Stemalot

nice. a friend of mine and I were thinking about this peak for the same weekend. but we went to Squamish instead in fear of lousy weather.

do first ascents to avoid this problem. Also, I totally agree with many of the posts here, climbing is about pushing oneself...the attention you receive from outside is superficial and will become stale with time. but the confidence you gain from pushing yourself to the limit mentally and physically will stay with you for life.

oh yeah Jordop, hours of this sure was fun too!

humm...everything jordop have suggested and me foolishly went along... next time, I'll do the suggestion.

what cha gonna do there?

it is still mighty impressive! excellent vid Dru

I wonder how many times he has done that route before.

More on the proposed Chief gondola: http://www.thetyee.ca/News/current/CheifBattleSparksFears.htm Original story: The Squamish Chief is no stranger to controversy. More than a decade ago, a proposal to turn the base of the spectacular granite monolith into a quarry was almost approved. The ensuing protests thwarted the proposal, and paved the way for the area to become a provincial park in 1995. The 600-hectare Stawamus Chief Provincial Park and the adjoining Shannon Falls Provincial Park now see approximately half a million visitors a year. At the official ceremony celebrating its designation as a Class A Park in October 1995, disgruntled loggers from the resource-dependent community hijacked the stage to protest forestry cuts. News cameras rolled as then-mayor Corinne Lonsdale used the platform to berate the government on the part of forestry workers. Logging trucks circled the ceremony like sharks. Bloody fistfights ensued. Cut to 2004. Squamish forestry workers have lost the war to save local jobs and the region wants tourism to drive the economy into the future. A bigger battle is playing out over the Chief ? and it has implications for all provincial parks. In August, two Whistler-based developers, Peter Alder of Peter Alder Enterprises and Paul Mathews of Ecosign Mountain Resort Planners, were revealed as the proponents behind a hush-hush plan to construct an aerial sightseeing gondola on the Stawamus Chief [read about it in the Tyee story: Gondolas Up the Chief? ]. The outcry was immediate. Squamish?s Megan Olesky, spokesperson for newly formed Friends of the Chief, hikes the Chief at least once a week. She contends that a gondola up the Chief is anathema to the town?s growing reputation as an outdoor recreation centre. ?A quick gondola ride to a viewpoint symbolizes everything that outdoor recreation is not,? she says. ?And the fact that this is in a provincial park makes it even worse. To me it sends the message that our protected areas are for sale to private companies. This is a terrifying precedent to set.? Parks ?open for business?? Gwen Barlee, of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, is also concerned that the province might set a precedent if it approves the $12 million private development. She worries that it might be the first domino to fall in parks across the province, thanks to new legislation that relaxes restrictions in parks and allows the province to ignore local rules. ?What we?re seeing with this proposal, with the introduction of parking meters, with the reduction of the boundaries of the South Chilcotin [Mountains Provincial Park], is an all-out war on our parks. These are public parks, and they aren?t the Liberals? to give away.? The Significant Projects Streamlining Act allows the government fast-track approval and override its own and local laws and regulations for ?provincially significant? projects. The subsequent Parks and Protected Areas Statute Amendment Act permits recreational and tourism development in parks that is ?consistent with or complementary to? recreational values. No definition of ?recreational values? is provided. Bill Barisoff, Minister of Water Land and Air Protection, which oversees BC Parks, set the future?s tone when he introduced his 2004-2005 budget estimates. ?The Premier has talked about building a park system that is open to everyone. We need a range of use options beyond traditional camping that keep pace as our population ages. Our goal is to attract more people to our parks.? The government?s Recreation Stewardship Panel, which delivered its report in November 2002, also troubled preservationists and recreation advocates, who objected to its ?invitation only? public consultations, which took place over a mere four days. The panel, chaired by former Social Credit environment minister Bruce Strachan, recommended more user fees, more private service delivery, and more commercial, revenue-focused facilities. Strachan told CBC Radio?s Almanac that the Panel wanted to see five to seven parks designated as ?intensive, revenue-focused recreation locations.? New or expanded commercial operations would have to be ?endorsed in an approved park management plan that included opportunities for public input.? Development proponents must obtain a park use permit under the Park Act, and applications are reviewed to ensure they are consistent with the act and the management plan. Chief plan excludes gondolas The Stawamus Chief management plan was completed in 1997, after two years of extensive consultations. The plan states its aims to ?provide non-mechanised recreation opportunities for different users to experience the park in ways compatible with the special features and natural values?. The plan also marketing and promotion of the Chief, given its already high usage, estimated at the time at 25,000 rock-climbers and 50,000 hikers a year. Contrast this with gondola proponent Peter Alder?s vision: ?Sulphur Mountain [at Banff] is probably the closest similar installation to the one we?ve proposed. We?re planning to build a viewing platform over about two and a half