gnibmilc

drinking and driving and talk of towing with an old climbing rope can never end well. last thing i remember was a cloud of dust and thinking we needed to change tacks or put up a spinnaker. the big white witch leaks no oil. hey thanks for letting me crash in the front...acre...a fine one! Tim, as for crazy jamie, i only remember a hasty retreat from a hornet's nest on the first pitch of Zodiac and a gift of bottled water. we thought about going up to Chianti on Saturday but i didn't see light until 10am...and we saw your car on the way to the pond pullout. that twisp brew pub has wicked good beer and chow...hence a return visit on Saturday night and the subsequent off road adventure. Going to need to visit the Chianti summit yet this year...

, My suggestion regarding the method of protecting the initial section of the 5.10 pitch on the right side of the bright yellow headwall was intended to improve the quality of that point of protection. My simple minded recollection of the “one arm bandit” led me to believe that two nuts would work better because the “arm” is an unusual expanding type feature. It is an extension of rock that runs up into the ~2” crack, which, while an integral attachment, will flex outward and side to side. If you step on top of it, it is solid. If you push it left or right it moves. If you grab this feature from the top and pull out it will elastically bend outward. The intent of my advice, besides instilling additional confidence in your protection, was to encourage the use of two stoppers in lieu of a spring loaded camming device and a stopper. My memories of the feature from 4 or 5 years ago gave me an extra bit of imagination regarding the possibility of the nut being weighted first during a fall, which could compress the slcd, if not fully retracted already, which could in turn allow the nut to come out and then permit the camming device to expand the arm enough for the slcd to come out as well. Clearly a sequence of events which are highly unlikely and perhaps not even possible and certainly not appropriate to spout off about prior to your lead. My apologies for shaking you up and as I recall, you were effortlessly quick and cool on that lead. It was very nice to see you out there leading the cruxes, thanks for that! The end of you post seemed to have a discontinuity. The scrambling pitch after the awesome 5.8 crack deposited us on the summit. The descent was done with two 50m ropes and some errant/unnecessary gully groveling. It is probably best to do the first rappel, which is located about 50 past the summit, scramble down and toward the Concord Tower/Liberty Bell gully, rappel and scramble the climber’s right side of the face of the Minuteman, never venturing into the gully proper or passing a rappel station without using it. .

No Pictures?!?!!

btw eric, there is a fine adventure route up the buttress on the SE side of eightmile...4th class+, much of it very clean...hundreds of feet up...

Does anyone know and care to share information on the rock and cement structure on Eight Mile Lake? It appears to have been built with buildering in mind...complete with a few surprises.

Active posters on this site climb at all levls of technical difficulty. Some of those with the biggest mouths rarely climb anything that most of us would recognize as technical at all, and there are plenty of folks interested in moderate peak-bagging and easy rock climbs.

what trask is trying to say is that the best way for someone from out of the area to get started mountaineering in the NW is to take the basic mountaineering class with the mountaineers.org club because cascadeclimbers.com doesn't yet have an organized curriculum or base of experienced leaders. hey, one year of boot camp, one year of acting like you know what's going on so that you can, and what do you know...you've got the freedom of the hills....how far into those hills you go is dependent on who you are...

One for the girls?

Join the Tacoma Mountaineers and take the Basic Mountaineering Course. That's what these folks really want to say, but...it's hard for them. You might learn about Mountaineering and what too many years of raining winters does to people.

NOPE I DONT USE PETZL BINERS..... I THINK THAT ROUTE IS THE BARBER POLE?? BUT I WOULD NEED A MORE CLEAR DEFINTION OF WHAT YOU SAW!! NICE UPPER PITCHES EH?? yeah, good pitches in general, really. the squeeze was pretty fun, if you like that kind of stuff, and the loose flakes were solid enough to climb on, and yeah, the dihederal pitches were pretty cool. if you recall about 30m up from the tree belay at which you last saw me, there was a very obvious flake/horn comprised of oatmeally rock...at that point a very obvious purely horizonal crack/ledge shot left until out of site. it goes on at least 50m with nothing but lichen covered stuff above it. the topos for that area are all pretty off the mark so far as i could tell. that carabiner must be ***n's or **u's. it is a curse to have other peoples gear.

speaking of which...is the Petzel bent gate key lock carabiner yours or not? it was very shiny, has a certain color tape on it, and was perched too well to have been sitting long. btw, the freaking horizontal crack/ledge that shoots left from the dihedral on the NW face was hillarious. 50m+ around the north side...thought i was seeing SEWS before i turned around. do you or dru know what that thing is?

This is one of the prints from a disposable camera that I found around 8/25 in the Wind River Mountains. It belongs to the party comprised of 4 guys from Colorado and 1 from Austin, Texas (the skirt wearing guy). If anyone knows these guys, point them this way and PM me for return of your camera.

I remember the loose flake. I called it the "one armed bandit" because when I pulled it out, I got a hand full of change. That was about 5 years ago. The rappels off the side down the gulley I didn't follow far enough into/across the gulley and ended up hanging off of a lame baby angle. A dulling descent.

there is plenty of chicken wire around and very few porcupines.

It was an accident.

the generator doesn't work much anymore. bring your stove, olive oil, onions, green peppers, garlic, a rat trap, and clamor up to the top of the food chain.

sorry, i'm trying to learn how to climb from this website...i didn't realize that modern=self locking. most people still use atc type devices? the munter works in your scheme except for the lack of true auto lock? or must i carry that reverso or gri-gri....got to go to rei now....

don't most belayers notice when the end of the rope is coming and just pull the rope out of the device slightly ahead of time? what if the crux of the pitch is the last few meters to the next ledge? Then you pull the belayer off their ass/feet/up the wall/into the first bolt/first piece of gear/off a ridge/into a roof/into a traversing fall into corner...just like when simultaneously climbing...but only on those 50.02m and 60.01m pitches.

You must have not thought it through. The distance from the anchor to the harness is the same if using a knot on the rope to hang from or not. The only difference is the knot. If you are not using the rope as an attachment point to the anchor it still runs down to your harness so this distance is unusable in your book. If your not fast enough to take off the belay at any point you should pratice some more. An essential alpine skill!! No need for the leader to stop! just take them off. one day you will figure out what i'm talking about dru, your point only seems valid on those hardman 50.01 and 60.02 metre pitches you do when you do what it is that you do ON LEAD...and that's only when you're doing it toughie style with no good gear between belays...because if you've got good gear between you...no worries but a little simultaneous climbing which we known you can do when you do what you do. less to do if you just clove hitch the climbing rope into that belay anchor and pretty hard to mess up. plus then you don't have to bring that daisy chain...just a locking carabiner, eh? with that saved weight you could bring a few more of those tasty Tom Horne's doughnuts.