catbirdseat

Says the New Boulder Boy.

I ran 4 miles of hills on my lunch break. I invited my new boss along. He said he runs three miles every day. I asked him at what pace he runs, and he said "8 minutes per mile". "Oh, good, that's just perfect", I said. Only problem was he never runs hills. He pooped out on the first hill. Hee hee.

Tell us what it is we are expected to download on faith.

Has Lenin lost his sting? Do we no longer fear his ideas? Certainly he is known more for his ideology than his deeds, unlike Stalin. Certainly, 40 years ago, his statue would be unthinkable. He is in Fremont because our system won the cold war and communism is no longer a threat to us ( or is it?). Maybe in 50 years, someone will find a bronze statue of Osama bin Laden in a dump and bring it home as a piece of funky art. Right now that is hard to imagine.

Bite me!

That statue has an interesting story associated with it. Some art connoiseur, Lewis Carpenter, was travelling with his wife in Slovakia shortly after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. This statue of Lenin had been standing in the town square and had been toppled. Some wino was living in it in a junk yard. The thing had been installed quite recently and was solid bronze. He asked what the price was and I guess they only wanted the equivalent of the melt down value of the bronze, $13,000. So they guy buys it for reasons only he could know, and spends a fortune to ship it to Issaquah where he installed it in front of his home. It was so heavy that it sunk into the ground and fell over at one point. I saw this thing in the guy's yard near High Point Way or the Preston exit, I've forgotten which. So this guy dies suddenly in 1994 and his wife is stuck with this thing she didn't want, so where else would she go, but the People's Republic of Fremont. They agreed to "temporarily" display the thing so the widow could try to sell it. It actually had a "For Sale" sign on it at one time. Well, to my knowledge nobody actually wanted it, but the good people of Fremont got used to it, and so it remains. I guess you can still buy it if you want for $150,000. Story Article

This is a good reason to practice your 5:1 and 9:1 raise systems. I've heard people say, "how often, really, would you have to do a raise, as opposed to a lower?". Well, here's your example. There's no way two guys could lift a big guy like me with just a z-pulley.

Cool. Enough snow to clean things up, but not hide the crevasses.

So is it settled then? Oct. 1-3. How come so few people voted? I hope it isn't an indication of turnout.

Are you saying that Al Qaeda didn't know that Khan had been arrested? If anyone goes without communication for long enough, they will be presumed to have been arrested. The guys who leaked the information of Khan's identity probably had reason to believe Qaeda was already aware of his capture.

Oh, it's a book she's holding?

That's quite a precocious lad.

I would have built myself one of those time machine, except that I can't find a second singularity. They are so damn rare. Also, if you aren't quick on the draw with the magnetic field, they just fall to the center of the earth where you can't get at them.

Who took the pictures and where is her picture?

If you've ever had one of these close calls where you are sliding toward doom and manage to arrest a fall, it's amazing how much goes through your mind in the one or two seconds you have to think about it. In roped leader falls, it's all over in perhaps a quarter second. A slide is a comparative eternity. You think of such things as: "Why weren't you more carefull, dumbass!". "You know that drop is enough that you are going to break something". "I can't believe this is happening to me!". "This isn't snow, you can't do a self-arrest on ice." "Which tool should I swing with, right or left?" "The LEFT one, Swing!" THWACK! "Goddam, the MF stuck, I don't fucking believe it!" "Fucking get your other tool in, now!" Okay, I admit it. It was me.

Next time call the cops and tell the assholes you called them ten minutes ago, so they better split now.

When I was a kid my parents used to make us go to sunday school. One time we were coming back from church and entering the driveway and my mom said to my dad, "look out, don't run over the cat!", and I said, "my cat runneth over". They thought I was so clever.

I think what Harry means is that there are few HIDDEN crevasses on the DC. You can still slide into one if you fall, hence the pickets for running protection and the prusiks.

Someone I know well had a close call right out of Vertical Limit today. He was on the lower Coleman icefall practicing ice climbing. He had just climbed a near vertical step about 15 ft high and was going to walk off, but he wasn't careful and caught a crampon. In an instant he was sliding on his side towards the drop off. Just has his feet reached the edge, he swung one of his tools and, to his utter astonishment it stuck. He walked away with only a strained tendon in is left forearm. It would have been a survivable fall, but it would almost certainly have resulted in injury. This individual says he vows to be more careful in the future.

That's overkill, DPS. It doesn't need to be super strong.

Yeah, baby! Hit me again. It hurts so good.

I can't answer that, Iain, since I was too busy watching the ladies (helping to ensure their safety of course .

We were ticking off the skills needed to take these gals up Da Toof: 1) Learn to clean gear- check 2) Practice holding a leader fall - take lead class in gym (I ain't gonna be the guinea pig) 3) Learn to rappel - Dryad's job(?)

While it is true that the Boulder Route is sometimes lead by the Mountaineers as a Basic Glacier Climb, it is one of the more challenging routes and is probably only done by about one party a year on average. I climbed the route in 1998 and it was really fun with only one other party of three on the route, which followed us all the way. The neat thing about the Boulder is that you have to do your own route finding, as there may not even be tracks to follow. Parts of it can be steeper than either of the other two more popular routes. The original trail was built by the Mountaineers many years ago. It wanders about in wet areas and is really unpleasant. The Forest Service plans to reroute or rebuild the trail in the near future so that it is out of the low areas. They considered running it on the ridge, but rejected that because the meadows up there are supposed to be frequented by elk or goats and they didn't want them disturbed. I remember that third class section on the approach quite well. There was a manky old rope tied to a tree to use as a hand line. On the way down, most of the people in my party decided to rappel the section. I down climbed while they spent a long time setting up. Combined with some fast hiking, I ended up with an hour long nap at the cars before the rest showed up.