Rad

Was just up there discussing/climbing this with my partner the other day so the details are still fresh in mind: The roof + corner that leads to the red slings on the rock spike on pitch three is what I did my first time too. It is well-protected but very pumpy. I found it harder than the traverse, but not 5.10. It goes straight up from the tree that's on the ledge. I thought this WAS the standard/Becky way to go. I do think it's better than the options to the left. These options start about 20ft left of the tree. One goes right around a small bulge on a handcrack/layback (5.9 one move wonder). The left goes up flakes just left of the bulge (haven't climbed but doesn't look bad). Both join together after 20ft in the easy corner system that merges back with the spot where you see Strickland in this photo. Here is a good picture of Strickland (from the gallery) that shows the steeper option past the slings on the rock spike. It's a good one. His last piece is where the red slings are on the rock spike. Enjoy! WS on OS p3 straight up from the tree

Booty ethics is a gray area where conscience meets consensus. Here’s your test: You climb a multi-pitch route late on Sunday afternoon and don’t see any other parties on the route. At the crux, you find a sweet cam deep in the crack that is overcammed but wiggles. You hang on the rope and tweak, wiggle, and coax the unit for five minutes until it finally pops out. Booty! You don’t see any other climbers, descend in the twilight, and return to work the next day where you barely make enough to pay the rent. What do you do in each of the following scenarios? 1 – A friend suggests you should list the cam on the lost and found column off cc.com. You’ve never heard of that website, and go about your usual day sweeping the monastery and whistling a Gregorian chant. 2 - You hear on cc that someone you barely know, but who seemed quite friendly, lost a cam like the one you found and would 'be very grateful for its return'. 3 - You learn that a very rude and obnoxious cc poster lost a cam some weeks back. The location and description suggest it could be the one you found. What would Robinhood do? What would Jesus do? What would YOU do?

(Who, what, how, when, why) started ascensionist.com? Why does it have a layout almost identical to CC? Why is it deserted? (nobody can spell assentionist?) Is this where CC-banned sprayers go to die?

Leavenworth, baby. When it's warm the rock dries fast.

That could be the Leavenworth catch-phrase. Here are a few others: Index would be "steep cracky thing" Vantage would be "bolted crumbly thing" Static would be "blank slabby thing" others?

Footnote: Gazing through bleary eyes at a sign posted above the urinal in the Albertson's in Monroe, I read: "The dog wants his house back. Visit our flower booth". What a crass and cheesy advertising gimmick, I thought. Then, as our day of climbing was winding down and we were walking through fields of flowers I had a thought... so Gene and I gathered some lupine to take to our ladies. Mine did the trick. Gene?

Saturday’s forecast was for showers everywhere. It was wet and drizzling for our dawn rendezvous in Monroe, but I convinced Gene and Craig we’d have good weather. Sure enough, it was perfect in the Icicle all day: a mix of sun and clouds with no real precipitation. We headed for Condorphamine addiction. Kramar’s second edition guide describes this route as an “alpine sport climb”. It sounded like an oxymoron to me, and Gene and I spent a good part of the drizzly drive to Leavenworth debating the meaning of “alpine” and “sport”. We didn't reach enlightenment, though we agreed on the facts: CA is a bolted, well-protected, no trad-gear required, easy rap-off, multi-pitch climb in a beautiful setting that requires a little bit of a hike on the approach. Call it what you will. Craig wisely ignored us and slept. We hiked up through forested and open slopes to the base of the cliff, passing a rainbow of flowers in bloom. Kramar’s book just says 7 pitches, 12 bolts, 85ft raps, but otherwise has almost no information. We found the topo below to be quite helpful and accurate. We did the climb as basically 3.5 pitches, climbing on 2 60m ropes: I linked p1 and p2, Craig linked p3 and p4, Gene linked p5 and p6, and Craig scooted up the last pitch to the top. The crux moves on p2, p5, and p6 were quite fun and interesting. The exposure was cool but not extreme, and there were great views up to Colchuck, Dragontail, Sherpa, and Stuart as we got higher. We had a grand old time. It’s worth scrambling a few feet to the crest of the formation to soak up the scene before you rap down. The summit area has a definite ‘alpine’ ambience and looks across toward the Colchuck lake area and up into large cliffs with lots of new route potential. After rapping down, we top-roped the ‘Opus of the condorian kind’ variation. We felt it was a smidge harder than the p5 and p6 cruxes of CA, which are listed at 10b. Gear: We had 2 60m ropes, but one >=50m rope would suffice. Lots of quickdraws. Approach: A good trail leads to bathtub dome, where you follow a rising traverse to the obvious scrub line on the corner of the buttress.

