JosephH

Thou shalt march as the lemmings do and drop your partners like raindrops from the sky...

Ivan, when's your last day at school...?

Peter, those are each seperate shows between now and November - as far as I know Simon has never said they're doing a group show though I believe several folks will be at the Stonemasters show. See the tour's website for the details on the various upcoming Portland shows

There are no "they" and particularly no "they will never", and it isn't a "battle" - it's science and politics. If nothing else, the Peregrines will likely regain their natural range in the 2014-15 timeframe at which time the closure could probably be dropped or amended in various ways. Until then there is always the possibility they'll nest elsewhere and we'll know where; at that point the South face would open within days of such a verification. Every year is different, and whether we're talking opening early or dropping/amending the closure - nothing will happen unless climbers are actively engaged in the process. Want it closed until July 15th into perpetuity? The surest way to do that is simply do nothing and sit around whining and bitching about it. Me? It's not my deal. Whining is something you typically attempt to nip in the bud by the time a kid is eight - after that it's likely to turn into a life-long, victimal swan song.

Got my tickets!!! Denny, Robbins, Donnini, Largo, and Portland's own Dean Caldwell - not to be missed...

Some climbs you are going to get up with a helmet on or you are going to expend more energy to do different moves to accomodate one. The route I'm currently working on is an overhanging, A-frame flared chimney through a big roof; you start out too wide to chimney and at the top it narrows to nothing forcing you out of it. With a helmet on you have to exit it sooner (lower) and that takes consider energy to compensate for. Given the pitch up to and including the roof is R/X rated I wore a helmet the first few goes, but the moves out at the apex of the flared chimney at the lip of the roof is just not doable with a helmet by me. My partner manages, but I know he's churning considerable extra energy to do it. Maybe once the roof goes I'll consider it again; but since the climbing up to the roof is now at least doable I've made the call to abandon the helmet and it's very much the right call in my case. As climbers we have a small set of ironclad "You should always..." rules - wearing a helmet isn't one of them and never will be for me. But recent generations of climbers are different, they obsess about and overcompensate for many things, often the wrong ones. Better 'rules' to harp on for today's [social] climbers would be "STFU and belay" and "don't dog on trad gear"...

I always bring a helmet; I sometimes wear it.

I don't know, is that how you're raising your kid - to wail and whine relentlessly and do nothing about situations he doesn't like? That was probably Django's approach after the fire or Doc Watson's parents after their kid went blind...

No, actually I don't - I'm just a guy who doesn't like not being able to climb there. The difference is, instead of being an relentlessly whiny little bitch, I chose to try and do something about it. What did you ever do to get it open even one day it wouldn't otherwise be?

Before it opens we'll do a survey of the Peregrine nest and one of the loose rock load for anything that might threaten the railroad. If anything looks bad we'll probably do a pre-open work session to drop it in a controlled fashion. Will keep folks advised as the next couple of weeks unfold.

"Take!" gathers much more naturally in a clenched throat than "Dogging!". Try it - bug out your eyes a bit, press your tongue against the roof of your mouth, clench your throat and try saying each of them. "Dogging!" requires way to much involvement of the back of the tongue and throat. Besides "Take [me]!" is way more intimate between partners.

Kevin's always fixing things.

Safety check = climbing safely. Engage wit, do not piss on self.

How can you subject your children to the risks of climbing safely?

I do, and have always, fallen a lot. That' said, I know someone who fell five feet to where their body was under an overhang and the side of their head wasn't and they ended up in a nursing home for life. It's a choice, bad things happen; a helmet may help, it may not, depends. I would say the bigger danger in today's climbing world by far is getting dropped.

Back home we used 'yowsa' for all signalling of any kind.

All the Gorge nesting appears to be about a week behind, so I'm just guessing we're looking at more like June 2x as opposed to a June 1x opening. I plan on really ramping up the monitoring over the next two weeks...

At no point have Falcon populations ever 'exploded' - they have made steady and painstaking gains from 1970 when there were no pairs east of the Mississippi and only a relative handful of them west of it to today where they have reclaimed about 3/4 of their natural range. That equates to places like NY state having just under 70 pairs in 2008 (13 pairs in NYC). There is not and never has been an 'explosion' of Peregrines - just a steady, hard fought forty year battle to restore them which sees gains and loses in every year. And we're still only talking under 2,000 breeding pairs in the U.S. and Canada. In Oregon the average number of young fledged per occupied nest site averaged 1.55 from 2001 to 2005 and 2.18 young per successful nesting attempt during this same period. Couple that with the fact they have a mortality rate in their first year of 59–70%, going down to 25–32% in adults. You can see between their rate of breeding success and mortality that there is no way they can even begin to sustain anything but slow and steady gains in their numbers. Kevbone has a far higher breeding rate.

Pretty much the only time I wear mine is when I get on cc.com. Helmets and Internet forums - millions of keystrokes down the bitbucket for naught. I will grant you they're a lot more necessary now that the demographics have exploded and you never know when someone clueless might be bumbling around above you at single pitch crags. For multipitch in general, with very few exceptions, I never climb straight-line, near vertical multipitch under another party, ever. I sometimes where a helmet for specific endeavors, but mostly not.

Maybe where you guys where climbing... pindude got the roots of it right - it went from 'take me' to just 'take'.

Yep, big change from old school days. Back then at any of the crags all you heard was "falling"; quite a change from today when all you hear is "take". "Take", it's the plaintive of our times.

Do you know anyone who's died climbing? Doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Sub-10 ropes cut much easier under tension than a 10 0r 10+ rope. Don't kid yourself - the 'not me' covers a lot of f#ckups that happen all the time in climbing.

You can't pull up a 10mm and clip? Yeah, right. Like I said, sub-9.8 singles are for sport climbing.

Good stuff Bill! I think part of the deal is that, while some minor advances in the nylon and rope manufacturing have taken place, they are just that - minor optimizations. It's not like we now have spider silk ropes that is stronger than steel and can barely be cut over an edge. Bottom line? the technology of nylon and ropes hasn't changed so much that you can just say skinny ropes are bomb and ignore reality. Making ropes 'skinny', or making any gear 'ultralite' for that matter, involves some real world trade-offs and these need to be acknowledged and understood. Things don't get skinny or lite without a cost. For me that means I [trad] climb on either 9.8's or 10.2s depending on the specifics of the rock and route I'm climbing. I only buy ropes with high fall factors, high sheath percentages, and teflon coatings regardless of their size - they last longer and should be less likely to cut (in theory at least). They are a little stiffer, stretch less, and have a slightly harder catch; all attributes I personally like in a rope. When evaluating rock and routes I also don't limit my options; I also consider whether doubles or twins might be more appropriate - even here in Oregon. On the route I've been working on I've variously used double 9.8s and even paired a 9.8 and a 10.2 for a specific pitch before just settling in on a single Mammut 10.2 Supersafe. Single sub-9.8s might be ok for sport climbing at crags where the risk of a sharp edge is minimal, but you won't find me trad climbing on a single smaller than a 9.8 until the material science advances significantly.

Could have sworn I'd posted up about it at the time as Dave had talked about it at length after tracking down the origin of one of the bird bands I found out at Beacon on upper grassy ledges while replacing anchors - sure enough, it was a racing pigeon from Vancouver. He said it was a serious problem through the PDX / Vancouver corridor. But I just did a search and no post, must have slipped my [senile] mind at the time. Hard to imagine, particularly over pigeons - it's like if rat fanciers started killing cats.