billcoe

Dude, don't go poaching Ivan's lines. ____________________________________________________________________ Very fast for spring/calf deep snow, I got winded just reading the TR.

College students are children now?

Popes back! Hi Pope!

Yeah, wonder what? Hard to say really.

I'd be interested in learning the persons name. I would never want to climb with them. It would help my psychology. Your story made my heart palpitate. _____________________________________________________ Folks made fun of me the other day for posting this in the alpiners Anonomyus thread, but swear to God, there is nothing more important than your belaying skills, I don't give a rats ass how hard you can climb, if you can't belay then piss off, and that includes the dumbass who nearly killed you through operator error. Larry DeAngelo still gives hip belays and has never dropped a climber after 30+ years. It's called skill. The GriGri had nothing to do with your fall. It was 100 percent belayer error, 100 percent avoidable. I believe 100 percent that person should quit climbing right now. NOW! _________________________________________________________ Glad your OK dude. Here's the post that drew some ridicule. - Bill's extra long request for good partners "Hi all: Sunshine, finally. Looking forward to this. Short technical note: I figure that posting my rant thing here for everybody, just once, might be better than PMing everyone. As it’s a new year, with new folks, I want to restate my terms and conditions. Sorry if you heard this before. I don’t know the skill levels of people tomorrow so I’ll repeat. I only have 1 major issue. Safety. As such, I give and expect 100 percent perfect belays. 100 percent perfect means: good communication, ground checks for every climber/belayer, and brake hand on the rope ground to ground round trip for any climber off the deck who thinks they are on, or should be on, belay. If you've ever seen a person dropped by their belayer, you witnessed a less than perfect belay. Might have been a 99 percenter, hard to say, but it was less than 100 percent. 1 really don't give a rats ass if you can outclimb me, welcome to a huge club if like most people you can. I don't care. I don't want to hear anyone say it's just top roping either. I choose to be safe and as part of that refuse to climb with anyone who expects to do less. If you don’t like what I’m saying here, don’t show up. Last year the rescue crews were called out for 10 cliff incidents, most in the area we will be in. Every Fucking one of which was avoidable, except that somebody chose to not be safe. Don’t think this can’t or won’t happen to you. I once carried out one of the most experienced Oregon climbers who had just finished the easy White Rabbit 5.3 down climb and while turning on relatively flat ground, banana-peeled on the wet mud and seriously pitched. The hospital stay was like a month or so with the broken ribs, punctured lungs, surgery to remove the spleen and permanent pins added to the wrist a week into the stay with more surgery. No one is immune and it’s a choice we can make. I free solo out here sometimes and it always shocks and surprised that rare person who sees me toping out - I’m fine with you doing so too, best not this time of year with this group please, let’s let it dry out and clean off some. I don’t want to teach belays either. If you don’t have your Sh*T together, don’t come out expecting that somebody will help you to get it together. Make arrangements with somebody else some other time, I’d rather solo. I like to get set up efficiently and rapidly to get maximum time to get pumped. That might mean running up 3 laps in a row without untying and/or down climbing. Given the time constraints, it’s not a good time to be dogging a route unless you have a belayer who’s toasted out and done in, and nobody is standing at the base: rock shoes on foot tapping hoping for another shot before dark. You want to smoke a bowl or drink some beers, pretty common and fine by me, stay in control and don’t get sparks on my rope or (more) glass on the ground is all I've ever asked. If you haven’t choked and blown spit on your screen due to my arrogance thus far, I’m driving from Beaverton and should be there @6 pm. Directions to Silver Bullet are thus: as John said: After 3 speed bumps the road bends slightly right and passes a big tan dome building. Park past the big tan dome building, @ 100 years before the hard right turn, and cross the road to the north into the woods and walk c. 100’ east paralleling the road. You should immediately pass a tunnel on your right that goes underneath the road, @ 20 steps further there is a trail that branches left, head left out to the cliff edge (another 25 feet or so) and you should be able to gaze down to some anchors below. (Going straight is a very safe and gentle walk to the bottom. You could curve around and meet up with folks below if you don't want to jump on the fixed line). Communication from the top to the bottom is very difficult. There is some white water rapids or something further below, and the continued roaring sound never abates and is very difficult to overcome. The hand signal for advising a belayer that you are over the edge, tied in safe and can be taken off belay is a wave of the hand for instance. Planning the hand signals in advance is a good idea. If my finger points down and makes a circular motion after I've topped out, that means please lower me. A fist means stop. Might want to clean some crap off so your trip up is cleaner, or perhaps reclimb a section that felt particularly great or difficult. As there is plenty of slippery wet mud, leaves and winter moss buildup, I suggest we tie off a fir and rap to the ledge below, set up the climbs and then rap the same line the rest of the way down. I rarely do this at this location, but this would be the time to rap IMO. It might be dry, but probably not. I have beater rope and don’t mind getting sap on it. You show up and see a light blue Maxim tied to a fir, feel free to rap on it, don’t ask permission. Side note: out here it's common to see a single party have 2, 3 or 4 climbs set up, tradition is that you can climb on their ropes. Nice to ask first. If you feel insecure on a single line rap and want a fireman’s belay, glad to do it, flip the rope around till some enquiring person at the base walks over below you and looks up, point or shout and we’ll pull on it to slow you down if you have a crappy rap device and/or hate single rope raps. Tossing an identical sized 2nd carabiner in most atc devices helps slow you down too. As this had been a active rock quarry, many of the anchors are into large blocks. We had a winter with some freezing; I always, but especially now, like to back up all the anchors with a backup rope tied solid to a fir or a rock further back. I have plenty of sections of retired ropes to do this. Bring your climbing ropes and personal gear, some lockers and such if you have it. Should be plenty of gear and ropes if you don’t own that stuff, so no worries. If you want to warm up bouldering, you might drive to the top and jump on some of the short man-made stuff up there. It's pretty good. Have fun, be safe, and see you tomorrow. PS, 2-4 is a great number of folks, I usually bag off if I see lots of cars and it's a big group, please don't be offended if that occurs. It's me, not you. Any of you last years or before dudes gonna show? Ivan, Paul, B-rock, Ron, Dan, Pete, Roberto, Kirby, T?" ___________________________________________________________ Some of my lack of judgement problem things have involved climbing with inexperienced people because I wanted to get out. I watch it a lot closer now. Good luck with the mind dude, be glad you didn't land on a pile of rocks.

