hemp22

Bill, for organizing all that excess rock gear that you own, it seems like it'd be better to have the daisy pockets going across horizontally instead of vertically like they are on those things in the picture. Also, from the picture, it looks like those frame bars would make it so that you can't fold & roll up the unit like you could with Moof's california roll. It seems like the ones you pictured would be just installed in your home and not moved....and if you're looking for a stationary storage/organization unit, isn't it cheaper to just use some peg-board?

Looks like a home-made version of a California Roll

Damn Bill. You're gonna make the rest of us look like mere amateurs because our racks fit into only 1 picture...

No comment on this topic of spray in the forums. But it's nice to see the sunny climbing pictures. the forecast of rain in the mountains means the stellar skiing won't take my mind off of climbing this weekend, so i'll have to reminisce about sunny climbing days instead.... triassic sands - good times maybe i'll see if i can scrounge up some more

I agree too. We all owe a substantial debt of gratitude to you Kellie, and you'll be leaving a large pair of shoes to fill for anyone with the guts to take on that role. Divvying up the state a little more does seem like a good idea. The Portland area is so far removed from the southern oregon crags, it'd seem overwhelming to try to tackle all of that. But you did so admirably. So....now does this mean you'll have more time to get out climbing with us this summer?

'05 subaru legacy 2.5GT 21 city. 27-28 hwy. mpg can be improved by skipping the turbo, of course.

i'm not a developer or anything, but i've been using PCs forever, and just recently it became OK for me to purchase a mac, so i bought a macbook pro for home use last year. The transion to using a Mac has been pretty easy. I think the one-button mouse is great actually - you just use a second finger to right-click, or to scroll, so it's easier....and now i find myself trying to do it that way with the touchpad on my work PC. Figuring out the little software navigation differences is the only tough bit....i'm used to using the backdoor shortcuts a lot in windows, and I don't know them in Mac software, so for some things it seems more difficult. And, the best part from a use-ability standpoint is that it takes like 30 seconds to boot up and be running - compared to my standard operating procedure for my PC, which is to take it out of standby when I get to work in the morning, and then go get coffee while it wakes up... So anyway, don't let the transition part scare you...but the point about needing to run windows-only software through crappy virtualization may be a concern.

i second what the other folks have said. graham is very good about repairing stuff, and is normally good about getting back to you when the OR show isn't in progress. I sent him my pack and he got it just before leaving for the OR show - so he let me know he probably wouldn't be able to get to it until he was back.

if you're interested in checking out one of the Cilogear packs in PDX, you can take a look at mine (once I get it back - I just sent it off to graham for some touch-ups). I'd agree that it's great for climbing - good weight, size & versatility. I've used it a couple times so far for B/C skiing and it worked fine for the mellow tooling around that I was doing...but yeah, it's not as refined as some other packs out there that are more purpose-built for more serious B/C skiing/boarding

nation.needs, welcome to town. this time of year can be particularly bad for driving...especially if we have a light frost like we did last week that ends up delaying schools and bringing perfectly clear highways to a standstill. today was nice at least - wish i could've gotten out climbing. Kat, ain't you down with OPB? that's oregon public broadcasting...i think those stickers are required in this state on any Volvo that's more than 5 years old. The DMV probably sends them with your registration tags.

paulina is at about 6300' - about the same elevation as the base @ Mt Bachelor.

Retire your old harness by sending it in for strength testing. Rock & Ice, Arc'teryx and Mountain Gear are doing destructive testing of old harnesses. If you send them your retired harness, they'll give you a gift certificate for $25 off of an Arc'teryx purcase of $125 or more at Mountain Gear. (yes, you have to spend it on arc'teryx-only gear, and only at mgear). Arc'teryx's new "WARP"-technology harnesses aren't out yet, but they're supposedly going to be super comfortable (and super pricey), so maybe you could hold out and use the money for that. http://www.mountaingear.com/harness

i took a fall one time that managed to pull the rope through a constriction and into the crack, which was flared back into the rock. The rope had stretched just thin enough at the peak force of the fall to slip though...and then it wouldn't come back out. The rope moved fine back inside the crack, but I couldn't move up any further due to the z-clip effect caused by the constriction. body weight wouldn't stretch the rope enough to pop back out, so I had to anchor in and un-tie from the rope to thread it back out of the crack.... i've never had a climbing shoe get caught on a draw or piece during a climb, but one time when scrambling down from the top of a climb i did manage to get the thumb loop on the heel of my shoe caught on a draw hanging off the back of my harness. ended up having to do the one-legged funky chicken dance down a bunch of scree before i could stop and get it unclipped.

yeah, RuMR is right - Bishop's Terrace. It is do-able in 1 pitch up to the terrace with a long enough rope (we had 70M), but I'm not sure if a 50M would work.

not quite. this one's a 5.8. it's off the road to the ahwahnee. bomber hands up top.

