JosephH

Trout Creek and Beacon once it opens. I'd say you should get yourself to some granite somewhere as well. A quick spring / summer Valley scouting trip does sound like it would be a good idea rather than just showing up and attempting to do your first wall (though plenty of folks have...).

Nope....just the sensitive moss folks! Nope....just the sensitive habitat folks! Dude, you're being a bit swishy on the liberal / environmental front there...

I believe Shane used one of my Loweballs for that spot, but I'd have to look at the video again.

It's not his, it's Shane's route...

Good article, but it should be noted that would also require changes to how we pursue our coporate and national interests relative to the political structures of nation-states, i.e. we need to insure SOF isn't synonymous with death squads and paramilitaries supporting corporate interests above those of the population at large. That [containment] legacy is why many Central and South American nations have turned against us over time.

That's my point though, once 'battlefields' are in play we've already failed on multiple fronts and putting guys like you in bad positions that were best avoided by other means. Once our military is in play, however, then we need to provide them with any and all resources they needs to be effective - which includes appropriate combatant detention centers.

Fighting terrorism with the military is the poorest idea of all, though. When it comes to terrorism, the military is our crudest and least effective weapon. Our values, diplomacy, economy, strategic relationships, international alliances, and law enforcement together are the only effective frontlines against terrorism. Any time we have to deploy our military against terrorists we have essentially failed and are being forced to use our solution of last resort. The military has a role to play in an integrated whole, but it should be in a service, rather than a leading, role.

That, would be an excellent thing to do once Raul steps down. It would also help insure we won't do anything this stupid again - at least not with the ease gitmo provided.

Again, that's why they called it a "constitution" - it implies one has one - as in the ability to 'hold' one's values when under stress, also often described as "having a sound constitution"... The Constitution isn't supposed to be a flag of convenience flown only when times are good. The men who wrote ours would have been the first to have spoken out against Bush administration policies and treason.

Uh, that's sort of like saying you have a lousy track record as a lover, but are great at masturbating...

Given climbers have a lousy track record doing that at Beacon I suspect you can for sure count on that not happening.

The best outcome would be BRSP doesn't close and Erik comes back to run it fulltime, though again I'm worried about Viv and Ben even if it stays open.

This was a complete misuse of the protraxion. The rope should have been secured directly to an anchor with an alpine butterfly or figure-8 before being ascended. Ascending directly on the protraxion or any other hauling device is an inherently bad idea.

i'm sure you'll have em brainwashed in no time Joeseph Never know - a whole new staff would kind of suck in terms of there likely being no good overlapping handoff of the park's operations let alone just the climbing aspects. Would do my best, but it would depend entirely on who we got dealt. Hopefully Erik would just come back, but I'm beginning to have my doubts about that.

The only way Cheney could "sum it up" is if he were speaking from behind bars for treason... Your words could easily be labeled 'sedition'. Just saying... It is a funny world when treason becomes diplomacy and patriotism becomes sedition - happened often enough, though...

The only way Cheney could "sum it up" is if he were speaking from behind bars for treason...

Good to know. It wouldn't take too long for the bridges to be pretty suspect all the way around. There's also a 'Friends of Beacon Rock' trail maintenance group that's pretty well organized and I suspect they'll be weighing in on all this over time.

Ivan, those were parking fees and when they did them in they did so as part of a state law forbidding them in the future. Will be interesting to see how this plays out. Could be the fishermen are the ones that keep it open, but who knows at this point. It's possible we may lose Viv and Ben (and even Erik if they keep him in Olympia) regardless and it would then be a drag to try and educate and bring around a whole new crew who may or may not be climber-friendly.