Yeah, I had never heard of anyone putting this up in Portland, and you'd think that there would be this incredably irresistable urge to spray about it.......... The only bridge I've ever done (twice-long time ago), I can't remember where it was and can't find it again. Maybe I put it out of my mind when I heard Wiss zippered it and landed in the river. Think of piton hammer, iron, biners, weight pulling you down into the water, trying to float, trying to live....not a good mix.

_______________________________________________ I'll help out, but first I want to see some pictures.

__________________________________________________________ THATS WHAT I AM BUT WHAT ARE YOU? .............UHHH...Wait just a moment I might have screwed up my response again...

Dohhh, until Layton showed up talking other Mike I just figured I just figured that this was ML.

Yes, that helps me sleep at night too! Nice job Mike.

JH, I appreciate the comment "sandbagger extraordinaire" , coincidentally, my regular handle in the old days was "Couchmaster", put on me by Opdycke once when we went out to Beacon and I hadn't been out for months and must have cranked something hard. John, Joseph is talking about a direct start to Red Zinger - Breakfast cracks area (just slightly to the R). Joseph had told me a long time ago about working that with Marco, then we showed up the other day and there like magic, was chalk on it. And a new bolt too I guess, which was probably more for Red Zinger. Since Red Zinger is 11c or d, and this arete thing is way harder than that, must be pretty F*ing hard. Should be interesting to see if somebody can crawl up it. Joseph, the 5" hole was drilled by the quarry folks I'm pretty sure, there are some other ones here and there. That one seems unusual in that it's drilled straight up into a roof...but there it is. I think one of the blocks on the inside the structure on top has a similar, although slightly smaller diameter hole in it. I think it might have been one of this quarries blasting methods. They would drill a big assed hole somewhere, pack it with HE and let loose. They were trying to get blocks out, which would be one way to do it I suppose. Top down hammer drilling leaves the fines which need to be cleaned out first, so maybe drilling straight up elimated that issue. I'm making all the last part of that up you know.

ipod flea video on NY times The new Ipod "Flea" is highlighted on this video.

No shit? Well sign me up if they're hiring!

They say that there are plenty of other slippery slopes in Arches.

"World peace declared"

Seconds until Dru shows up with a "Have you tried a tinfoil hat yet" comment.... 3...........2.................1...............

Nice: pics?