acres, a warming shelter and chemical toilets at the top. At Sulphur Mountain, they?ve found that the maximum stay on the summit is about 15 minutes.? Five million people are currently driving past the Chief every year, and Alder believes he can get at least 80 percent of them to go up the Chief gondola at least once. The Wilderness Committee?s Barlee wonders what the point of a management plan is if it can be overridden. ?The public are so against this. I don?t think the government, with an election just seven months away, would want to shine the media spotlight on this issue.? Ministry having a ?hemorrhage? Alder is aware of the project?s political sensitivity, and says the ministry is ?very insecure? about it. ?A lot of it probably has to do with the political nature of the comments we?re getting back,? he told The Tyee. ?The Campbell government has buggered up three major things they?ve tried to do,? citing the privatization of liquor stores, the sale of BC Rail and the contracting out of the Coquihalla Highway?s operation. ?So they want to have a very transparent process, which is fine.? Barisoff insists that the management plan won?t be amended unless it represents ?the desire of the community.? He told The Tyee that he has instructed the gondola?s proponents to take the proposal before the community and convince the citizens and council of Squamish that it?s worth amending the management plan for the gondola project. The proponents have since revealed that their delay in announcing the project to the public was at the behest of the ministry. ?They?re having a shit hemorrhage on this one,? says Alder. ?They asked us not to release any information to the public until we?d gone through the process they outlined, going to the District of Squamish, the Squamish First Nations, the Ministry of Highways and [the 2010 Olympics organizing committee], and giving them each 60 days to give us feedback. Then the minister would tell us when we could release it to the public.? The ministry now refers questions about the proposal to the proponents, ?as nothing new has happened, and the minister can?t spend all his time dealing with the media.? Process lacks ?fairness? Opponents of the gondola are concerned that public consultation has been handed off to the project proponent. Barlee wonders how equity and fairness, or the appearance of equity and fairness, can be achieved in such a situation. ?I don?t think you can have an industrial developer run the public consultation and achieve that,? she says, adding that she?s troubled by the way the government directed the proposal. Spencer Fitschen, co-chair of the Squamish chapter of the Sierra Club, and a representative on both the Squamish Select Committee for the Environment and Sea to Sky Land and Resource Management Plan, told The Tyee that ?this whole proposal didn?t come from ground up, but from top down. It started in the Premier?s Office and came down and that raised a lot of alarm bells right off.? Fitschen said he hasn?t encountered any support for the gondola proposal from local residents or the local government in Squamish. Although the District of Squamish hasn?t made its position public, staff were asked by the Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection months ago to provide a recommendation on the project. ?I?ve been told that an opinion was sent to Victoria, recommending against it,? said Fitschen. Acting mayor of Squamish, Sonya Lebans, was not available for comment on the allegation. Park land swap lacked input Fitschen said that although he believes the province would like to set a precedent with commercial development in a provincial park, the Chief gondola proposal is too controversial too close to an election to get the go-ahead. ?I don?t think the Chief would be their first choice of a test case.? Fitschen does agree, however, that if the Chief gondola gets a park-use permit the floodgates will open. A ministry official told The Tyee that although they routinely receive enquiries about commercial development in parks, ?at this time we have no other third party proposals for infrastructure developments.? Still, the Western Canada Wilderness Committee has other areas of concern. A road was built through Monck Provincial Park to provide access to a private housing development. At Cathedral Grove, the government is planning to use two hectares of old-growth forest in the 20-hectare park for expanded parking, despite fears that the disruption to the forest canopy could increase the number of blowdowns in the park. Park watchers are also concerned about deals being concluded behind closed doors. In 2002, Intrawest?s Whistler Blackcomb swapped land in the Fitzsimmons Creek drainage for 87 hectares of Garibalid Park surrounding Flute peak. No public consultation occurred. The company announced the expansion of its skiable area with great fanfare this summer. There is also concern that independent power projects may locate some infrastructure within provincial parks. ?It?s all happening under the public radar,? said Barlee. ?These are public lands, the public commons.? She said people have worked for decades to preserve them ? in the case of the South Chilcotin Mountains Provincial Park. it was 50 years ? yet the current government is cutting protections away at the behest of private commercial and industrial interests. ?And the public doesn?t even know what?s going in. That is wrong. It?s really wrong.? Lisa Richardson is a journalist based in Squamish.

stupid damn website won't let me read the article without signing up! hate that!

21198posts/1305 days = 4.5121 X 10^-3 Hz Fortunately for all of us, this is well below the threshold for human hearing.

hell, I never said the new MEC cataloge is good!!! in fact, I stated a bunch of my dislikes about the new cataloge to MEC already. I just want freaking new toys!

