catbirdseat

Try Fossil Rocks. Take I-5 to the Puyallup/ Mount Rainier exit, Hwy 512. Drive East for 2 mi., take the Parkland exit, Hwy 7. Drive S. for 5 miles to the Roy Y, go right onto Hwy 507. Drive south 12 miles to the town of McKenna. At the first intersection past Stewart's Meat Market, turn left onto Vail Road. at 0.9 mi turn left at a four way stop with a BP gas station on Bald Hill Rd. Follow this road stying left at Lawrence Lake Road Y . At this point there are two locations allowed for Parking...Logging Road 4000 off of Piesner Road or Logging Road 1000 off of Bald Hill Rd 3.3 mi. past Piessner. Approach hike time in both cases, 45 min. Better just buy Marlene Ford and Jim Yoder's Guide. I got my copy at Mountaineers Bookstore.

TV news is BUSINESS. They will report what the public is interested in. They are in business to make money and are in a better position to decide what is newsworthy than we biased climbers are.

No chest beating here. Saturday, I was content to drive out to the "sunny" eastside by Lake Cle Elum and hike up Hex Mountain. Indeed, I avoided most of the precip and stretched my legs too boot. Sunday, I helped teach a beginning navigation field trip on Heybrook Ridge, near Index. This time I did not avoid the rain. I poured all morning and let up a bit in the afternoon. It's a good thing I brought my "climbing" umbrella. I guess any time you come back out of the woods with all your students is a good day, wet or not.

You can go out in any weather you feel like, but bad weather on Rainier is in a category all its own. Just don't expect rescue to come quickly for these guys if they need it.

How about things that are cheaper alternatives? Prepackaged lunch meats, $5/lb. A whole turkey, $1/lb.

If you can't stand TV, read the book Detectives on Everest, or go see the show at Tacoma Natural History Museum.

Eric Simonsen's Detectives on Everest WAS featured on Evening Magazine with John Curly. I'd delete this if I could.

We had all sorts of toys when we were kids, but we preferred to play outside and build tree forts and make scale models of the alamo using mud and sticks. We made tunnels by digging trenches and covering them over with plywood "borrowed" from construction sites and then dirt. Being a kid was a lot of fun.

Everybody should play this game. War isn't as simple as some people would have you believe.

Have your nephew post on cascadeclimbers.com. Perhaps he can find someone who will take him out and show him the ropes. I do know it is too late for him to enroll in the Mountaineers Basic Climbing Course this year. All the Branches' courses have started already. There are always the various guide services like Alpine Ascents. However, their 6 day glacier climbing class alone is $990.

Although I haven't been there before, it appears to be cliffy on its east side: Topozone Map

I sure wish people would stop going out when bad weather is a certainty. To begin with, poor visibility increases chances of blundering into a crevasse. Second, with no one else on the mountain, there can be no aid from other parties. With a rope team of two, if one falls in, it is up to him to prussik his way out on his own. We can only hope that these two have dug a shelter somewhere and are just waiting out the weather.

That name is very familiar, but I can't place it.

The forum would be much less useful as a resource if people like trask could freely post spray to it. He seems to feel that he doesn't already have enough turf already. He wants more.

I believe it is a mountain that Beckey named Bandit.

"The bidness of bidness is bidness." Attributed to George Bush by Molly Ivans

Goatboy's choice of S. Early Winters Spire is a good one. There is also a peak near Rainy Pass that is an easy scramble, called Whistler Peak. It has an incredible view of the North Cascades. It is mentioned in Peggy Goldman's book.

Somewhere between the two extremes of no Accident Forum and an Accident Sprayfest, there must lie a useful format. I have to believe this. One way to do it would be to have it more heavily moderated than other forums. Perhaps contributors would submit their posts directly to the moderator who would decide whether to post, return for edit, or not post. I agree that there should be no place for wild speculation. There should be only useful information. If someone then wants to speculate about a given post in the Spray Forum, then, by all means, have at it.

Why did someone pick that particular site for a memorial?

It's kind of ironic. Climbing is supposed to be dangerous, but something wierd ends up getting you instead?

No, trask, the day you were made, they broke the mold.

No don't tell us about dinosaurs, Dru. We want the world to be simple and understandable. God and religion gives us that. It's so much easier to go open a book to get answers than it is to have to go dig in the ground and do radiocarbon dating. Why do we need scientific experiments, anyway, when God has already told us everything we need to know in the Bible? Thinking just hurts my brain.

I don't doubt that I'll say dumber things in the future. But I mean what I say about the crushing sameness of modern America. Everywhere you go, everything is the same. The same clothes, the same MacDonalds, the same WalMarts. I'm certain that most people find it comforting to not be surprised to find something unfamiliar when they travel. But to me I like it when they someone talks differently, or dresses or thinks differently. You can have your MacDonalds trask.

I like it too. Thanks, we never would have got it had you not pointed it out to us.

Please don't change to be more like us dopey Americans. It would be a much more boring world. It would suck if everyone had the same Detroit accent as the anchor of the evening news.