Well, short update. Although a good time was had by all, Seth did not show up with any shotguns So I left mine in the car. He left the Lycra at home too. He brought a bike, but not a bike lock. Hmmmm. Interesting that the usual line up of crank shooting thieves were not in the area, in fact, I haven't seen any needles (or condoms either) for some time. We had another group show up for the same area, so we set lines on the 5 best routes there and shared. Which gets to my only real point, if you ever see a bunch of people tying up an area, which never use to happen but as more people drift in here it is becoming commonplace, sharing, community and saftey should be the order of the day. So, if I tie up a bunch of routes, I encourage you to just jump right in. If I don't want to be with people I just go off on my own, it's always been that way. Rap my ropes, climb on my ropes, have fun. Please reciprocate. There was no beer. There was no doobies. There was no naked women. There was no backrubs. There were no flaming shots. There was no shooting. It was a straight 2-3 hours of after work cranking and it was good despite the absence of other stuff.

Cilly, I hope this has to do with your job as a Repo man rather than some anonomys asswipe on this site puffing his chest up. If the latter, please share, theres no room for that kind of pussy crap in the world IMO. Wishing all well.

We got to go up to Seattle to climb a bridge? We have our own stinking bridges down here.

New wave! Awesome. BTW, if we're going that way, I have 4 or 5 shotguns, could get loud. There hasn't been any shooting going on there (excluding paintballers and plastic BB shooting wargamers) since the quarry caretaker left in the late 60's. You might reconsider the wearing of the hotpink Lycra given all of this... too easy of a target.

Thinking about it Use to highly respect DP on many levels and for many reasons. Just from things I've read and heard from others I respect who bumped into him here or there, I had high regard for the dude. If the facts as presented are accurate, not any longer. It tears my 2 sides some, and this is the same debate we are having @ Beacon Rock right now on another forum on CC.com regarding "The Rules" (See Oregon Cascades thread). I don't have an answer. Don't have 1/2 the answer or a start of the first part of the answer either. If true, had DP not intentionally trying to make money on this climb (as indicated by the film crew and the Patagonia press release -later retracted), I'd have a different opinion. So to recap a worst case guess, it appears that Potter was intentionally breaking the rules to make money. If they decide to close that area to all future rock climbing now, then that is indeed a very poor choice that will F* over many many people. It doesn't fit in with what I know about Dean Potter though, so I have some confusion and would want to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Yup. Weasel infestation all over the place after work tonight.....and bats too. Ask me about the bats next time. Have you obverved that rock that is right above where you folks drytool? I figure one of you must be digging the dirt out from behind it to get the route below clean......but ......you folks might choose to trundle it before it decides to cut loose on its own. Most likely it's not going anywhere, but you never know. I would estimate the weight somewhere well over 500 lbs, certainly enough that we won't need to be having a "well, he had his helmet on" discussion after the fact in the unlikely event that it chooses to roll on its own accord. I have walkie-talkies for communication if you want to station somebody below to watch out for the unwary and see if a tap with a prybar is enough to make it slide off. I've been surprised out there just climbing along a couple of times to just pull on some apparently stable block with my hand just normally and have it slide right towards my head. Have a prybar too.......And enthusiasm as well. Maybe it wants to stay put, I was unroped, and just kicked it with my foot and didn't see any movement....but didn't want to push hard and take the ride to the base with it. Something to keep an eye out for. Hope it's cool in PHX for ya John, it's probably @ 72-75 degrees with the sun out and dry today FYI.

I'll be there, probably silver bullet at 6pm as I'll be with 1 or 2 friends who would want that area. You and Jaben are more than welcome to join us there (or vice versa whatever). Same for the rest of you rock weasels. Feel free to join us. Hi John!

Matt, I wind up having to just shut the F* up on all this stuff in the end anyway when somebody gets rude and tells me to just shut the F* up, so I probably should do it now, but here goes then I'm done. 2 issues, this book will be for people coming for a week or 2 of special vacation from say, Switzerland, or some equally strange place who only want to bang out the best climbs. You think they will figure out these insider nuances, but hey, they're Swiss for Gods sake. Won't happen for some folks. As far as this 1 description goes, he talks about the crux 13C tips, but then discussed 12D at the start and 5.10 to finish, no talk of what you are looking at with that. There could be 200 feet of 4" wide crack. When Watts first did it, he described the crux as very technical jamming. I could see Euros buying in to Teresngas description and bringin wide gear. Maybe not. But it seem rude as hell to assume everyone will just catch the little joke and not get F*in the ass IMO. I don't have a problem with JT generally, and I suspect he's a great guy in person: but I will say that in this instance, it seems like an attempt at an outsider to cash in on the internationalism of the place for a quick buck, and it will serve to concentrate people on the better routes, thus screwing over the locals. (Not that any dudes from Der Schweitz are complaining. ) I probably come off as quite the whinner there! Sigh: C'est la Vie!