I talked with Viv about it - link to details here: Washington State Parks - Current News This was the second park cuts list that was put together by WSP. Beacon missed the first cut, but made it onto the second cut as they only make enough in fees to cover half their operating revenue: Location: Beacon Rock Annual Park Expenditures: $503,848 Annual Total Revenue: $245,914 Cost Savings per year if mothballed: $257,934 % Total Revenue / Park Expenditures: 48.81% Full Time Employees (FTEs): 7.87 Annual Visitation Total: 91,289 Visitor per FTE Annual: 11,596 Park Expend / Visitor: $5.52 But part of reason it's on the list is traffic numbers which are inaccurate. The traffic numbers were only from the campground road going up from the parking lot, and did not include the group campground, boat launch, or main parking lot numbers. The closures are closures as in completely shutting down operations. This would be a disaster at Beacon (and Maryhill) where fishermen will raise hell about it relative to the boat launch. From a climbers' perspective things it very much puts climbing at risk from an outright ban from the outset to bigger issues related to the tourist trail. The problem there is do they leave the green gate open or closed on the park's closure. In either case, with the gate closed and people swinging it, or with no maintenance on the tourist trail bridges, sooner or later someone is going to die and the result would likely be a closure in that scenario as well. It is possible they'd try to shift the operation of the park to Skamania County, but the impact scenarios to climbers would probably not change a great deal in that case even if Skamania County could come up with the funds to keep it open on some basis. Shutting down the BRSP wouldn't affect the Peregrine closure at all other than enforcement - but, if we started poaching because the BRSP staff isn't there then the WDFW would then move to ban climbing entirely. Beyond all that, even if Beacon is spared, there is a good chance Viv and Ben may lose their jobs as more senior folks from closed parks pull rank and take their jobs. New senior rangers unfamiliar and uninterested in climbing would in no way be in our best interest. I have a call into Erik, who is working in Olympia in the finance department of late and hope to hear back from him. In general, however, nothing will be known or decided until the state legislature votes on some hard numbers. It's a bummer for climbing all the way around and so I wouldn't get too carried away with fantasies of poaching-gone-wild as poaching during the closure would just lead to a ban in the course of the first closure after the park shut down. If the BRSP did shut down, then that would be when folks had better self-police effectively or the place would simply be shutdown as too much of a hassle.

Yeah, no Beacon Rock right now in the traditional Southface sense - probably better off at Broughton's or Ozone...

No, it was 'opened' as an extrordinary rendition endpoint where torture could be used and it was specifically chosen for its supposed extra-Constitutional status (which even a heavily conservative SCOTUS made very clear it wasn't). Thank god our founding fathers weren't as wishy-washy as today's conservatives when it came to holding their values and understanding what's important in the face of changing rules and games - they didn't call it a 'constitution' for nothing. The saddest part of all was the neocons corrupted America's values and Constitution in a perverse quest for 'restoring dominance' for a "New American Century" and not out the slightest interest in a war on terror, which was always just an anthem. Again, I'd be shocked if even 25 of the 500 were detainees of sufficient value to even merit the effort, expense, and damage to our standing in the world. This whole rendition slice of the neocon's preemptive war strategy was high treason in and of itself as was the torturous legal letters issued from the OLC to support it. From pretty much any perspective, but especially from increasing U.S. security and influence, everything about both wars and the 'war on terror' have been an abject political, diplomatic, and military failure. It's not your fault, you guys currently in the military do what you do to the best of your ability and do it well; unfortunately, the clowns wielding U.S. military might for the past eight years were completely incompetent to do so. I and any number of guys I know could have done infinitely better with the same resources; in fact, I have no doubt you also could have done better and would have done things quite differently yourself.

I haven't climbed in so long I've forgotten how to walk off-concrete and can't lift a line thicker than a shoelace. Pretty sure I couldn't slep all that gear without a gearSlave either - can Gent help me...?

Ok, I got it - no bolting this Sunday...

What's the deal with this? Been consistently erratic for weeks now. Seems like you guys need more bandwidth, cycle provisioning, or that there's some bottleneck somewhere...

Explain to me how you rationalize and justify indefinitely detaining 17 Uighurs who were fighting the Chinese, not the U.S. - are we working for the Chinese military now? And no, people like me have nothing whatsoever to do with why it cost so much - a fullhouse of piss poor political, intelligence, diplomatic, and military decisions made by the previous administration are what have squandered $3T only to foster more terrorism than it's prevented and left the U.S. little better prepared to deal with a terrorist threat then on 9/10/2001. The gross stupidity of the decisions made in the ME and at home since 2001 relative to true security for U.S. interests at home and abroad is only surpassed by the complete squandering of human, material, and financial resources which could have been used infinitely more effectively for our long term security. Hey, it's been an unbelievably pathetic, ineffectual, and counterproductive response to terrorism on every single front since 2001. Again, the entire Bush administration might as well been hand-picked agents of China's MSS and Iran's VEVAK for how well they've bolstered those nation's global interests at the heavy expense of our own.