dryad

Mt. Ruth is a fun, pretty hike all by itself, with great views of the Emmons on one side, the Interglacier on the other, and the big mass of Rainier right in front of you. Earlier in the season there's some great glissading to be had from a little below the summit all the way down to glacier basin, but it's probably all scree now.

Oh yeah, I also saw Leftover Salmon, some of the parade and drum circle, and a contortionist guy with blue tights. Is it just me or was the place even more of a mob scene than usual?

Went yesterday and saw Carissa's Weird, Nickel Creek, Ms. Led, Wilco, and REM while spending much of the day trying largely in vain to meet up with some other friends who were elsewhere at the festival.

well, so much for moping about jobs... the topic of conversation quickly changed to mountains Yeah, we sorta had our own little Pub Club going. Nothing cheers one up like and looking at mountain porn. Good time.

A little note on Mt. Erie... The little convenience store on the corner there didn't have the guide book. Apparently the skinny one is all sold out, and it's being replaced by a fat one that's still at the printers. So since the only guide we had was this one pretty worthless printout from the web, we wandered around a lot and eventually just did a few routes at a place I'd been before. But the objective of testing out my new rack was achieved. I took my very first ever leader fall on a 2" cam! I had never even taken a leader fall on bolts before. It was pretty exciting. After the climb, we stopped at this farm stand outside La Conner for barbeque ribs and great homemade waffle cones the size of your head. Yummy!

I just checked the weather forecast. Mt. Erie sounds more appealing. It will be hot as hell in 11-worth.

I'll be doing a lot of nothin' on Sat, probably dirtying up my rack on Sun, then at Bumbershoot on Mon. BTW Dustin, I was up at Ingalls last weekend and didn't notice any bugs at all, but then again we were back to the car not too late. Lots and lots of people, though. Have fun!

I was wondering the same thing a while back and the consensus among the people I asked seems to be that it works, but is just more futzy and takes more time than using biners.

I feel your pain, dude. Bummer! I think I'm going to go get some and drown my sorrows tonight. Wanna come?

A couple years ago I did an Outward Bound trip and we were given iodine solution in a little dropper bottle. It was super-convenient. No need to wait for pills to dissolve, just drop in 5 drops, shake up the bottle, and wait a while for the iodine to work. Does anybody know where to get iodine solution? I haven't seen it sold anywhere.

Dammit, all the fun stuff happens after I go home!

Sex is like everything else. It's more fun when done outside.

I was with a dude for a long time and we eventually split because we relied too much of each other for our entertainment and pissed each other off. After we split, I got into climbing, and he got into long-distance cycling. Now we're best friends because we have things to talk about and be excited about. Makes me wonder if we'd still be together if we had picked up our time-consuming hobbies earlier. Moral of the story: CLIMBING IS GOOD.

I don't do combinatorial chemistry. If anyone wants a chemist, give catbirdseat a call.

Nevermind that last post about Sunday. Had a little change of plans. Either Sat or Sun works, just not Mon.

Looks like Sunday will be the day for me. How about Mt. Erie? I haven't been there in a while.

But who'll program that one, hmmmm? Next thing you know, we'll be getting into some deep metaphysical origins of the universe issues here.

Not quite, but for parts of my job, I can be replaced by a robot arm. But I'd still need to program the robot arm first.

This is all very encouraging to read. I was worried I might have to run out and buy more stuff, but it sounds like I have a pretty decent collection already (9 nuts, 7 hexes, 8 cams).

I'm bored and there's this stupid incompetent bitch I have to work with who hates me and decided to do everything in her power to make my life miserable. Anybody know anybody who could use a hotshot biotech/drug discovery/high throughput screening/lab automation expert?

Hey, can I go too? I just got the day off tomorrow. If me/you guys can find a 4th person who can lead, we can have 2 rope teams and nobody would have to lug a second rope just for rapping. In any case, does anybody want to go climb with me tomorrow, whether or not we go with catbird and Ade?

Bet that got your attention! But seriously folks, I'm looking to practice leading this weekend and to dirty up my shiny new gear on some easy (5.4-5.6-ish) trad routes. I'm thinking something along the lines of R&D or Saber. Doesn't have to be in 11-worth, those are just 2 obvious ones that popped into mind. Newbies like me of course are welcome, or if you're a better leader than me and can think of a route like Blueberry Hill with both harder and easy pitches, that would be great too. Either Sat or Sun (or both) work for me, but I have to be back in town on Monday for Bumbershoot.

