MisterMo

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.

Second a bunch of what's been posted plus: Regarding more winter stuff, particularly backcountry skiing the WSDOT/WSP combined effort to reduce/eliminate backcountry/out ot bounds skiing throught marking every conceivable pullout on US2 from Yodelin to Prophet's Point as "No Parking" or "15 Min Parking Only" plus the winter-only hitchiking & pedestrian ban from Yodelin to Scenic. The signs go up about when the area opens & come down when they close. doesn't have a fuken thing to do with traffic safety IMO just a desire to keep people out of the backcountry.

Done it lots of times: No problem for me but I'm a pretty big boy. I grant you hip belay loses a lot of its appeal with a "little" belayer & a "big" faller & even more so it there aren't enough pieces in to provide some friction in the system. In general I don't dispute its shortcomings but I find its simplicity appealing. Back in the day the Mounties used a training rigamarole using manila ropes, run through blocks yet , attached to a free-falling concrete weight . Zero stretch, zero system friction and a damn good wham when you got the weight. I have a lifelong scar all the way across my back from the rope getting under both the pad they provided and my shirt. Ouch! I held onto it though, caught the "fall" proving only that adolescent determination can overcome stupidity in at least some circumstances. Lowering someone with a perlon rope is pretty tame by comparison.

I've got a season & a half on the Diamirs and am really happy with them. I was and remain suspicious about various plastic parts and the specter of difficult/impossible field repair, but I haven't managed to break any thing yet. IMHO "light" and "alpine touring" are mutually exclusive concepts.

as good a place as any to jump in...I've been thru this entire thread and it appears to revolve around various gizmos and their potentially fatal shortcomings. I hate to seem like a retard, overly reactionary, or excessively temporally challenged, but: What is actually wrong with belaying around your waist? Waist/hip belays have held some rather enormous falls have they not? The selling point of such, to me, is that there's little or knothing to go wrong, get flipped over or sideways, drop & lose, or goof up in the dark. Just gotta keep that hand on the rope & clip in at the station so you know in which direction the pull will come. Rapping is another story; I still use a carabiner brake & freely admit there's a bunch of ways to fuck that up.

...and in this corner of hell...The devil's evil twin says OK you got it; I buy your reasoning 100%...but...first...let's impose proper diet & excercise upon 100% of the population and really save some lives. To save a few more we could ban everything even remotely "risky". Same logic applies, doesn't it?

That was the first thing I did

Idle hands...

As old as the first war. Their "suicidal fanatics"; our "brave martyrs"...or some such hyperbole.

Thats your personal choice and everyone here respects it, I hope. I'm sure you do wear one when you are out climbing with your kids though.... Second those who have suggested this thread is a poor place for a helmet debate.

Glad too, to hear they're OK. Easy tho it may be, incidents on the Jello Tower pitch of Midway are not with out precedent. An friend of mine once managed to slip somehow in the first 20 or so feet of the pitch, and without having placed anything yet tumbled down through the rubble to the lower corner of Jello Tower. He was injured not seriously enough to call out the Mounties, but badly enough that half a dozen of us improvised a litter & carried him down to the highway. Near the same point in time the father of a friend was leading the same pitch; he had just reached the little alcove place below the top and clipped into the ring piton that used to live there when he fainted, apparently from the heat. No further incident but if he'd fainted ten seconds earlier he'd have gone to the ground.

Second Evergreen Mountain. One of the easiest/coolest spots on the west side. OK, not great camp spots if you can't get in the lookout. Carry water. Forget the road #; reached by about 10 mi of road on the East side of the beckler from Jack's Pass Also West Cady Ridge. 5 star meadows reached through 5 star old growth. About 3mi. 2k vert to first good camps alas no water on top here this time of year either.

There's a great little Tom Patey snippet about climbers-become-parents who slack on serious climbing because "it wouldn't be fair to the children...etc.,etc", & then hop in their fast cars & drive as though immortal. He put it much better than I can; it's in an old Mountain and probably in his anthology.

Yeah that one is not a good one unless you get the light just rust right. I live up there and been able to catch air on those street crossings. I always think about building a small ramp to set up on one of those street crossing, the nice thing is there is endless runout, until the light. Way too long ago my Mom worked up at the Jr High School up there. One day a couple of the local kids sent a bowling ball down Dravus...pretty well fucked up a car near the bottom.

Dravus Street east to Interbay...well all but the runout anyhow. Actually I think you could get cranking pretty good on SR2 from the Tunnel Creek curve west down to Scenic. Not super steep but a good clean fairly straight stretch of road on weekdays when you can ride out in the lane.

That was Lucky Light Draft. It came along later.

The Bush House closed due to structural issues. Informed conjecture is that while the current owner has the means to make repairs, they also have the means to ignore it. Rumours abound about new ownership/reopening but nothing tangible has happened although somebody did cut the grass last week. Past owner(s) have suffered & failed because of, under one regime or another, under-capitalization, lousy food, poor service, and all the other things that make restaurants go tu. Local controversies, hirings & firings, and all that sort of BS aside, a place like the Bush can't make it on "locals"; there aren't enough locals to keep them afloat. Both the Bush and the tavern (when it operated) relied on summer revenues to pay the bills in the dark wet months.

Not too creative but.... Bowron Punch 151 Bacardi and Tang about 50/50 Coffecup full of that & you just don't care

I don't have a clue what's physiologically "better" but... Have you ever watched a cow run? Enthusiastic but utterly lacking in grace. That's how I feel when I run...like a lumbering lummox (no offense there dude). I've always hated running; always liked riding my bike. So I ride for the pleasure of it & to be in shape for other things. I think it pays off well especially if you mash some. Mashing seem to be anathema to roadies but it's exactly what you do on foot on steep ground with a pack. No I don't worry particularly about getting hit by a car (something's gonna get you), but I do as a rule stay off SR2; heavy fast traffic is a drag.

Try Captains. They're in Fishermans Terminal & maybe still downtown somewhere on 3rd as well.

You won't want to hear this, and there's a nice reply in here somewhere about the lack of value in anecdotal evidence, but TIME was the only thing that made mine go away: about six or eight months if I remember correctly. Advil helped, avoiding heavy packs with waist belts helped, but it just seems to takea while to heal. Wierdest set of symptoms I've ever had BTW. I was pretty freaked out about it for a bit. My left calf muscles still twitch 24/7 17 years later.

Second GregW's post about above Index. More specifically: 1) Upper North Fork Sky. At the end of the pavement above Index take the left fork; go all the way (Past Lake Blanca Tr, etc. ) to the end. BIG timber, Cool waterfalls & pools in the river up there; lots of good places to walk, not much to climb. A teensy bit buggy up there just now. But...it's a bit further...but...when I get the urge to car camp in heaven I suck it up & drive to Harts Pass. Do sunrise/set at Slate Peak, walk south to Grasshopper Pass.

That would be a plan except for the obvious drawback that one will most likely be dropping multiple boxes which will not all land in the ten ring but only in the same general area. Come to think of it though, one of those treasure hunter metal detectors would probably work really well if you had some metal in each box...though you might seem like a silly sight, nickel-nosing in the middle of the Monarch Icecap or something