Cranbo

A buddy of mine - well, a Facebook buddy and an old high-school pal I haven't actually seen in years - was on a team just below the avi. He saw it. He ran like hell. He felt the spray from it. He's glad to be alive. This was his first mountain experience. I haven't asked him yet whether he's gonna try it again. I think I like climbing with my friends and little climbing club. If the conditions aren't right, we say "Let's wait till next week." My friend's been planning this all year, as have the guides, of course, and it was either go now, or forever hold your peace. Not that I'm suggesting the climbing guides would let that sort of pressure affect their go/no-go judgment. :-/ - rob

A good friend of mine was the belayer, and I am also friends with the climber. I'll just call them "B" for Belayer, and "L" for, um, cLimber. L was about 35 feet up Rainy Day Woman (5.12a) on World Wall I, and biffed. B is not sure why so much rope played out, but L grounded. He was shaken up, but ultimately he walked out of the hospital that night. I saw him Friday and he looks fine - doesn't have a scratch on him. A freakin' miracle is how B put it. - rob

And to feed back on a few of the ideas presented here... - I can't make an iPhone work on Verizon - the iPhone's GSM, and Verizon.... isn't. Right? - A POS free Verizon phone with a pre-paid account will cost a minimum of $100/year, as the time you buy for pre-paid expires after some given period. I crunched the numbers and $100/year is the cheapest I could find. That'd kinda piss me off to pay that for something I'm hopefully not gonna use (yeah, I know, cheap insurance, you say....) - rob

I was amused and horrified in equal parts once when I was, I believe, at Smith, and there was a couple climbing next to us, and one of 'em was up on the rock and shouted down "Take!" The belayer hollers "What?" Up top replies "Take! Take me off belay!" Maybe it was their special code. :-/ - rob

That's pretty funny, I was just on Baker exactly there, two days ago! And I got the same weird Rainier behavior (which Bogart explained, thanks) where it said I had coverage, 1 or 2 bars, but would just do "Connecting...." for a few minutes and then fail. Actually, it worked once, for about 30 seconds, then never again. I think I may just stick with my POS free Verizon phone, as many people recommended. Crunch the numbers, an iPhone costs around $2K/year - whereas my V plan is "only" $600/year - so I may just stick with that.... - rob

That's plenty "definitive" for me. I can live with "hit and miss", I'm just wary of AT&T being mostly "miss".... Can you give any examples or rules of thumb as to where you can or can't connect? I have always been puzzled, for example, that when I'm on Rainier's south side, my Verizon phone would show one or two bars of signal strength, but would consistently fail to connect. A few years ago I found if I forced the phone to go analog, I could connect there, but since analog went away, I haven't found a work-around. - rob

OK, call me a Yuckin' Fuppie with more dollars than sense, but I'm lusting after an iPhone. Years ago I went with Verizon, back when analog service was better in the back county - I'm talking Pacific Northwest, here - but analog's been gone for a while, so that's not a factor anymore. I wanted to know if people have any concrete experience with using an iPhone (3G, I suppose) off the beaten path. I try not to yak it up too much whilst climbing, but would like to have it for the proverbial emergency situation - OK, and calling my wife from the summit. :] Is moving to an iPhone a mistake? (Please try to keep this conversation to connectivity issues... yeah, like that's gonna happen....) Thanks, - rob

I told my buddy another option is to replace the leader's somewhat used Camalot with a similar piece off my bud's rack, then go buy *himself* the shiny new cam! - r

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I couldn't find such a thread anywhere... and I'm sure there's no "right" answer... and I'm sure I'll get lotsa snide remarks but hey, it's raining out, so... What do y'all do when a second on a trad climb can't clean a piece of gear? Does he "owe" it to the leader? (Assuming it's the leader's gear). Should they split the cost? Figure it will all even out in the end? This happened to some friends recently, and altho I told 'em my opinion (I favor #3, above), I thought I'd see if there's a consensus here. Thanks, - rob