We were just in Stehekin for a long weekend. The snow level is quite high (6500 ft or so) on most peaks. There's lots of bare ground up to at least 5000 ft in the places we saw. They had rain there the past two days that gave a very light dusting to the 8000ft peaks and probably accelerated melting everywhere else. In sum: very low snowpack that is melting fast, as you might have expected. I can't speak for the peaks you've mentioned. The flowers are gorgeous now. Enjoy!

Anyone been on the Snow Creek Wall lately? Is it dry? I was thinking about heading out there in the next few days. Does it stay pretty dry on "chance of showers" days? Is Orbit really harder than Outer Space? Thanks. You can bypass the upper Outer Space finger crack by climbing knobs on the face to the left. Then again, it's such an aesthetic, well-protected crack you should just go for it. I also found the lower, vertical part of the 'crux' pitch to be harder than the traverse. The first traverse move is just mental, not hard at all. Farther out, the traverse has great jams, tons of gear spots, and decent foot friction. Perhaps the crux is hanging your stash somewhere that the goats can't get to it. Dang varmints!

Saw a bundle the other day in puddles along the Monte Cristo Rd within 3/4 mile of the gate, croaking away.

Perhaps climbers should pack a kayak for the descent back to the trailhead... or, if you time it right, you could surf the wave... Hang ten.

