crotch

Dovals - Crappy gate. The spring tension declines much faster than with other wiregates. I've got more than a few where the gate will stay in the fully open position. Plan on retiring them every few years. Superfly - Very light- so light that they tend to rotate into a minor axis configuration when used as rope-end biners. Neutrino - Small but robust.

best online service out there.

BD makes a nice wiregate oval that's much lighter than the regular one.

met some peeps last year that dropped a bag with pins and stoppers. their stoppers were right next to the pins and the wires got crimped by the edge of the angles on impact. so keep them wires and angles separated.

Hmmm. If I have to pay for baggage over 70lbs- ooops, make that 50lbs now......

You're really going to submit Grade II? That's anything longer than 1 or two pitches, right?

flight from bettles to circle lake is about 70 miles, takes about an hour, but you're paying for the pilot to fly there and back twice. we didn't bring a radio or satellite phone, just hoped he'd be there to pick us up on the appointed date.

Bettles air from fairbanks to bettles and from bettles to circle lake. Then from Takahula lake back to bettles. I think the flight to circle lake was about $500 and the same coming back from Takahula, but I didn't keep close track as it all went on the credit card if you know what I mean. I think it was about 250 from fairbanks to bettles and i don't remember if that's roundtrip or not. Mostly rain, but never really a downpour. lots of days of drizzle and mist that kept the rock wet. we did get about a foot of snow in one system which pinned us down on one side of a pass. It took about 2 days of strong 24-hour sun to clear most of the snow off the rock. Is the 6" figure for the Arrigetch, or an average for the whole park?

Went there last summer from July 4-27. We saw no bears and carried no guns. Book with Bettles Air. http://www.alaska.net/~bttlodge/ Lance is a great pilot and a good guy. Tell Pete that Yoav sent ya. We're probably heading back this summer for more fun. Hopefully we won't see you there Walking in would be a multi-week suffer-fest and you probably wouldn't get any climbing done. Airdrops are mostly a thing of the past as the park service frowns upo them. Expect > or = 50% of your days spent in the tent due to weather. Clint Cummings maintains a website with a list of the climbing routes, though I don't think he's updated it to include the routes we did last summer (if you want info on those, let me know) http://www.stanford.edu/~clint/arrig/

The Fixe 5/16" buttonheads are supposed to be made of metal so soft as to be worthless. The old Rawl ones should be fine though.