Mark - No idea on the route, don't think I've ever been there, but it's some great-looking rock. What direction from Bend? Here's a nice, popular 1-pitch in the Valley that no one identified in my recent TR:

they should be able to tell the difference.... I mean, don't you know how to do the easy taste test to make sure you're buying good quality crack, and not that cheap-o "Metolius" stuff they sell at the climbing shop?

I did that on a trip to SLC in Oct and they let me on w/draws, harness and belay device. I'd say basically the same thing - just take your harness & shoes in your carry on and check all the other stuff. even if they lose the rope&rack, you can find benevolent people to climb with or borrow gear from with until you get your stuff back. i've travelled a couple times recently with shoes, harness & chalk bag (but no hardware) in my carry-on and haven't any problems.

1 of the very, very few things i've figured out that i haven't noticed everyone else was already doing regards climbing w/ headlamps n' helmets - most headlamps can actually go UNDER your helmet, instead of around it - wearing it that way prevents such disastrous losses and resulting epics. check it out! Yeah, that's a good one. A lot of these stories sound so similar... anyway, if i had even thought to bring a headlamp along in the first place, then hopefully we would've been better off. actually, when i know i'll need a headlamp, i'm in the habit of taking two....not so much because i'm worried about dropping the whole headlamp, but because my old one was a Petzl Tikka that enjoyed opening up randomly and spilling its batteries out...

yeah, that's correct - Nalgene makes a polyethylene version. link they're actually a bit lighter than the polycarbonate - but they don't hold up as well to hot liquids, and they tend to retain some scent/color from having beverages other than water in them.

do some searching online. i haven't been to them yet, but i know that there are huts down in the willamette pass area that you can XC ski into and spend the night at in the winter. those should be pretty accessible to you from Eugene. After you find where you're going you should be able to get a good handle on how concerned you'll need to be about avalanches. some of the nicer XC trails & huts (i.e. the more expensive ones) will have groomed trails etc and should be fine. but of course, checking the NW avalanche center forecasts & conditions is a good idea for whereever you go.