Times piece on Peter Potterfield paints pleasing portrait of popular prosaicist: ........................................ Books Seattle author, outdoorsman takes readers on his favorite hikes By Craig Welch Seattle Times staff reporter KEN LAMBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES Peter Potterfield, hiker/climber and author of "In the Zone" and "Classic Hikes of the World," is seen here at Discovery Park. E-mail article Print view Search Most e-mailed Most read RSS Beginning in the 1990s, the era of the Mountaineer as Pop Star, it seemed that every great climber was shadowed by a writer. Or four. The toothy, raccoon-eyed faces of high-altitude alpinists graced mainstream men's magazines. Big-wall climbers like Lynn Hill — who once fed herself by sneaking food from tourists' plates in Yosemite — were featured in fashionable, picture-of-grace coffee-table tomes. Behind the scenes, Seattle journalist and author Peter Potterfield took turns riding — and steering — that wave of celebrity. He's been an author of guide books, an editor of mountaineering anthologies, a biographer of American climbing's reigning high priest and the co-founder of a Web site that made instant icons of alpinists who found an icy corpse. Today, by some measures, climbing has backed down from the pinnacle of outdoor pop-culture hipness. Athletic cult heroes now include aerobic machines firmly rooted at or near sea level — cyclist Lance Armstrong or triathlete Lokelani McMichael. Mountaineering's top celebrity, Seattle's own Ed Viesturs, is famous for his caution. Potterfield, whose athletic pursuits often mirrored those of his generation, is counting on this nuance in the outdoor world's Zeitgeist. At 55, he's going back to his baby-boomer roots, trading tales of the Death Zone for the wilds of New Zealand and Patagonia and even Washington state. Author appearance Peter Potterfield will present a slide show and talk on his book, "Classic Hikes of the World," at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the main REI store: 222 Yale Ave. N., Seattle. He's hoping his new book "Classic Hikes of the World," a coffee-table-style guide to 23 of what he considers the greatest backpacking trips on the planet, proves to be an antidote for readers suffering an extreme-sports hangover — those wanting to blend wanderlust with simpler activities. "There no longer seems to be the same focus on the super extreme things," Potterfield said recently over coffee as he favored a knee banged up while climbing. "It's not the same phenomenon it once was. People want to read about things they can get out and do." A defining moment It's not at all striking, really, that an athlete's ambition can crest in a moment — a moment after which all goals are recalibrated. What's striking is that in Potterfield's case that moment can be pinpointed: July 26, 1988. Cooking instant oatmeal at 5,000 feet at 5 that morning, he was a half-day's journey to the 7,680-foot summit of Chimney Rock in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area. By midday he was stranded on a ledge surrounded by too much blood. Shards of bone protruded from his elbow. His left leg curled at an incomprehensible angle. The story of Potterfield's fall off Chimney, and his now-legendary helicopter rescue, anchored 1996's "In the Zone," his collection of horrendous climbing-accident stories, and highlights the everyman persona that makes Potterfield's writing so accessible. "I can report that it [his nearly 150-foot fall] happened with lucidity," he wrote. "Nothing blurred or was lost to velocity. I registered the impacts, felt my bones break, remained aware the whole way down." Potterfield had been climbing and hiking since the mid-1970s, while he worked as a reporter for newspapers from Atlanta to Santa Fe. He'd found his way to Seattle in the late 1970s while feeding an obsession with Mount Rainier, and spent the 1980s as a writer and editor with (now-defunct) Pacific Northwest, the glossy regional magazine founded by Harriet Bullitt. There, Potterfield intuitively grasped the pull of mountains to the culture, once telling friend Jim Nelson, the owner of the University District's Pro Mountain Sports, that he made a point to put Rainier on the magazine's cover twice a year. "When we have Rainier on the cover, we sell more magazines," Nelson recalled Potterfield saying. There was no better time to be a journalist with a passion for mountains. Things had changed Potterfield continued to climb after his fall, but he was different — and not just because doctors put steel in his arm and leg. He married, grew less arrogant, took fewer chances. "As a climber, I was never among the best of the best," Potterfield says today. "I was always a journalist first, and a climber second." When he left the magazine (which folded in the early 1990s) Potterfield made it easier for Northwest climbers to find their way to fabled peaks, with his "Selected Climbs in the Cascades," co-authored with Nelson. In the mid-1990s, he wrote "In the Zone," which featured golden-haired Seattle mountain guide Scott Fischer's ascent of treacherous K2 with Viesturs. "Peter always recognized how to reach a mainstream market," Nelson said. "He knew that accidents were always compelling, and that people were interested in the highest mountain in the world. Put those two together and you had a grand slam." Yet it was in 1999, as a founder of MountainZone.com, that Potterfield steered himself to ground zero in the collision between mountains and media. Potterfield and his Web site became New Media pioneers, airing the first dispatches from Everest via satellite phone as a team led by Washington-based mountaineer Eric Simonson discovered the frozen body of George Mallory, the British climber who disappeared near the summit in 1924. "The biggest thing was the Webcasting, and the instant ability to put news out there," said Matt Stanley, a former MountainZone.com staffer, now an editor at Climbing magazine. "The only real sort of popular outlets were National Geographic Adventure and Outside, and often the news you'd get in there was several weeks or months old. Peter helped fuel people's appetite for on-the-spot news." After selling MountainZone.com in 2000, mostly in stock, which collapsed in the dot.com bust months later, Potterfield got a call from publisher W.W. Norton: Could he spend three years researching the world's best hikes? "Sure, twist my arm," he told them. For outdoor lovers, the resulting 224-page volume is a mouthwatering package of stunning photographs and descriptions of everything from Rainier's Wonderland Trail to a North Cascades' hike near Lake Diablo, and to a romp along the British Columbia coast. His favorite: A solo hike across the tundra of Arctic Sweden. "What I found totally reset my threshold for what constitutes wilderness," Potterfield said in an e-mail interview. "The Arctic wilderness of northern Sweden is big and wild and pristine, you can drink the water out of any creek, camp wherever you wish, I felt like I could walk for days and not run out of room." Even though kids today spend hours with video games, Potterfield believes that backpacking is coming back in vogue, at least among some. "I've noticed that when I go hiking, I'm more likely to see people my age," he says, adding that he's convinced the mean age of backpackers was 20 when he was 20, and hit middle age when he did. And history would suggest that Potterfield knows his audience. Craig Welch: 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com

