dylan_taylor

aquadog

Skins on twin tips are great - there is way less drag (Elevated rear tip keeps rivit, metal junction up off the snow...) Most brands should work fine. BD clipfixes might even work though they fall off my normal skiis all the time anyway. Don't forget the duct tape.

I'm glad to see something like this happening. I hope it works. Unfortunately, I do not have much faith in the self-policing skills of the hords of front-rangers and SLCers who commute to the creek on a weekend-ly basis. I fear that even with the BLM's proposal, many slobs will forgo wagbags and continue to shit behind every juniper tree, leaving the ubquitous brown-crusted snow-flower blowing in the breeze as a sign of their passing. All those climbers know how to climb, camp, and party, but i get the sense that most creekers are relativly ignorant of proper waste management methods and Leave No Trace techniques. I hope the BLM proposed plan works. It would be a wonderful thing if climbers could show up 5 or 10 years from now and find it in the same (or better) shape than it (the Bridger Jack camping area for example) is in now. Only time will tell if Human Nature can be improved a little. Best of luck to the Friends of Indian Creek.

1. Quickdraws or slings? My selection of draws is a random assortment of whatever I have found, and not lost, over the last few years, and whatever i started with once upon a time. About 50% sporto-draws, and about 50% shoulder-lengths trippled up. (s0me are mammut skinneema, some are older spectra slings, and some are tied 9/16") 2. How many is good to start out with? I suppose it probably doesn't matter how many you buy, if you assume that your partner will have some too, but if you can afford it, buy enough to make your gear self sufficient. Thay way can choose to take your rack and draws if you know your partners rack is held together by duct tape and weedwacker cord. And even dozen ought to be a good enough amount. Thats what I try to have on hand. Though many will disagree, tied 9/16 shoulder lengths work fine in the alpine, are cheap, and are easy to untie when bailing, tying around trees, making v-threads, etc. Just check your knot tails periodically. As far as stories of gear pulling out cuz somebody used dogbones instead of extended shoulderlengths, i agree with a lot of people here that it is silly to blame gear falling out on draws that are too short. It was probably shitty gear to begin with. When climbing a crack that will take lots of nuts, I think it is a good idea to "trap" the nut placements by placing a cam (with short draw or no draw) at the beginning of the pitch or the beginnning of the section that will go mostly nuts, then place another cam with short or no draw at the end. This makes the rope run in a very straight line over the nut section, and short draws even on nuts should never provide enough levering force to pop the nuts out. The cams with short extensions should be in bomber parallel placements that will facilitate omnidirectionality and dissuade walking.

ricoh GR1-s

As memory serves you lowering increases the force on the anchor by a factor of 1.6 (when compared to a simple rap). Rapping has 1/2 your bodyweight on each strand. Lowering has your bodyweight on each of the strands (roughly). Lowering creates a pulley effect on the anchor only if it is redirected. Lowering a person from a device on a belay anchor and rapelling off the anchor put the exact same force on the anchor, provided no one bounces around. Lowering off of a sketchy anchor is actually a decent technique as long as that anchor is backed up by another. Then it can be removed once it passes the guinea pig test.

like these fine B. Washburn masterpieces... (Forgive the image quality. aren't these things pretty old after all?) west ridge and and southeast side...

you should check out the washburn photos?

SOLD

It was great last week. Getting colder and more brittle (more realistic!)

Coleman Deming side is in suprisingly good shape, tho the recent storm brought rain levels above the summit (rinsing away any late-summer snow accum.) The Glacier travel is relatively straight forward, even for october in a drought year. The first 1000' vert above the hogsback camp is predominantly ice. Make sure the 'pons are sharp. Firn line is at about 7800' and slots are easy to get around. One leaning "bridge" still remains between two slots at 8500'. But it is super solid. A bit of bare ice still lurks on the roman wall. Good luck. -DT

still 4 sale

More junk to clean out of the closet. Make an offer if interested... 1) Black Diamond X-15 3rd tool, 40 cm or so. There is no pick or bolt. You'll have to dig those up from somewhere (or wait till i find an extra pick around here....) 2)Lowe Alpine Helmet. One-size-fits-all-variety. Helmet is about 3 or 4 years old, but hasn't been used to much. 3)Lowepro camera case. Fits larger autofocus SLR's (I had an F100 with 24-120 EDIF in it). Pretty well used. Comes with shoulder strap and a bunch of sharpie-ink where I scratched out my address.

I was cleaning out a pile of gear in the closet and found these. They are size 11 liners for some scarpa alpha's I bought 2 years ago. There is some lint and maybe some cat hair's in the velcro, but the liners don't stink. I used them for a couple of short trips, then replaced them with intuitions when I went on an AK trip. The alpha shells eventually got worn out, so I have these liners still in great shape, just sitting around in the closet doing nothing. The origional insoles are gone. You probably wouldn't want mine anyway, they are stinky. Treat yourself to some new superfeet. Make an offer.

take a picture of your feet and post it here for all to see...

Also, i don't know if it is like this elswhere right now, but the bees are awfull on the approach to bear. I was stung once on the way in, once on the way out, and my partner was stung twice, several miles apart, on the hike out. There were times in the forest above bear camp, where the ominous sound of buzzing could be heard throughout the forest...

I tried to make the route easier by throwing all the shitty holds off.