damn...awesome stories you guys. nothing momentous here, but i'll see if i can contribute a few laughs... My first trip to Beacon was a humbling one... I went out with two friends who will remain nameless - let's just call them Leader and Follower1 - and I'll be playing the roll of Follower2. None of us were exactly what I'd call "very experienced" at this point. Neither Follower1 nor I had ever placed a piece of gear before, so we were ready to faithfully follow our leader whereever he was going to take us. Leader had the rack & double-ropes, and was also the only one to have been to Beacon before (like once, maybe - and he'd never been up the SE corner before). Our objective was to head up the SE corner. This was also one of my earliest multi-pitch excursions. I had been up a couple 2-3 pitch things at Smith probably, but the SE corner would've been the longest route by far. So we arrived at the rock at around noon or 1:00 on a beautiful late autumn Saturday, and headed down the trail only to find a couple other pairs of people starting up the corner, or waiting to start up the corner. So we knew we had some time to kill. We headed down to Free for All and played on that one a bit - taking our sweet time to let the other parties all get off the ground. When we headed back to the base of Cruisin', the coast was clear, so we started heading up. At some point before leaving the ground, we checked the time - it was about 4:00pm, but we didn't really pay any attention to it since Leader had assured us that there were really only about 3-4 pitches of climbing, then a bunch of easy walking/scrambling to the top. Everything was going fairly smoothly for the first couple pitches up to Snag ledge - but with a group of 3 relative tenderfoots, we weren't exactly setting any speed records. But did I mention that it was autumn, and that the sun was going down by 7:00pm or so? By the time we were up on the grassy ledges, the sun was starting to go down. Now would also be a good time to mention that we didn't have a book or topo and, as mentioned earlier, none of us had been up the route before - so we were working from Leader's memory of the route topo/description: "After grassy ledges, it's just like 1-2 pitches of really easy climbing/scrambling to the trail at the top...." I'll never be 100% sure of where we took a wrong turn - but nowadays my best guess is that after the short chimney section above grassy ledges, we kept heading straight up instead of taking the nice easy ramp up to the right. We did a couple of short pitches in the twilight, with the last one ending with the three of us huddled under a tree and it being pitch black. At this point we got to thinking (or admitting to ourselves) that we might be off route. Leader informed us that "we've climbed like 5 pitches already - so we must be really close - the trail has got to be only another 50-100 feet above us." Surely, it would be easier to just head up to the trail than to try and rap all the way down in the dark. So now would be a good time to also mention that we didn't have any headlamps or warm clothes. It was a nice sunny day when we'd left the car, so why would we need them? This little adventure took place back when most cellular phones were analog, and pretty bulky units with crappy back-lighting. But I was trying to be a bit of a technophile at the time, and I had bought one of the first phones to come out with a full color display. Taking it out of my pocket to check the time again (and curse a bit under my breath), I noticed that it lit up our little belay station pretty well. It was this shiny cell phone display that turned out to be our only consistent light source now that the sun had gone down. So, we handed it to Leader and let him try to keep on leading upward. Of course, as one might imagine, it's kind of a pain to try to climb while having to constantly push buttons on a cell phone to keep the backlight from going off. Thus, despite the best efforts of our valiant cellular savior (and the occasional temporary respite when a passing train would gloriously light up the rock), our Leader wasn't able to get much more than 15 feet above the belay. It was slow going when trying to use the phone to find each hold, and it was certainly harder climbing than we'd been expecting at this point. So finally it was time to admit defeat. It was time for Leader to come back down and for us to figure out how the hell to get off the rock. It was a first time bailing for any of us (as I mentioned, we weren't exactly well-travelled climbers at this point) We started rapping. It turns out that rappelling down a completely unknown rock in the dark, with only cell phone light to look for another anchor spot, isn't a whole lot easier than climbing in the dark. We were slow and cautious. 1 rap off a tree, then a second rap set up off some slung horns, and then while Leader was heading down, out of sight on rap #2, we heard a girlish squeal of joy come up from the darkness. "I FOUND BOLTS!" he yelled. Signs of civilization! and surely a sign that we were at least back onto an established route, if not close enough to be on the ground soon. Now, another added bit of excitement was that during all these raps, the phone started to ring. It was my then girlfriend (now wife), calling irately because she thought that I'd gone out to a bar with my friends without inviting her along. I didn't answer any of the calls - the last thing I wanted to do was to answer and have to explain "Honey, I'm cold and lost in the dark, halfway up some god-foresaken rock". So, at least I didn't make her worry - instead she was just really pissed. Anyway, by the time we got down to the bolted rap station, we'd remarkly only had to leave behind a couple slings and biners. And luckily enough, that third rap got us to the ground (having double ropes sure did feel good at that point). After tucking our tails safely between our legs, we stumbled back up the trail (still by cell-phone-light) to our car and were pleased to find nothing other than a friendly reminder on our windshield from the park ranger noting that the park closes at dark. Time check: 12:15 AM. Holy crap - just get me home so that I can begin to endure the wrath of the significant other that I knew was coming when I explained where I was. At least the flogging would probably warm me up. Post-script: It was a couple years before I would visit that rock again. Fortunately, in the meantime, I had started leading trad and had some more experience under my belt. My next time to Beacon, armed with a photocopied topo & route description, I headed up with 2 other friends (this time it was me doing all the leading), and cruised up the SE corner without any issues or mishaps (except for me unwittingly climbing one of the direct variations to the Slab pitch - the one that goes up the dihedral just below the snag ledge tree - instead of the easy way up). I've been back a number of times since, but Beacon definitely still holds a certain stigma in my mind...There's no place like Beacon to give you that good, reliable reality-check to put you in place if you start thinking you're hot stuff.

Trogdor and Chuck are both right on. The roof & dikes are on Haystack at the Leap. The Tuolumne pics (as well as the "thin crack") are West Crack on DAFF.

Yeah, I figured he'd probably related our Red Rock adventures to you. Anyway, correct on layback=Nutracker, and Elcap=Pineline. The hand crack isn't Selaginella though - didn't get on that one. And yes, the wide crack & thin crack & golden granite is in Tuolumne. Our original objective that day had been to do Regular route on Fairview dome, but it snowed on us the night before, so we decided not to do a north-facing climb, and instead we chose this nearby route that gets more sun exposure. maybe i'll give this guessing game a few days and then go through and actually label the pictures.... Bill - Thanks. looking forward to your Red Rock TR too

Thanks all for the comments. It was definitely a great trip. The "luge" ride was entertaining - but we actually had more fun watching people bungee jump up there and rating their screams... FGW - correct on Frogland and the Black Orpheus descent. We only had 1 rope to rap with, but I think the 2 descent routes shared that downclimb... I just got a bunch of other red rocks pics back too...