jerseyscum

crampon straps are a bit more uncomfortable on mine compared with heavier boot. I like them a lot though.

disposables work pretty good.

It was an alkaline battery that popped.

Yvon Chouinard argued very persuasively for self-belay grasp in his 1970s-era book. Never completely caught on I guess (no pun etc).

This is a completely idle question. I'm comfortable using Self belay grasp. Is it universally preferred?

Still photos from "Pitz" show her in the middle of a 3-person hemp rope on a 70-foot pitch of nearly vertical water ice with no visible anchors. She didn't use a double. Despite this, I strongly suspect the film is pretty schmaltzy. From recent tabloid story: UNTIL she died at 101 in 2003, director Leni Riefenstahl was reviled as an evil cog in the Nazi war machine, churning out pro-Hitler flicks like "Triumph of the Will." But a new book suggests she detested one of the Third Reich's chief architects. In "Leni," out in March, Steven Bach reveals she was repulsed by Hitler's Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who would plead for sex despite the metal brace he wore because of a shortened leg. "She referred to him as 'the cripple' in private and was repelled. . . [when] he fell to his knees, clutched at her ankles, and sobbed with desire, or he grabbed her breasts, 'his face completely distorted' with lust," Bach writes. At the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, according to Bach, leggy Riefenstahl scandalized both the Germans and the Americans when she had a secret affair with U.S. decathlon gold-medal winner Glenn Morris. Their passion was literally bared when Morris "grabbed me in his arms, tore off my blouse, and kissed my breasts, right in the middle of the stadium," Riefenstahl recalled. Morris was later hired by 20th Century Fox to don a loincloth for "Tarzan's Revenge

An extremely credible case has been made that nearly all water-borne disease contracted in the backcountry results from sharing food using filthy fingers, and not from drinking untreated water. Many people here are probably aware of this, but here is address where the poop can be found. http://lomaprieta.sierraclub.org/pcs/articles/giardia.asp

Don't sleep underneath the big rock north of the glacier. When I tried it boots were attacked and detroyed.

I have no idea if this is true: Man peed way out of avalanche A Slovak man trapped in his car under an avalanche freed himself by drinking 60 bottles of beer and urinating on the snow to melt it. Rescue teams found Richard Kral drunk and staggering along a mountain path four days after his Audi car was buried in the Slovak Tatra mountains. He told them that after the avalanche, he had opened his car window and tried to dig his way out. But as he dug with his hands, he realised the snow would fill his car before he managed to break through. He had 60 half-litre bottles of beer in his car as he was going on holiday, and after cracking one open to think about the problem he realised he could urinate on the snow to melt it, local media reported. He said: "I was scooping the snow from above me and packing it down below the window, and then I peed on it to melt it. It was hard and now my kidneys and liver hurt. But I'm glad the beer I took on holiday turned out to be useful and I managed to get out of there."

Lake Ann near Shuksan's Curtis Glacier might also be good.

I've made some cursory checks and can't find any estimates of rock climbing fatalities per 100,000 climber days on Web. Any figures would be suspect, I suppose, and I'm not interested in including mountaineering accidents -- just cragging. For skiing, by way of comparison, I found something suggesting 1 fatality per 1.4 million skier days. I also found something on Wikipedia suggesting 50,000 annual climber days at Gunks. (Not sure about that, but it sounds somewhat plausible). That might suggest 1:150,000 or something around there, based on the last five years or so... This sounds rather high....Anybody know something more definite or care to speculate?

I met a guide in Canada who regularly pays as much to an after-market bootfitter as he does for his boots. I'm not exactly sure what a bootfitter is or what they do. I do think superfeet (given their 3 different sizes) or similar, products, can help immensely with fit in many cases.

I have Brio 50 from a couple of years ago & find bag maybe too large. I've thought of trading for the slightly smaller-sized Brio currently available and consider it an A1 small pack for the money. In the interest of economy I'll sit tight for the moment.

Dylan: The quote isn't from main thrust of article, which is "why is ice slippery" or something like that. Excerpt is late in story and I gather on closer reading theory is mere speculation...though various ices are believed more certainly to exist on other planets...BTW thanks for guiding me on Triumph some years back and humoring me with a little geology.... http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/science/21ice.html Article adds caveat: "No one knows whether ice can be found inside Earth, because no one has yet figured out a way to look 100 miles underground. Just as salt melts ice at the surface, other molecules mixing with the water could impede the freezing that Dr. Bina and Dr. Navrotsky have predicted."

Maybe they meant Ice VII and not Ice II. People ought to keep their ratings straight.