MisterMo

It'd be quite a drive to the real factory sale. Didn't they move manufacturing to China?

Very good, won't claim the best. It's just above Gunn Peak colored a weird red. Scuse me while I shoot out the Index Avenue street lights.

Interesting... I can't speak to both as I've only been up via Pyramid Lake but until your post I never heard anyone sanything even remotely nice about Colonial Creek.

Index/Galena to pavement end from town if it actually dries out. Other things otherwise. PM if interested.

"the nuns there thought they could beat an education into me but I outfoxed 'em" On the Waterfront

Not enough sense to plug up an ant's ass Like trying to feed a raw oyster into a parking meter... (middle aged sex)

The Chieftan in Squamish or the Index Tavern; I'm not positive which. The Index Tav for years had a roadhouse license, minors could be in there until 8 PM but had to sit at the formica end of the bar. Really liked the Chieftan.It was a crowded & energetic place.

In the 1972 Ascent, closing a review of climbing periodicals, David Roberts penned the following paragraph. This thread caused me to recall it and dig it out. Besides making me feel suddenly very old, I think it's an interesting little comment to look back on: "Climbing, as we know it, no doubt, is in its last throes. In future histories of the 19th and 20th centuries it may occupy a few intriguing footnotes, perhaps a whole paragaph or two - classed with such period arcana as whaling and baseball. The wonder will be that so much youthful energy and brilliance were expended on a quixotically specialized wrinkle of the (already exhausted) pursuit of terrestrial exploration. Scholars, wading through the jargon of climbing articles, will be puzzled at the rhapsodies on A1 cracks and F9 slabs, the paeans to front-pointing, and hanging bivy tents. Alas-we could have told them that mountaineering, while it lasted, was life itself. But in the 21st century "we" will be doing something else: deep-sea spelunking, perhaps, or dust-storm sailing on Mars."

Not yer daddy but....re your photo: birds drown like that, nosediving into glasses to drink. Don't leave part full glasses around your bird.

The sum total of my SLC experience is less than a week but even in that short time I formed a clear impression that the state of Utah is very much under the thumb of the Mormon Church. I don't think I'd be happy for long in a place so influenced by one religion. Your mileage may of course vary. I don't, BTW, mean just the weird liquor laws; hell, Washington has weird liquor laws. It was rather lots of little things that all added up.

Liberty Cafe. South side of Blewett

It was supposed to be the "SMC Dome". Clark had "found" it and with visions of glory lugged a bunch of stuff up there & futzed around the better part of a day. Al finally just went ahead & did it in late afternoon & the name just stuck.

No just doing that chain-link rock catcher stuff. the highway will remain its twisty, windy, shady, two lane self.

Your TR seems to have sparked a bit of a...fuss hereabouts. It appears you went off and did a pretty cool route and along the way bumped into a thing or two that you hadn't known was on the menu...that's alpine climbing....and you did have an unplanned bivouac...that's alpine climbing too...and you dealt with all of those things & had a pretty good trip which is commendable. Sooo...good going; nice TR. I'm mystified by all the fuss.

Great photos. Besides being really pretty & apparently thinly populated what's it like?

I have consumed enough booze out of water bottles over time to float a pretty good sized boat. Whatever ill or lasting effects this has caused I really doubt were caused by the containers. Bowron Punch: 151 Bacardi and Tang...about 50/50. Coffee cup full of that & you just don't care.

I'm using a Canon S-50. Far and away not the smallest out there. I like: viewfinder that zooms with lens, ability to turn LCD off, non-proprietary battery and memory. I'd be happier with fewer "features" in a smaller package. Im nervous about the lifespan of the sliding door on-off gizmo. I find I rearely shoot at or need 5MP but there's no harm in having that; they print nice. In general I'm really happy with it; it's easy to haul around everywhere unlike the Nikon & 5 lenses I used to lug on mountain trips.

FYI, although this may be common knowledge, the huge rings at Index are remnants from the quarry operation. The Lee Pickett photos of that(and other Sky Valley stuff) are accessible online at the UW library if anyone is curious. Don't remember the URL but I think it's easy to find if you just google his name. Saturdays thru the end of Sept. the little Index Museum across from the store has some excellent big prints of the old quarry up on the wall.

A proposal is of course, a long way from a built project; this will probably wind up in the same graveyard as Sandy Butte, the Tram to Muir, and Mt. Hinman...all serious proposals from the dawn of time. Eco and rape of the woods considerations aside, from a business point of view it's tough to envision: 1) A successful day use area that far from populations 2) A successful destination ski area serving up Washington snow and weather (well above treeline yet) competing with parts of the country that offer better conditions. No the skiing would only be part of a larger gimmick albeit no less an intrusion.

For a thing that defies all reason, human attempts to make some sense or order out of death fill volumes...rooms...libraries. My own sense of death is that dying will be somehow fascinating, enough so that the actual mechanism seems unimportant. Of course, I'm not in any rush; it will come in its own time.

I should know better but I'll try anyhow. It is not homogeneous, rather discrete crystals of quartz (a mineral), feldspar (a mineral), often (always?) mica (a mineral),etc. all globbed together. You can't write out a chemical formula for granite, in pieces of any size. Only if you break it up down to the level of individual crystals would you get homogeneity but you would have one of the constituent minerals; you would then have, say, a crystal of feldspar; it wouldn't even be granite any more. I give up, probably made it all worse

Indirect indeed it is compared to Eldo Creek. That's a pretty little traverse though, going in Sibley Creek & coming out Bostin Basin or Cascade Pass

Nice fotos. That's an interesting approach to Dorado Needle this late in the season. Earlier on it's fairly trivial. Were you perhaps intending a route on the Marble Creek side of Eldo Needle? If so there is a route down into Marble Creek Cirque from near the small lake at the head of the Northerly fork of Sibley Creek. I haven't been down it myself; people who have report it as unpleasant though direct. It may be the shortest route into Marble Creek. As I recall it's fairly obvious when you're in Marble Creek looking over at it, a lot less so when your're near that little lake, looking down. Been a while since I've been to either spot tho.

That isn't their aim. Their aim is to make everyone a "paying customer" by forcing them into expensive snowparks so that they can subsidize use by snowmobilers. Maybe in part but what else they don't want is people dropping in to the highway from out of the area. The issue began with a boarder supposedly wanting to drop in to Old Faithful release area so avalance control and pedestrian safety are the red herrings. But bullshit; they don't control Wenatchee Bowl or Tunnel Creek and they ticket persons comeing out of those areas when they hit the highway & stick their thumbs out. The ski area, incidentally, opposed this policy when it came out to no avail, or so I have been told. Last spring when Old Cascade Highway and Tunnel Creek roads started to melt out where a car could pull off SR2 and park legally the fuck-monkey plow crews pushed snow up to make that impossible. Same bullshit situation occurs on Hwy 410 at the Crystal Mountain Turnoff and in MRNP. To go overnite to Van Trump Park in winter you have choice of parking Nisqually Bridge or Longmire, not Christine Falls where you leave the road though. Demented assholes: I parked at Christine Falls for YEARS and the sun still came up in the morning. Guess maybe I should stop....

[quoteSeems to me you answered your own question. Only to a point: It was a bummer for sure. How I'd compare my experience to getting my finger sucked into a belay device or, worse, watching my belay device explode or come undone at the instant of holding a fall I can't say cause I haven't experienced those. Seems like the latter could easily be fatal though: given a choice between pain only or pain combined with premature violent death I'll choose the former.