dryad

Man, all you extra Y-chromosome, too hardcore for your own good types really piss me off. Is it really so bad to make a route a little bit more user-friendly once in a while? Ditto everything what lost_arrow said.

I wore mine the day I did crevasse rescue practice. Man, I never knew I could prussik so fast!

Just to cover all the bases, here's my post from the other thread of this same name.

The alpine bod is cheap, light, and has a lot going for it, but it is like a CHAINSAW IN YOUR CROTCH! I would only wear it on a glacier slog where the actual odds of having to use it are very low.

OK, executive decision time. Carpool #1 leaves the 65th St P&R at 2:45 pm. PM me if you want in on this carpool. If nobody PM's me, I'm not going there to wait like an idiot just in the off chance somebody shows up.

Is the BlueWater 9.4mm Dominator really the "lightest single rope on the planet"? What else compares?

I think that we should have 2 carpools going: one from Seattle leaving from the 65th St P&R (or similar), and another one from Issaquah for the non-Seattleites. Sound good?

Ditto. By the time you get on the route you'll be so happy to be on something solid that you'll almost feel like you could solo the thing! Have fun - it's a great route. Cheers!

Like I said, "SOMETHING to use as a personal anchor". I never specifically advocated a daisy. Snowbyrd doesn't have any slings either!

The rope should be your personal anchor. Ummm... what about when you're at the top of a sport pitch and you have to untie yourself to feed the rope through the chains? Or any time you're getting ready to rap off of anything, for that matter? What do you anchor yourself with then?

You got a helmet? That's pretty important. Also, something to use as a personal anchor. Other than that, I presume you'll be climbing with more experienced people for a while and can share all their other gear (rope, draws, pro, etc etc)

It's really great to see the lurker babes coming out of the woodwork. See y'all out there!

What does everyone here have against robots??? They're cheap, light, have that handy extendable sling, and saved my sorry ass just fine. Also, as a person with small hands I find cams with a U-shaped stem that can be retracted with 1 finger easier to work with than the kind with a single stem.

I'll be there!

I was just imagining wearing those little shorts with a harness and all the scary ways they'd ride up. OUCH!

Exactly!

The deal with the shoelaces is that Mythos laces are like 10 feet long so if you have small feet you have this huge length of extra lace material that you have to cut off or loop around your foot or tie in a great big bow or whatever.

Please forgive this stupid question, but what is the best way to store a tent? Is keeping it stuffed really that bad? How about in a big laundry bag as you would with a sleeping bag? Would the advice be different if the tent was single wall vs. double wall?

Thank you icegirl for organizing this, and it was great meeting the rest of you folks. I had so much fun! I can't wait to get out there again. And I'm scheming of bigger adventures too. I gotta say also that the girlie drinks were the perfect ending to this girlie evening. We need a margarita graemlin. conveys the idea but isn't quite right here.

I gotta agree with cracked and co. That chick is too blonde, too tan, too generic, too overprocessed, and looks like the type who'd pitch a hissy fit if she broke a nail. Edit: and her teeth are too big. Now Salma, that's a hottie.

"An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan" by Jason Elliot was a fascinating study of the history and culture of Afghanistan as well as some pretty damn hardcore travelling.

Sorry, didn't mean to make you read my mind. I thought my feelings on the subject were pretty clear from my post on the original thread, and I didn't want to engage in a long-winded monologue on this subject that is pretty dear to my heart. So here's more. The Khumbu has not been a wilderness area for millennia. It is widely inhabited. The trekking routes are centuries-old trade routes, not hiking trails put in there for the amusement of hikers. The landscape is shaped by farming and yak herding as much as it is shaped by wind and water. If you are looking for some kind of pure wilderness experience, you are simply going to the wrong place. The Sherpas are people just like everyone else who want the best lives for themselves. If you ask them, they will tell you that they consider tourism a big net positive. They feel like their lives are infinitely better with it than without it. I think it is pretty damn self-centered for us westerners to begrudge them some basic development like education and electricity in order to preserve some romanticized vision of their traditional culture. Is it all positive? Of course not. Deforestation is a big problem. Pollution is a big problem. The area did get developed too quickly and without enough controls. But the damage that was done is slowly getting remedied. Wood burning has been banned completely, and the forests are coming back. The availability of electricity at the lower elevations has also helped reduce the need for wood burning. I think that better facilities to deal with garbage are on their way. There is a lot more that needs to be done, though. A lot of the blame has to rest on the shoulders of the trekkers themselves. For example, the use of bottled water is heavily discouraged in every guidebook and every publication, but people do it anyway. Nepal has no facilities to recycle the bottles, so they just accumulate, and there is absolutely no reason for anyone to use them. You can get boiled water anywhere, or you can filter it or treat it with iodine. Very easy things. People who refuse to live without certain luxuries that they are accustomed to have no business trekking in the first place as far as I'm concerned. This is just one example. I was really disgusted with how obnoxious and demanding some of the other trekkers I encountered were. And they were not Americans, by the way. Americans are expected to be obnoxious, but I observed that the Euros, Aussies, and Kiwis are not any better. A country to look to as a model is Bhutan. They opened themselves to tourism recently, and limit it to only something like 5000 visas a year. Their goal is to avoid the problems with overdevelopment that Nepal has had, and I would like to see how they manage.

This topic came up in the "worlds best mountains to trek though" thread and I thought it deserves its own. Here are the relevant posts: Beck said: Lambone said: dryad said:

I did not have the balls to go over the Cho La pass unguided. I was there a bit early in the season (mid-March) so the fog was still rolling in every afternoon eliminating all visibility. I was told that the route is not obvious, and several parties had to bivy under rocks because they couldn't find the village on the other side of the pass in the fog. So I just hiked from Gokyo down to Phortse, then up the other valley. It only added 1 day to the trek. 'Treking in the Everest Region' by Jamie McGuiness was the book I was using too. It has lots of great information on side hikes and trips off the beaten path.

Get off your high yak, Beck. Hillary is just pissed that other people are tresspassing on what he likes to think of as his own personal little mountain fiefdom. The Sherpas have to support themselves somehow after trade with Tibet (their main source of income for centuries) pretty much completely dried up after China took over Tibet and did their best to close the border. It's true that there has been a lot of irresponsible development, but it is getting a lot better. For example, wood burning is completely banned. I wish they would also ban plastic bottles, or that the stupid tourists would quit buying them. Everyone I saw with one got a talking to from me. I feel especially sorry for the lodge proprietors living between Jiri and Lukla who are really hurting. Trekking in that area was always a small percentage of the total, and now it's almost non-existant thanks to the Maoist presence in the region. There is a sad running joke that the the only 2 sources of income that Nepal has are tourism and foreign aid. Sadly it's true. And no McDonalds in KTM yet, thank goodness.