gslater

Iain - Good to see you here. Perhaps you can explain with some precision where these two caves were, in terms that past Hood climbers can relate to. Were they both in the upper stretches of the Cooper Spur route, or more in between Cooper Spur and the left NF gully? How far apart were they? Etc....

Not necessarily true, for a variety of technical reasons. I know it's not true at my workplace.

Looks like the first cave was in the upper stretches of the Cooper Spur route, a few hundred feet below the short summit ridge that extends to the SE from the actual summit. And given the activity seen in the live video yesterday, I kind of assumed cave #2 is over the top, slightly down the normal southside route from the summit. But this is more speculative.

I certainly hope so. At one point late this afternoon, I saw that there were 19 people viewing the main Climber's forum. 2 were viewing Rock Climbing, 4 were checking out the Freshiezone, and 516 were viewing the Oregon forum!!! I'm pretty impressed that the hosting servers and software held up to the steady load, especially so recently after a major update.

As a climber, I find it very frustrating that we'll never find out precisely what happened to the deceased climber. We/I crave the information, and I am always eager to learn all that I can from the experiences of others. But I'll much rather suffer that frustration than have to suffer the sense of loss that his family must be feeling.

Looks like an anchor to me too, but as always, hard to say...

South side would indeed be easier to descend after topping out, but remember, these guys had never been on Hood before, so that would be facing the devil they don't know, as opposed to the one that they do.

I think they said "2 ice axes", but that doesn't necessarily mean more than one person.

I'm curious if they found ice axes, or perhaps pickets... I keep hearing/seeing "ice picks", which means absolutely nothing. If axes were still there, not good, because I can't imagine leaving without those. If pickets were there but no axes, then perhaps good.

Surprised that even here in Portland, KGW isn't showing anything live from their chopper. Instead, they're showing "Kurt Browning's Gotta Skate 6.0". Nice.

Everyone is standing along the SE summit ridge. Looks like they might be setting up to lower people down the top part of the Cooper Spur climbing route. No indication of where this cave allegedly is, but they keep talking about lowering people down to look. Based on where they're standing now, they must be heading down Cooper Spur.

For those of you out there who are watching Fox News, you should know that they keep showing live shots of Mt. Adams, across the Columbia River in Washington state, and not Mt. Hood. From where they're located down in Hood River, you can see Adams, but not Hood, so I guess that's what they're showing.

Local TV (channel 6) in Portland was just showing live video (from their news chopper, apparently a long ways away) of about 10 SAR people stopped somewhere just below the summit. During what I saw, they didn't zoom out to give any perspective on what the exact area is. Couldn't really see what they were doing.

All of the aerial video being shown on CNN appears to be from previous days, mainly yesterday. Today is rather clear and sunny, but for some reason they don't have any fresh aerial video from today.

JayB - With all due respect, where does one find a formal declaration of "this thread's primary purposes"? I don't think Cluck started it as a support group. I'm keenly aware of the sensitivities involved here, and I'm all for keeping the real spray out, but there has been some technical discussion here that has apparently been appreciated by non-climbers looking for understanding of the issues involved. As long as it stays on the non-spray side, it seems like it would still be welcomed by some of our recent first-time visitors.

MLUs are a local, Mt. Hood-only thing. Completely different from EPIRBs or any of the other "standard" personal locating beacon thingies. Activating one does NOT initiate any kind of a rescue. If someone activates an MLU, it won't do any good until one of the local rescue agencies is onsite on the mountain with the receiving equipment. It's really not all that different from what you see with biologists tracking animals on Animal Planet. The rescuers use the receiving system to try to locate the MLU. It doesn't broadcast any kind of position information.

Mugatu. My avatar. So hot right now... Mugatu.

Either of you guys have any experience that tells you which of the following is more important for ultimate accuracy, such as required for surveying work? 1) Having a greater number of visible satellites all clustered together toward one half of the sky, such as near the southern horizon? or 2) Having good "triangulation", with satellites visible in multiple directions, even though there may be fewer total visible at the moment?

Could certainly be used, but it wouldn't be a first choice. Lots of people have gotten hurt/killed descending the Cooper Spur route, due to it being fairly steep and having an ugly fall line. But to be fair, it should be mentioned that women in very long skirts and pointy little boots used to go up and down it over a hundred years ago...

Found a web site that has a couple of nice graphics of the constellation geometry and ground track. GPS geometry

I think that plot is a little bit deceptive, because it only represents where things can be seen in the sky from a given point. Looks like a northern hemisphere point. But it does show the satellite plot not going to the N Pole. A little digging on the intarweb found 6 symmetric orbits, each with an inclination of 55 degrees, at something like 26,000 km from Earth center (sort of a medium orbit, by standards). Mean Earth radius is a bit more than 6000 km. Given that geometry, I think that puts them pretty far out there, and thus solidly visible over the poles, but obviously not right over the poles. Would need to plot that one out to be able to visualize it better. But with the 55 degree inclination, at any given time satellite visibility/availability will probably indeed be very slightly better at non-polar latitudes, but I think it would be a pretty small effect. Maybe it's better to state it as a potentially lower availability at higher latitudes, rather than a northern-aspect thing. But yeah, it seems you're right that there could be some north-side degradation (in the northern hemisphere, of course), albeit very small.

I think the note thing is confusing because of typically inconsistent/inaccurate descriptions of when/where they were found. Due to what I can only presume is a lack of familiarity with the area, I've heard various conflicting (and very often incorrect) references to "ranger station", "campground", "campsite", "hut", "lodge", "shelter", "Cloud Cap", "parking lot", etc.. Someday I'm sure there'll be a consistent and accurate timeline put together, but I wouldn't expect that for a while.

I'm a Garmin GPSMAP60C user (Magellan 315 before that), and guess I just haven't used it yet in a situation where I would have seen the 30 second delay in letting you know it can't get a fix. That might be because I've never used it in the wilds to continuously navigate to a waypoint. If I ever do need/want to use the GPS, I'm much more of a "where am I, and what's the bearing to the next waypoint?" kind of guy, and then I use a compass to get there. Of course, that behavior could also be different from one Garmin model to another, or one generation to another, since it's more of a matter of how the user interface is designed, rather than how the receiver itself works. I'll have to test it out sometime. I guess I don't understand your comment about needing to be not be on a north-facing aspect to get the great positional accuracy. In general, it seems that it shouldn't be dependent upon that. In a former life, I worked in the world of, uhhhhhhh, let's just say "spacecraft control", including certain aspects of the GPS constellation. Can't remember the exact particulars of the orbital mechanics of the constellation, but from what I recall, it doesn't seem like it would make much/any difference whether north- or south-facing. I bet 30 seconds with Google would get me some pretty reasonable data though....

SOL - In what way has your Rino been unreliable? Are you saying that GPS is unreliable, or that particular unit?

Brian - Thanks for sharing; you're kinda handy to have around...