So those were your sticky dot tread shoe prints that were leading us off into the devils club... My friend and I just climbed the DNB on Bear on Wednesday. THe climbing certainly isn't super cruxy, but then again, there are only two to three 5.10 pitches out of 20, so it can't be that hard. But I thought the rock sure sucked, the choss-climbing felt sustained to a wimp like me, and it made routefinding tedious. We got off-route at the snow-patch and did our own choss-fest to gain the ridge crest. Complete with big pendulum traverse and A0 stuff. We camped next to Ruta Lake exactly where your first picture is taken. We were afraid of not finding water. I am glad we did it. Perfect camp sites, and only an hour back and forth to the notch. The berries are still incredible up there and the salmon run was incredible in chilliwack river!

Mike, did you drop the tent poles? Nice Job!

wasn't ours. we dug it up. We lost a fuel can, a bag of garbage, some dirty underwear and socks, and a green stuffsack with minidiscs and film in it. I heard someone lost a tent...

I did have a few scanned - from the one roll which survived the trip. Racking up for summit day... The summit of Waddington as viewed from the NW summit in shitty weather... Our tent, during a digging mission partway into the storm... Descent from high camp, looking north Mike King picking us up at Rainy Knob

thank you.

Both shovels were BCA shovels - aluminum. Both blades broke at the exact same spot. The aluminum ruptured around the shaft at the blade-end of the weld. Repeated warnings to not pry may have not been heeded by clients. Who knows. I have abused shovels far worse than this, and had them last longer. The client's shoulder reduced on its own, but his arm was useless and he had little feeling in his right hand. Slinging his shoulder sufficed for the trip out.

When flying out of the Waddington Range towards White Saddle, one can look out of the left side of the chopper off to the distance in the north west (north of the waddington range) and see a nice rock peak with a formidable east buttress. I am searching for information and history about this peak.

Climb: Super-Brief Waddington TR-Various activity near Plummer hut and Bravo Glac. Date of Climb: 7/23/2005 Trip Report: I headed into the Waddington Range twice this summer. The first trip was up to the Tellot Glacier. I was guiding one client. We camped at the dragons back after being dropped off at the plummer hut on July 16. On July 17 we climbed a new? route on the dragons back, it would be a little to the right of the 5.10 (the second route from the left side) in Don Serl's guidebook. We have no name for it, it was nice 5.8 hand-jammies for about three long pitches, then a short lichen pitch to the top of the wall. It is short, obscure, and I wonder if anyone will ever climb it. We have no name for it. On July 18 we attempted a route up the highest Tellot Spire. It was extremely windy, and the rock was verglassed. We ended up veering left at the second pitch (more towards Tellot #2). The first pitch was easy mixed, the second was dry rock. My client dislocated his shoulder while reaching down to unstrap his crampons on a ledge two pitches up. Rope trickery ensued as I lowered and tandem-rapped my client a couple pitches back to the glacier. We went back to our camp, I dragged our heavy kit to a flat spot below on the glacer, we hoofed it to the Plummer, and flew out that afternoon, and returned to Bellingham, somewhat disappointed, the next day. On Monday, July 23rd, I returned to White Saddle with another Guide and 4 clients to attempt the main summit of Waddington via the Bravo Glacier. We flew on the morning of the 24th, and made good progress up the lower Bravo to the Cauldron Camp. It was in much better shape than it was when I climbed it earlier in July a year ago. The following morning we found that crossing the 'Schrund was MUCH easier than it was a year ago. No two-tooling was required. We made rapid progress up to Bravo col, then up to Spearman Saddle, where we camped. We climbed Spearman Peak the next day, following the convoluted knife-edge ridge away from camp and up towards the petite summit pyramid. Here is Spearman Peak (not my pic - client's digi pic) The next day we moved up to the high camp at 12,300 feet, right below the tooth. A shovel broke this day breaking camp. Bad news. On the 28th I summitted the NW summit with two clients. Beautiful climbing in poor visibility with high winds. The other guide and his client were turned back on the main summit (at the notch) by these winds. We returned to camp at the beginning of a nasty storm. We were storm-bound for three days, digging like fiends with our one functioning shovel. One tent was burried (later recovered). We woke on monday, aug 1st, 80%buried ourselves, sharing small 2-P tents between three spooning men. Some sleeping bags were rendered useless by the wet nature of the storm. The wind blew at least 60-70 MPH in camp, and at 100+MPH over the ridge 150' away from us. Any person who left the tent to dig would find themselves plastered in rime within seconds. Eyelashes would freeze together. Goggles or shades were useless, as they rimed up almost immediatly. Probably 6-7 FEET of snow fell around camp in less than 72 hours. It was far worse than any storm I have ever seen on 9 trips to the alaska range. Partly because it was warm and extremely wet. Here is a view of the summit tower - heavily rimed: While digging out in the sunshine, we broke the second and last shovel. I shudder to think what would have happened if it had broken sooner. We departed camp tuesday morning, and couldn't locate our cache at spearman saddle. The cache-markers were completely buried (bigtime snow-accumulation zone in the wind eddy at spearman saddle. I bet 5-10 feet could be deposited here in a big storm due to the side of the fetch on the buckler glacier side). In this cache is garbage, extra fuel and food, dirty sox and undies, some minidiscs, and my USED FILM. If anyone ever finds this cache sometime in the next century, let me know! All I would ever want back is my film. I learned my lesson. It was the first and last time I have ever cached film. We flew out that night, and pancakes at White Saddle the next morning, and went to squamish. Gear Notes: lots of shovels. Longer cache markers.