tlinn

Climbed Wedge Mountain NE face this last weekend instead. Found nice blue ice streaks with a few inches of consolidated new snow in between. The new snow made for nice, easy cramponing and the blue ice was great for screws. Placed the odd picket in a few shady pockets where there was more snow. New snow is above 8500 feet.

Finally scored the roadie van eh steffan!

If you wanna buy a very small, practical rack I would buy a full set of nuts, add the orange and yellow metolious tcus, the pink and red tricams, plus a number one and a number two black diamond camalot. Those just seem to be the pieces that I place the most often at Squamish. The orange tcu is my favorite.

Is the North Face of Shuksan still in condition or is it too broken up? It seems like most of the fresh snow over the past two weeks has melted off and it could be good.

I was there in February and did some stuff at a place called El Chorro, a few hours north of Malaga. Mainly sport climbing but some pretty cool long trad routes exist in the canyon. Probably a bit too hot right now. But the El Chorro Rockfax guide is the book to get. Another cool place is Tarifa. We camped right at the bottom of the cliffs with a view over the Atlantic. You can always cool down at the beach if it gets too hot. The guidebook for that area is called Escalar en Cadiz and is in Spanish. If you're lucky you can get a copy from an English climber who publishes them in Tarifa. He had boxes full of them and gave me and my friend a few extras. Unfortunately I left them all with my friend in Europe.

Yeah, fun route...the swelling just went down in my leg.