Can anyone recommend good climbing films AVAILABLE FROM NETFLIX? I'm willing to suffer through poor plots/scripts to see quality climbing sequences, unbelievable mtn/nature scenery. No Everest flicks please. Others off the list (because we’ve seen them recently) include Touching the Void, which was excellent, and The Eiger Sanction, which is much more campy than you may recall. Was there ever a film made of Lynn Hill’s nose climbs? What about old BMFF films, and the movie that started me off: Moving Over Stone? Laud your favorites and pan the dogs!

Wazzup w/the softcore porn? An interesting piece, but why in Alpinist? What if it had been written or illustrated by a guy? Would that make it less acceptable? I thought we were supposed to get inspired (aka turned on) by alpine climbing tales...

Most of the (powerade, gatorade, your-favorite-ade) are available at the supermarket for less. Buy powder in bulk to save $ and be more enviro friendly.

Looks ripe for a lethal injection of 'freedom' and 'liberation' from our flaming Bush. Oh wait, there's no big industry interest to protect. Guess he won't be bothered.

Likely flash from photo of a photo. For example:

Yes, an excellent, well-written, sincere article. Thanks for the link. Oddly, the faces are familiar: NPS ranger Craig Brouwer helped me and my wife get NPS approval for a cliffside wedding ceremony in Stehekin in 03. He moved over to Marblemount that fall. Dr. Lisa Taitsman is someone I went to high school with years ago and had lost touch with. I'll have to drop her a line. Meanwhile, I'm counting my blessings for having safely gotten up and down Forbidden.

Earplugs to deal with bagpipe blowing boneheads. Spouse/significant other is other much better than smut mags. What better was to christen that summit?

Bring: 1 - Digital camera as navigation aid: shoot when weather and angle are good, refer to image (digi zoom very helpful) when you're in the thick of it and aren't sure which dihedral/gully leads where. Also useful for future extortion of partners. 2 - Coin for making important strategic decisions. 3 - Knife for cutting rope if traveling with Joe Simpson. 4 - Beano for your partner. 5 - Aluminum foil instead of pot lid and heat xchanger. 6 - Your satellite crackberry to link to CC when things get dull.

Pros and cons either way, as many have said. Go try them out yourself and see what you think before sinking $ into membership. Punch cards at VW could help you do that, not sure if SG has same. Single vists are spendy at VW. Student discounts used to work at SG. I like the non-hold textures at VW better than SG. The old SG walls were like slick wooden slats with holds bolted onto them. It's better now but still not up to VW IMO. Have fun.

I find that redirecting also makes belaying much more strenuous and slower. I will redirect if I don't want to be pulled downward/off a stance or if my partner (plus pack) is large and/or expects to hang a lot. In most cases, I find straight off the harness is faster and easier. As was mentioned above, when doing this it's important to any remove slack between you and the anchor. Otherwise nasty scrapes and worse may ensue. ouch.

A little to the South...

Photo. Foil on side should be wider and wrapped loosely around the zone between pot and flame with an opening on one side. Sorry, that's the only photo I have handy.

Aluminum foil as wind shield, lid, and heat exchanger for your stove. Saves time and fuel and is incredibly light. Years ago I had an MSR stove with this heavy heat exchanger, designed to make more heat go on your pot and less off into the alpine air. It worked great but was heavy. To get the same benefit (boil twice as fast and use half the fuel) take a generous piece of aluminum foil, fold part over the top of your pot (as a lid), wrap the middle around your pot extending down to your stove (heat exchanger), and have the last bit on the upwind side of the stove (wind shield). The stove needs oxygen to burn so don't wrap too tightly down there, and make sure the part around your pot is not completely tight either, because you want hot air to draw up past your pot. Leave your usual pot lid (and exchanger) at home. If anyone is interested I'll look for a photo to illustrate.