140m rope? I am thinking about carrying a 60 m x 8.1 mm and use it as a double rope for 30 meters! This of course depends on the type of terrain one is on. I say go light!

good job, glad to know the climbers will live

Just got my Fall MEC cataloge in the mail. eeehaaa! start saving up...

this spray is great! keep it up girls.

shouldn't bullshit level be rising?

when you flush, it's out of sight and out of mind... untill it comes in full circle and ends up on our dinner plate.

another reason not to check the weather forcast... http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040831/WEATHER31/TPFront/TopStories Original story: Summer chill leaves experts with red faces Canada's weather forecasters are confessing that their predictions for the summer season were so wretched that Canadians would have known roughly as much without any forecast at all. "Never have we been so wrong for so long in so many parts of the country," said David Phillips, the senior climatologist at Environment Canada. Richard Verret, in charge of the weather element division at the Canadian Meteorological Centre, was equally blunt. "It turned out that the forecast was not very good, to say the least," he said. "In fact, it's been a particularly bad forecast." Canada's weather agency, hand in hand with its supercomputer and complex global climate models, had predicted that June, July and August would be warmer and drier than usual right across the country. But when all was said and done, it was a stinker of a summer nearly everywhere: cool, wet and dull. In fact, it was the coolest summer since 1992, when Mount Pinatubo spewed ash into the atmosphere. Winnipeg had the coldest summer on record. Crops froze in Saskatchewan. And Toronto chalked up about 125 fewer hours of summer sunshine than people have come to expect: just 700 compared to the normal 825. Vancouver, Victoria and Yukon were some of the few parts of the country that were hot and dry. "It would be nice to get more accurate forecasts," said Terry Pugh, executive secretary of the National Farmers Union in Saskatoon, noting that farmers plant different crops in line with predictions about the length of the growing season. He said the unexpected chill over the Prairies already has delayed ripening by two or three weeks. Being an agency that lives and dies by its statistics, the meteorological centre, known as the Canadian Met, naturally keeps figures on the accuracy of its seasonal forecasts. In other words, the Met meticulously marks itself and publishes the figures on its website. (It doesn't do the same for daily forecasts.) It is able to predict, on the basis of past forecasts, how accurate its seasonal forecasts are likely to be. After the fact, it releases a score of how accurate it actually was. The dirty secret is that even a chimp forecasting the temperature of a coming season would be right a third of the time, statistically speaking, because the temperature is predicted as being either above normal, normal or below normal. So if the accuracy of the forecast comes out at 33 per cent or less, it means that the forecaster has no skill at all, Mr. Verret noted. Sometimes, the Met's skill score can hover around 60 per cent or even 70 per cent, but most of the time it runs at less than 50 per cent, he said. (That is to say, the forecast is wrong at least half the time.) This summer, it has been far worse. In fact, Mr. Verret said if he were to forecast the summer skill score, which won't be crunched until next week, he would peg it at 37 to 40 per cent. That's not significantly above sheer chance. That means Canadians got nearly as much accurate weather information this summer as they would have had without any forecast at all. And that's just for the temperature. What about precipitation? "It's hopeless," Mr. Verret said. "There, we have no skill at all." This state of affairs weighs on the forecasters. "You're only as good as your last forecast," Mr. Phillips noted, sighing. Mr. Verret is trying to come to terms with it. "Being in the forecast business, you learn to be humble," he said ruefully. In the agency's defence, Mr. Phillips pointed out that the signs leading up to the summer forecast were persuasive about a warm and dry scenario. The ocean water on the West Coast and in the Labrador Sea was so superheated it was like a "hot tub," he said, measuring more than 3 degrees above normal. Usually, as the water goes, so goes the land. Not this year. Instead, the great swath of Central Canada was cooled off all summer by a ferociously cold spring in the Arctic tundra, the second-coldest on record and a big climate surprise after the years of extraordinarily warm temperatures in the Arctic. Those switchbacks, a feature scientists say is characteristic of global climate change, make forecasts even trickier than usual, Mr. Phillips said. "Luckily, Canadians are very forgiving," he said. "They'll ask you what went wrong with the forecast, and their next question will be, 'What's the winter going to be like?' "

sorry...I should have been more specific. Was it raining all the time while you were there? I want to know what "change of shower" in the forcast for the area really means. Just because the rock was wet, doesn't mean the weather is down right nasty like it was in Vancouver.

how was the weather up around there? brought back some more of that Lillooet honey?

Just a caution, if you don't like George W., you are most likely not going to like BC's premier, Gordan Campbell and the idiots running the province much. A so called "liberal" but really a wolf disguised as a sheep. He leads the Liberal party in BC, but practices fascism. In a recent poll, BCers rated their dislike of Campbell almost as much as Bush. Hey, but Canada welcomes ya!

Irfanview. Can't go wrong with this little beauty!

time for a new vice president!

sure why not, Happy birthday! ...who ever you are

Soon the Canadian dollar will worth just as much as the US dollar! yeah!