catbirdseat

A number of people seem to thing all our troubles are over with victory on the battlefield. They are just starting. Now we have to restore law and order and put a stop to all the looting in Iraq. We have to create a police force and establish government. All the various ethnic minorities must be prevented from attacking one another. They must all be convinced that any one group will be favored over another. The tough thing is that the old regime used terror and intimidation to keep everyone in line. Now they have to be made to cooperate with each other on a voluntary basis. A new mindset will have to take root, for democracy to grow. It will be a very hard and long road. I hope that the US has a long enough attention span to get it done right.

This all sounds like a load of sh--, I mean spray.

DPS, you're kidding us right?

Dave, how about providing a subject line that gives the reader a clue about what is in the thread. It would save time for those people who don't care to read more war verbiage than we are already getting.

A beer related story. My former company was interested in using supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) to produce an herb extract for a mouthwash. There was a company in Yakima that specilized in using SFE to extract the active principle from hops for use in beer brewing. As you know hops is bitter. Now imagine, if you will, if you could concentrate a bushel of hops into a thimbleful of a yellowish waxy material. My friend Ward got the bright idea to taste some of this by placing some on his tongue. Bad move. He said it was the bitterest thing he had ever experienced and the taste lasted for several hours.

We did it in June of last year and encountered a lot of unconsolidated snow over ice above the ice step, which made for some scary climbing. We only had two pickets and which we had more for running belays. The ice step can be done in various ways. You can climb the face of the step for a short but almost vertical ice pitch, or you can go around to the east for a longer, but easier and more meandering two or three pitches of alpine style ice. The glacier crossing was quite straightforward. We wish we had done the climb a little later in the year. This year, June might be best. I suggest just camping at Marmot Camp and setting out from there at about 4 am. You can do the climb as a one day, as we did, but it wasn't all that pleasant losing all that sleep.

The Army had a specification for their computers. Part II, subpart A, "...said computer must not crash every five minutes." The Mac was the only one that could meet the specification.

I just bought a Maxim like Iceguy's. So far I like it, but for just cragging, I think I like a really fat rope. I'd like to just keep it for alpine routes.

Meganerd, I got turned around on a trip to Tomyhoi in September. It started snowing and blowing and we couldn't see where we were going so we settled for Yellow Aster Butte.

I hope you don't play the skinflute, fgs.

Great suggestion. Bots don't have access to PM's do they?

I would want to be roped myself, and have rock shoes.

No, in the first case it just means you are an idiot. In the second, it means the climb was too easy, AND you are an idiot.

I think this epic discussion is good enough that it ought to be cleaved off from the original thread and made it's own topic. Can that be done? Moderators?

I had an E3 once. My son and I were scrambling Dickerman in snow, got off route, and were coming down a steep slope. My son, aged 14, slipped and couldn't arrest and rocketed off into a moat and struck his head. There was a helicopter rescue at midnight (Blackhawk), then I had to guide the rescue team out as they had been dropped and didn't know he route. Got to trailhead at 4:30 am. Grabbed a bite from the chuckwagon and then drove straight home, showered and then went to the hospital. Finally caught some sleep round noon. My son was in intensive care for 8 days and rehab for 1 month at Children's Hospital.

Someone else has already used this photo in another thread. Get with it man!

trask our beacon of "shinning lite", our cornerstone! This not a spelling error. I means trask is a shin kicker, but a shin kicker lite, as in coors lite.

What say you, AlpineK? What if you cut all the branches off first?

j_b, did you free solo that fifth class pitch to the summit straight up from the shoulder of the NE Ridge? That would have been tough for us with our packs. If you go early enough, you could go light, with just an axe and crampons and ascend the NE Ridge, take the ledges across the East face to the S. Ridge, on to the summit and then scramble down the S. Ridge to a notch that allow descent to the West Face then back via Columbia Glacier and Blanca Lake. I'd like to give that a try as a day trip. It would be a hard day, but a fun one. It would take 4 hours to the base of the NE Ridge, so you'd probably would want to start at about 2 am from the Quartz Creek/Curry Gap Trailhead. I'm up for it if anyone wants to give it a go. Probably June would be the best time of year, or possibly July.

Huh? Whachu talkin' 'bout Allison? ALPINIST rocks! Allison, be careful, you are starting to as incoherent as Fleblebleb or even Erik.

Erik, that was absolutely brilliant! You've outdone yourself. I give this thread five stars.

If you made trask a moderator, I'd bet he wouldn't ban anybody- well MAYBE Sexual_Chocolate. But I believe the people he hates the most are ones he depends upon the most.

Cracked, you haven't lived until you have had an epic. You should try it sometime. I suggest Whitehorse, for starters.

That is just terrible.

Yeah, "Sink the Pink". Ode to a Pink Tricam