Cobra_Commander

Yep, pretty good Mark!

I may have played this card before...

damn can't think of the name of it but I definitely remember the jam behind the little blade above!

Makes a good climb great...

Looks like something up at Easy's. Big Boss Man

Is that really the season pass price? That's ridiculous.

Billy's word is usually the good word when it comes to this stuff. -Richard

the cult of per-son-al-ity

Same deal as Feck, skied by on the way between Fairy and Great Cairn. Big stuff, and no one around.

The tacoma is part time w/ auto locking hubs these days. The last manual lockers were on the 98. The trd package will give you a locking rear diff and some bilsteins (but they're not as burly as the retail bilsteins). I don't know anything about the new tacos though, apart from the fact they look like a pug. They do not have a traction control system as far as I know. They are still just a truck in the end. "Traction control" is a relative term too. The subarus basically just a have a limited slip setup that they way over-market to make it look like some nuclear scientists are down there deciding where to send the power at any given second. I consider the Ghost River Wilderness in Alberta to be my limit for ugly winter climbing approaches, and you see Subaru Legacies plowing through the creeks occasionally, but usually driven by some psycho canadians. The high clearance trucks definitely pay off for plowing through drifts, but often just get you more stuck, further in.

I bet the sno-mo crew is eyeing that one carefully. As long as they don't charge me just to pass through a giant timber gate.

Why go way up there when there are perfectly good Estacadians to mingle with

Most of the mountain rescue and sar teams in Oregon have been running Garmin units for over a decade now, with minimal problems, for what that's worth. Units I used over the years, no real problems: 48, 12, 12xl, Geko 201, GPSMAP 60cx Sorry to hear about your bad luck.

Bill, please go ahead with it if you think it's right. To this day I don't understand the contention about bolts at Rocky Butte. There are places to stand ground on bolt anchors, but Rocky Butte is not one of them.

YES. nice work!

The term "on-sight" shall never be applied to such routes as the Reid HW on Mt. Hood.

Thou shalt spell correctly.

For those routes, a normal axe and just about any ice tool would work just fine for you. Two short tools would be annoying on the significant low-angle terrain encountered on those routes.

I actually want a decently-weighted tool. I hate the ultralight axes when I'm trying to get up some short stretch of ice. I always find myself in this situation in ski mountaineering, where some ice steps turn out to be more significant that I expected, and I have some annoying lightweight axe pinging off the ice. This is just my opinion but I find those "hybrid" axes try to do everything and end up not doing anything that well. Anyone who spends a bit of time on long steep routes realizes a pair of quarks or vipers are not going to stop the show because you can't plunge the shaft in. In fact I find the vipers are perfect "hand rails" for running up steep neve, the classic conditions for a traditional axe. Just plung the pick in and the point goes in too (a little annoying with the viper fang, but not too bad), and you have a great little handhold out of the snow/ice. You are certainly going to have a harder time self arresting with them, but you shouldn't be falling if you're focused on a good self belay anyway. And I wager 80% of the time self arrest isn't going to jack for you on routes that would benefit from these tools.

Throwing big rocks down shit is as american as 4th of july and apple pie. NOT wanting to push that sucker off is decidedly UN-American. If you have to opportunity to cut loose some huge boulder I'm starting to think you're with the terrorists.

Plenty

Depeche Mode has occasionally accidently been clicked in the playlist

Apparently, you suck. Maybe you can spin it and claim coolness because you listen to coldplay, to be even hipper than the haters. Dissing coldplay is so last spring!

near marblemount I assume.