JosephH

ask for input and actually listen... too bad our "liason" to the rangers isn't the same way! funny that erik listened to the climbers more than___.... meh, nevermind. Did you or someone else have something new to say I haven't already heard a thousand times already? You know, something that might smack of at least a tenuous grip on reality and Wash. state law and is rooted in this world and not the one with runaway children, pirates, and ticking crocodiles...

Probably still worth one or two folks spending some time out there trying to figure out where they are nesting. It would be helpful to know relative to the management of the place should you succeed in getting climbing reestablished.

Can't tell quite yet, but it's feeling that way so far given how long they've been quiet and down on the nest.

A few more weeks and we should be good...

An ironclad national ID and a $10k fine per employee would shut it down overnight. Ditto for a national ID for healtcare services. It's all a matter of will and how serious you are.

Wrong, employment is the overwhelming driver. Period. $20-25 billion worth.

Enforcing the border is basically irrelevant. Employers are employers, how they pay is irrelevant. The primary reason immigrants are here is employment - the only way to control illegal employment is to maintain tight control over it. Again, securing the borders is the biggest pipedream of them all and the most ineffective way possible to approach the problem. And you call securing the border some form of rationally 'thinking' about the problem - get a grip. Pretty much every aspect of employment happens in the open, employers are fixed in location and it takes a fraction of the resources to enforce, even the 'cash' businesses - it's the ONLY place to control the problem. Republicans and conservatives no doubt dominate corporate and business ownership and management - and guess what? They are the ones directly fucking the American people in the ass by illegally employing immigrants. They are the ones who show no compunction at all in shifting their legitimate costs onto taxpayers. That they then run their mouths and wave their arms over 'illegal immigration' is not only the height of hypocrisy, it's a magnificent scam they pull on honest conservative voters.

Most rightwing politics boil down to finding someone to blame while rightwing 'businessmen' rape and pillage their constituents. It's the same slight-of-hand magicians have been using for years.

Well, well, well - good job. Glad to hear you eased back into something a bit more manageable, but no doubt just as exciting. You're launched...

Two pieces of gear pulled in an area with adequate placements; the second was injured to one degree or another belaying; they were a relatively new pair of climbers. I think we can chalk it up to a combination of a bit of zealousness and inexperience without overthinking the details too much in the aftermath. They sound like they'll be ok and hopefully learned a lesson that will serve them well in the future.

Yes, my fifth grade teacher. Amazing, though, how you often manage to see such trees yet miss the forest.

We know where to find the Koreans and more or less understand them. There was eventually a quite a bit of action in the wake of the Cole once folks got a bead on who might be involved, but not really much of it was made particularly public. And it's not like there weren't folks putting the first WTC, Nairobi/Dar es Salaam, and Cole bombings together from an intent perspective. However, the operative perception of '[keeping] it over there' is what, in the end, we ran afoul of and shaped the dynamics of our domestic approach to terrorism in the prelude and run-up to 9/11.

Your thinking about the guest worker program with its injectible nano-visa which, as a nice touch, induces temporary sterility for the duration of the job.

Well, an implantable, contactless national ID card with a Depo or Implanon backing would kill two birds with one silicone stone...

Nah, the multi-certificate, biometric, contactless smartcard technology we sell today really can't be 'faked'. Add the five years it would take to roll it out here and the cards and certificate infrastructure will be pretty solid - certainly way beyond the means of all but a few governments to be able to spoof the system. It really wouldn't be worth the effort and a large number of dupe cards with multiple valid certs would be tough to generate without being detected pretty quick.

Nope, worthless.

You want to stop illegal employment from the supply side then you have to have national ID cards. Period. How else can employers tell the real Americans among the unwashed masses of non-white applicants?

Good going Ben...

Multiple gear pulls and burned hands - sounds like they may have gotten a bit ahead of themselves, glad they'll live to tell the tale which is always good.

Good to see the pics that go with the tale...sounds like it was a good time regardless.

Mark, that's by and large what I've been doing over the years.

Peter, we eventually got 150' ropes around '76, never saw a 165' for sale in a climbing store until a few years later. I was just climbing at first to take photos - no books, no ropes, no nothing; was a monkey boy up in trees my whole childhood so was just jumping on things with interesting orchids and ferns in pockets. After a few weeks on rock I met a couple of other folks who were learning and we all learned out of basic and advanced rockcraft. But learning outside and on your own you are by nature cautious about risks and you experience and learn in a fairly gradual and step-by-step manner. You gain experience as you go, particularly as it pertains to anchors, exposure and operating around edges. You get limited to no experience with any of the three in a gym. Or at least I don't know of any gyms where you end up standing unroped at the top of a climb. Transitioning to outdoor climbing and trad (and multipitch) from gyms and sport entails several significant leaps which can be problematic. Most people backoff and that's why the majority cite big differentials in the ratings of sport and trad routes they'll lead. In that is an implicit respect for the differences in risk and complexity which is probably healthy overall so that people don't get in over their heads at first.

Yep, goldline, MSR knot specials, and early kermantle...120'

Summit, I guess I'm saying that I don't perceive today's scene as 'safer'; quite the contrary. I think the combination of the 'safety' of the gear combined with most folks learning in gyms has resulted in a much less safe scene. People coming out of gyms without the requisite experience with edges, exposure, and anchoring along with no notion of stancing and a very cavalier notion of belaying (//particularly in groups//) makes for some dangerous transitions from indoor to outdoor climbing and from sport to trad. Similar to the interactions of windsurfers and barges in the Gorge, I'm always astounded there aren't a lot more casualties climbing than there are.

Oh, don't get me wrong, a twenty foot fall directly onto your waist by a leader who doesn't get a first piece in is a crushing and brutal experience you don't want to have. And I had this happen a couple of times back in the days of 120' ropes, hip belaying, and before cams when anchors were often dubious or marginal. In those circumstances you didn't redirect through your sometimes dubious anchor, rather you protected the anchor both by staying off of it with your stance and by putting your [soft] body between a leader fall and the anchor. A lot of my experiences like these were on early and solid Eldo 10's in the mid-70s. Coming from a background of climbing those lines in EBs with short ropes and just a set or two of nuts and hexs while hip belaying leaves you with a very different sensibility around anchors, stancing, belaying, and safety in general. Today's scene basically has incredibly safe, if not luxurious equipment. Yet the flipside of that is today's cams-over-nuts mentality and an almost unconscious, unaware, and / or cavalier disregard for many aspects of climbing that are fundamental to staying alive over the long haul. Because of that I sometimes I think it was a bad idea in general to introduce springs and mechanics into climbing gear. The addition of springs in the form of cams has fostered a real [unexamined] plug-and-go mentality and the mechanics of grigris has fostered unconscious belaying.