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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.

from NYT The scientists started considering what happens to tectonic plates after they are pushed back down into Earth's interior. At about 100 miles down, the temperature of these descending plates is 300 to 400 degrees — well above the boiling point of water at the surface — but cool compared with that of surrounding rocks. The pressure of 700,000 pounds per square inch at this depth, Dr. Bina and Dr. Navrotsky calculated, could be great enough to transform any water that was there into a solid phase known as Ice VII.

I do greatly love and admire and even envy *DELETED* in almost all possible ways, but might add that dealing with somebody else's inferiority complex or figuring out if it exists can be a little troublesome and tiring....

Wonder if this affects Tongass politics.. VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) -- Canada unveiled a 16-million acre preserve Tuesday, including parkland covering an area twice the size of Yellowstone, teeming with grizzly bears, wolves and wild salmon in the ancestral home of many native tribes. Closing another chapter of the wars between environmentalists and loggers, the Great Bear Rainforest is the result of an accord between governments, aboriginal First Nations, the logging industry and environmentalists. It will stretch 250 miles along British Columbia's rugged Pacific coastline -- the ancestral home of groups whose cultures date back thousands of years. The area also sustains a rare white bear found only in British Columbia.

Was looking at a Scurlock photo of Coxcomb side of Baker. Becky makes vague reference to two cleavers leading up to Coxcomb and has brief writeup of "Coxcomb route." In the Scurlock photo the cleavers look like gigantic ridges...& like quite separate routes for much of the way. Maybe it was the angle it was shot from.. But how steep & long are these ridges? Do they compare at all with North Ridge and how often are they done? http://www.pbase.com/nolock/image/51443013

In the late 1970s REI sold a sleeping bag that used aluminized, perforated shell material. Typical goofy idea from REI. I never heard any reports about its effectiveness.

I've got some Petzl 10-points and there's a little clamp gizmo in the middle, for the bar, that converts them to semi-rigid from hinged. I showed the clamp to a hot-shot ice climber and he suggested it had no real function. I UNDERSTAND THE THEORY, but does this feature make any practical difference; have any value and/or any down side? I may (or may not) have used them both ways for steep hiking and didn't notice. Is this feature unique to Petzl?

I once laid a space blanket over the frame of a very small tent before installing fly, a moderately cold night. It seemed to make the tent warmer, but I have no idea if it really did. I do believe that tents with flys are much warmer than single walled tents.

hmm...26% more pages than current edition. Doesn't say format size... Says it includes info on "rock climbs" as well as alpine climbs and traverses.... I wonder how much of the new information is on rock climbs vs alpine. Current edition has no "rock climbs," per se, but I suppose the local craggers will get their due.

I can't wait to buy this book...Does anybody know how many pages it's going to be? How much detail is there compared to the current edition-- which is 260 pages in fairly small format. Photos? Drawings? How much is based on old book? Is Deception standard route still going to be called "class 2?" What percent of new material will be about cragging (am more interested in alpine.)

I knew I could count on you guys! The frikkin' Lowe people don't even know if they formerly offered three sizes....Seems like any really decent pack comes in three sizes (Take note of BD for crissake-- in one size only.) I don't want the pack because it's too big and heavy and I'm too tall....But thanks for offer of additional help! Ought I assume that optimal torso length is about same as none-Lowe brand, current womens packs in size "small?" Any knowledge of 1995ish Lowe torso adjustments? I guess I can figure them out, but wish I had original specs from that era....