Since this has turned into a discussion of the basic course, I'll chime in. - I got the feeling that many of the instructors hated my guts because I asked a million questions all the time, often of the "why do it that way and not this other way?" variety. - I see how it's good practice to learn to climb rock in mtn boots if you're going to get into winter stuff and mixed snow/rock/dirt routes. But in the summer on ordinary rock climbs it's just plain silly. In the basic class, you're supposed to wear boots all the time, but if you have a backbone, you can wear whatever you want. I've been taking rock shoes on my rock climbs, wore tennies and carried my boots on a glacier climb with a long trail approach, and nobody has said anything (most often I got looks of envy, actually). - My pack is almost always at least half the size of everyone else's. - My absolute biggest gripe is the policy that you have to summit a climb for it to count towards graduation. I have seen firsthand the kind of bad judgement this encourages. One of my climbs should never have left the trailhead because the weather forecast looked crappy, and we woke up on summit day to a blizzard and went home. Another climb shouldn't have left base camp, again because of crappy weather. Out of 6 people, 2 (including me) stayed behind and went back to sleep, but the other 4, 2 of whom were students desperate to get a glacier climb done, went on ahead. They did manage to summit eventually, but they suffered through rain, sleet and almost no visibility. It was an epic waiting to happen. Bottom line, and this goes for any class, is you should go into it knowing what you want to learn, never accept anything just because someone says so, and stay open to other sources of information (duh!). Sure I'm severely unimpressed with the basic class, but I did get out of it what I wanted to, which was a basic knowledge of glacier travel. So it wasn't a waste of time. There are plenty of cool mounties (many of them post on this board), but there are plenty of dogmatic dickheads too, and it seems like it's the dogmatic dickheads that are mainly the ones making policy.

The past couple of weekends I've been to South Early Winter Spire and Blueberry Hill in Darrington, and it made me wonder, what constitutes a crag? I presume most people consider SEWS an alpine climb. There is a summit to get to and there is a non-trivial approach. On the other hand, I presume most people consider Blueberry Hill/X-Dome a crag, but there is also a summit to get to and it also has a non-trivial approach, which is a little shorter time-wise, but a lot more treacherous than the approach for SEWS. So what characteristics qualify something to be called an alpine climb rather than a crag?

I can't resist a chance to chestbeat about my first trad lead on something not totally trivial. On Sunday I went to climb Blueberry Hill with brianb. We had great directions and found the granite sidewalk just fine. That thing should be renamed the "granite boulevard". It's huge! Must be quite a sight when it's all flowing with water. One correction to the beta I got: the first wash is more challenging than the second, just barely passable in a Honda Civic. Anyway, I led the first pitch and the last 2, and Brian handled the 3 harder ones in the middle. Pitches 3 (the one with the couple of bolts) and 4 (the one with the series of diagonal cracks) were the most fun. We then rapped off the right side of the Blueberry Terrace off a tree with about a million slings on it into the gully, then did another rap off a tree, and then down the the Westward Ho route the rest of the way with clean slabs and nice chain anchors. Piece of cake. Is this the way most people go down? Catbirdseat did something different. I have a question about the top 2 pitches. Where the hell was I??? On route, a little off route, nowhere near the route? I started from a belay at a big bush, climbed up a couple of blocks, then was faced with a blank slab to the left, a dirty corner with a little shrub in the middle of it in front of me, and more blank slab to the right. After a lot of indecisiveness, I went up the middle since I could get gear in, stepped over the little shrub, and up the corner towards a crack/flake system, and up towards a belay at the next large bush slightly to the left next to a big huge block with a wide gap under it. Then for the last pitch, I went straight up the slabs from where I was and it got progressively more dirty and with gear placements getting more and more sparse. After a 30-foot runout and my route finding method having degenerated into "spot the next crevice in the distance and run for it", I was getting a little worried. At least the climbing was easy. I was almost out of rope when I reached the woods of the blueberry terrace. I saw a larger, more vertical tree farther right. Does the route go over there? BTW, in case anyone's wondering what we did with the second rope, we decided to have the leader drag it. Worked out ok, but I definitely did feel the 2 ropes weighing me down while on lead. But we did discover an added benefit to this method... Brian forgot his chockpick, so we were passing mine back and forth, but more often than not, we'd forget to do the swap, and the leader would climb off with it. With the trailing rope, the leader could slide the chock pick down to the follower. Handy dandy.