JoshK

WTF are you talking about? When have I ever said I hate the US? I love my country which is exactly why I want our shitass president out of here. I'm in no way proud of what our soldiers did either. Calling them out for that kind of crap is hardly against my country.

Yes, I'm sure UN troops hold the monopoly on soliciting prostitution... After all US troops are model citizens...they never proposition prostitutes, they just get prisoners naked and take homoerotic pictures with them.

LOL...no thanks. I like to drag the skis along but I have no love for skiing on firn or other such completely dirty nastinest. They do work good for jumping crevasses tho. In fact, it's a mounties approved method!

Pro Mountain Sports has carred those DMM cams for quite a while now. I've checked them out in the store and they certainly look nice. As you said, really really light. Check them out there if you feel like supporting somebody other than REI.

Cool, thanks for the advice, all. It's one of those climbs that looks cool mainly for the setting and views. Obviously I would agree there are certainly better looking and more challenging alpine rock climbs out there...

corn is great. second to powder for fun factor (IMHO) and much less likely to slide

by some definitions of spring, it is still spring and will be right up until june 21. however, midsummer eve is less than one month away, the implication of this datum is that this is early summer. arguably, one could say it is sprummer right now. what it isn't is ski season. I did the ptarmigan traverse, baker N ridge and glacier peak frostbite ridge all in june last year and all were awesome skis with minimum foot travel once you hit the start of snowline. I realize some folks don't like to ski at this time but for those of us that do, this year is much worse than normal.

Sky, I would normally agree, but man, it's slim pickings for this time of year. I was shocked to see how much had melted in the past few weeks. There is still plenty to get tho, just requires a little more effort. Who knows, maybe I'll head back in as soon as the road opens all the way (they said they were hoping for this weekend) and give it a shot again. Since I want to do it on foot anyway, it's neat to compare it snow vs. not. What is the definition of true joy? Having your ski tails hit the back tire of your bike!

Yeah, and he'll probably live longer because of it. Wow, amazing stuff...I can't believe climbing that hard, let alone that many hard pitches in one climb.

Yesterday I went up to the buck creek trailhead on the end of the chiwawa river road. The road is currently gated 6 miles from the end but is completely passable by car until the end. I took a mountain bike for those 6 miles...a shout out to the forest service..I really needed that extra 12 miles of bike riding yesterday. Anyway, down I rode with skis and shit on my back. My goal was to go up buck creek, hit fortress and chiwawa and red and go out through chiwawa basin. After 7 or 8 miles of going up through the buck creek drainage (almost all of it on bare trail) I turned around. At 4600 the snow pack was pretty much all gone. From that point forward it would have been that awful trail-snow-trail-snow crap until quite a ways higher up. I was in this area around July 4th a few years back and I swear the snow pack wasn't all that much worse then. After bailing I decided I'll just go back in a month or month and a half and do that loop on foot instead. It sucks...that ski tour should still be really good at this time of year.

Totally doable...in fact, the whole thing is doable in a day if you really wanna haul ass. If you know how to bivy (translation: really light) then I think you'll have a much more pleasent time. It's a great area, and as Tom said, you'll have a much better shot with the weather.

Now if our government wanted to actually do something useful with their crackdown on civil liberties, the would ban the FOX network as a whole...

Now *that* would be some sort of descent!

I'd like to get some educated guesses from people who have climbed this route before. What nature is the "construction" of the NE ridge. Does it tend to melt out quickly? It's not a terribly high peak so I'm wondering if it's climbable on mostly rock now. It also looks like most of the climbing is pretty low grade, so I'm assuming snow, if it was there, would not be a huge obstacle. thanks, josh

Personally I think the "right thing" has nothing to do with christianity or any other religion. I think things like this are common sense for any modern person. I don't need a religion to tell me that killing, disrespecting my wife, stealing, etc. are bad. On the opposite side, however, many people do use religion as an excuse for the bad things they do.

Yeah, ended up bailing due to the weather. The system was acutally making things *worse* on the east side of the crest from what I can tell and I didn't feel like climbing rock in snow and rain. Sometimes you're better off just staying home and getting require things done, as much as it sucks

I'm pretty sure it is. I PMed Paul. Unfortunately it's just my backup shovel that I give to partners who dont have one so they can dig my ass out I really want to find the handle to the nice voile (sp?) shovel I have.

Yes, I'm pretty sure I remember seeing an antenne (the weather was moving in, it was late, and the snow was hardening, so we were on the summit all of a couple of minutes) I know we were certainly on the true summit, you could tell that.

Yeah, cause nothing works on macs, including the viruses and shit

Cool, I'll check those features out. Finding out BillG supports Bush's re-election has renewed my interest in using something else

In what ways is it so much better? I am not arguing as I am open to trying something different, but I just didn't see what I got in return for an extra piece of software on my computer.

Well, my several day experiment with Opera has ended with the removal and purging of it from my computer. Too much junk on the screen. I just want my simple browser back. I give them credit...much faster (and correct) layout than most of the alternative browsers, but I'm still not too impressed. I think it's still at the level of "well, it's not microsoft" but not actually better in any way. My 2 cents.

Hey Paul, thanks for the reply. I just noticed Robinson myself. Looks big and interesting and easy to access. I would imagine the snow level is probably pretty high around there now, but who knows.