My only suggestion for the new supplement (I picked one up at RP-Terrebonne a couple weeks ago) is that the plastic laminate for the cover is too damm stiff. It doesn't lie flat, or stay open, or stay closed, it just wants to be the way it is. (Or maybe this is an early edition?) But I've been coming to Smiff for 9 years now, and thanks to this book we sent 3 new routes on our last (short) trip! - r

Cool, I have a Rock Empire cam that I picked up about 6 years ago in Wales. Time to retire it, perhaps. But it's my biggest piece! - rob

We were at Smiff last weekend (along with 12 bazillion other people) and went off to the Marsupials to seek some solitude. Oops, it was full of Mazamas! But they were nice, and a couple of 'em were nice to look at.

My wife grew up about a half mile from this place; her aunt and uncle, until about 3 years ago, lived immediately above it. We went hiking with her brother yesterday, so I asked them if they knew anything about it. Apparently it's an old quarry - it perhaps was called the Black River Quarry? Didn't have any beta as to climbability, but they did say that in the mid 60's one of their little classmates fell to his death there. Cheers! - rob

OK, I know we all were new at some time and everybody's gotta learn somehow, but... Spring is (finally) here in the Northwest, and the Noobus Climorus is out in force. Have any "fun" sightings to share? We bailed on St. Helens this weeking cuz of the avvy danger, and after also bailing on doing a backpacking trip, decided to just go to Exit 38. Altho it wasn't so crowded we had to wait in line - actually, we got on everything we wanted without any waits! - there were crowds of people with shiny new racks with a dozen QDs (on a 5-bolt route), REI shopping bags and other recently-unpackaged toys, etc., etc. But the only really scary thing we saw was a team consisting of a young woman who seemed, more or less, to know what she was doing, and a beefy dude who was obviously new. He bulled his way up TR-ing a 5.9 at We Did Rock, and altho I wasn't paying close attention, seemed to be having a lot of trouble setting up the lower. So when he started letting himself down on one side of the rope, with the short end just 5 feet below him, his belayer shouted "Jason! The other end of the rope should reach the ground!". No shit. So Jason hurks himself back to the chains, and I think he was just holding the chains with one hand whilst pushing the rope thru what we assumed was his ATC, taking quite a bit of time and huffing and puffing at it. One of my buddies asks his belayer "Is he anchored in?" about 4 times, with no response, so we start shouting "Jason, are you on your personal anchor?", with no response from J, either, until one of his friends (they seemed to be there in a Noobus Posse of about 12) says to us "He doesn't know what that is", to which I shout "THEN WHAT THE F*** IS HE DOING UP THERE?" - meaning of course not "What action is he taking?" but "What is his reason for existing?" So eventually J gets the rope almost to the ground, a buddy comes over and ties a knot in it (one double overhand, up about 6 feet high, which is stupid and has exactly the ill effect later that you'd expect) and they tell Jason to come down. Which he does, and now we can see that one rope is just hanging free, and the other goes thru a quickdraw clipped to his harness, and he's hand-over-hand/sliding/slipping down the rope. He's a Stallone-looking dude, so he actually pulls this off for about the 1st 50 feet out of 70, then starts sliding out of control till the biner on the draw snags the knot at the botton, at which point he kinda goes upside down and all tangled, but he doesn't splat. My buddy the WFR and I relax a tad as the Noobs all giggle with glee. Shite. Afterwards I wondered if I should have said something, either in the heat of the moment or perhaps in a more measured way, later. Instead, we just moved on, quickly. - rob

Sweat, The falls going for the top weren't off into space the way the last one was, there was rock under my feet at that point. If you look at the pic http://www.smithrock.com/aboutsr/gallery/images/monkey_face.jpg this was in the area like 45 degrees up and right of the mouth... so at that point I wasn't looking straight down to the ground, like I would be on the final pendulum swing. But I do gotta say I think I have something broken in my brain - if I'm on a solid line, I don't really have a fear of heights. Well, not if I don't think about it too hard, anyway. I'm sure I could spook myself if I let my imagination run wild, but I try to stay focused on the upward-and-onward task at hand. ;-) Glad you enjoyed my travails! - rob