climate change, which formed the basis of their 1997/1998 multi-million dollar advertising campaign against the Kyoto Protocol. The GCC began to unravel in 1997 when British Petroleum withdrew its membership. Since then many other corporations have followed BP's lead and left the coalition. This exodus reached a fevered pitch in the early months of 2000 when Daimler Chrysler, Texaco and General Motors all announced their exodus from the GCC. Since these desertions, the GCC restructured and remains a powerful and well-funded force focused on obstructing meaningful efforts to mitigate climate change." Isn't it funny when the same ghosts follow the critics of IPCC: global warming hypothesis critics are apologists for big business and/or conservative politics. The same names, organizations appear over and over and over. And you still expect us to believe your intervention here is to play the "devil's advocate"? I'd say it is at least an interesting coincidence.There is a reason MtnGoat and Fairweather are in a minority position: their position is just not tenable in the face of the evidence presented by climate scientists. Quit obfuscating the issue by smearing the IPCC and address fundamental observations if you have any pretense at wanting to discuss the science. For reference: http://www.ucsusa.org/

to Shuksan: I find it interesting that you compare future earth climate to navigating a glacier under lots of rockfall (there is something to be very concerned about after all?). Now if you also consider that an overwhelming majority of research scientists say you are responsible for much of the rockfall, I am sure you'll change something about your methods of travel.

I don't mean to be impatient (well, just a little) but since MtnGoat is fond of the concepts behind the scientific method: we are still waiting for the supporting evidence for the comments he made against the IPCC report.

Dru's post reminded me of a funny Midnight Rock trundle story I heard about quite a few years ago. The story is second hand and thus may be inaccurate ... but here it goes. The characters involved are responsible for developing the crag in the late 70's-early 80's. There was a huge block wedged close to the edge which apparently resisted this group's (3-4 people) best attempts. As is often the case, the difficulty was shoving the darn thing without pitching oneself over the edge. Upon which they decided to tie into the end of a rope (the lot of them) to finally get their jollies. The boulder eventually went (where did it stop I don't know, but one can imagine), and so did they! I am not sure whether they were able to extract themselves on their own or help was needed but the thought of 3-4 hard Washington boys dangling in a bunch at the end of a stretched rope must have been quite a sight. Definitely, the best trundle story I ever heard.

Lots of good suggestions (Louis, Edith Cavell, etc..) I am surprised noone has yet mentioned Brewer buttress on Castle Mtn. It has some of the better rock in the area. As for hikes, I have liked Castleguard meadows (have to walk up the Saskatchewan glacier) and a trip up to Yoho is a must and can possibly be combined with a visit to Burgess Shale (guided once a week I believe) A great natural history guide written by a climber is Ben Gadd's Handbook of the Canadian Rockies