tvashtarkatena

That's the line, center photo.

Trip: Snow Lake - Oompa Loompa (WI3) Date: 2/1/2009 Trip Report: Oompa Loompas promise candy but they're really not very sweet. Don and I skipped over to Snow Lake to check out some ice he'd seen from across the lake about 50 years ago. We passed what he thought might have been the flows, but they looked cottage cheesy and the top outs involved tunneling back through the mountain to the other side. Then, it caught my eye. A perfect, blue line pointing toward heaven far above the West end of the lake on a minor buttress coming off of lower Chair Peak. I drew me like a cracked skull lures a zombie. The ice appeared to be good, but, in fact, it was heavily sublimated, occasionally weeping, and frosted with partially consolidated spindrift deposits. Nothing fantastically sketchy, but not great, either. I belayed off of a couple of twigs and an ice tool because the tree I thought I could get to 30 feet below turned out to require some form of levitation or sudden transformation into a guy who can actually climb worth a damn. The next half pitch involved some swimming through a top layer of vertical snow encrusted on some small, hanging trees after climbing a gulley with a narrow smear of warming snow. Nothing wrong with the line itself, mind you. e found the following descent route after some searching: After topping out on top of the buttress, continue to the next mini buttress and descent steep snow to the very last small tree (getting this right is important) on the West side near the end, above an icy gulley. One 60 m rope barely gets you all the way down. Oompa Loompa, or whatever it's called: 80m, WI3 Gear Notes: Screws. 2 small cams and a lost arrow would have come in real handy. Approach Notes: Snow Lake

Make sure you have time to do Spickard and Little Mox, while you're in there. Skip the rest, although the view from Rahm is to die for. 4 days total gets you all this. Climb Spickard on your last morning, then hike out.

I've so already done that, so you can suk it.

i was thinking a fine sauce w/ plenty of tabasco and some good home-made buns would serve f'in funny.

Oh, yeah? Well, we used to shoot the tanks at the Richmond Refinery with a 50 cal rifle. You had to be really far away.

What would be cooler would be to sit on the propane canister, which is in turn sitting on a freshly lit M-80. We used to call this experience a 'rocket ride'. I urge you to try it.

s long as the beer fairy's a boy, eh Hey, twice the dates

I like the toilet paper fairies that follow certain women around the backcountry.

"In a world... ...where no one... ...paid their fair share." "Dump fees. It was about character. It was about personal responsibility. It was about time somebody started puttin' the hammer down." "Dump Run" A Choada Boy Production Now playing in selected cities www.DumpRunTheMovie.com

I had a pet tortoise that was older than I was. Spunky. They can live to be 150. This one was about 40 at the time. I would always think, Hey, why do I own you rather than the other way around? Tortoises will consume anything, and I certainly tested that behavior pretty thoroughly. They eat like miniature brontosauri, taking huge bites, chewing with the mouths wide open and masticated against their thick, pink, human-like tongues that are always a bit of a shock to the uninitiated. One time he ate a seagull. Anyway, I fed him a couple of beers and he never came back out of his shell. After he started stinking a bit, I figured it was safe to boil the flesh off of him. He made a pretty cool lamp.

DA

CHO

ye chyoadyeskaya

El Choaderon.

You might want to depressurize a canister so that it can be recycled on the way home. Your side arm should work well for that, though.

Dude, you can get those cheaper at Skymall.

Not the best band or singer, but I always feel better when their music comes on. The Allman Brothers are God, however.

Anyone ever find them in the backcountry? Several years ago I found a couple of beers nine miles into the Ho (not to brag or anything). The unpunctured one was a Guiness. It wasn't too bad. Similarly, I found two shitebocks grown into the moss at Lake Serene about two years ago. One was drinkable, one was not. I'm not sure the taste of Burgie is degraded by the elements. I'd just jumped into the lake's only small melt hole, and I needed blood thinner quick. Who leaves these beers for some curious bear (one can had obvious claw punctures) or stranger in the distant future? Is there, in fact, a beer fairy? Now that's a preternatural being I could get behind.

The GOP has exchanged what's good for the country for what's good for the GOP. It describes itself as the 'Party of the Big Tent', ie, we'll take anyone, and it does...to win elections. The result is a loose coalition of single interest kooks; the ideological burnt crumbs at the bottom of the toaster, impossible to reconstitute into any kind of coherent ideology. The GOP, at this point, has no core ideologies it can sell. Everything it had, neoconservatism, deregulation, and the like, it put on stage, only to see it catch fire and burn the theatre down. Thus, when any real problem is confronted, such as the tens of millions of Americans that have no health care coverage, the GOP's answer has been "Big Government is Bad". It doesn't seem to get any more complicated than that, but, after all, these are toast crumbs we're talking about here; they only have so much capacity for reasoned debate and considering complex problems. This, of course, has lead to Republican leadership that not only cannot solve problems, but one that actually creates more problems. By electing them for 8 years, we've handed over the keys to the store to a mongoloid who just really likes the color red, with predictable results. The problem for the GOP is that this evolution to idiocracy has been a long, slow, deliberate process over decades. It's going to be very difficult to move the party back towards a core set of reasoned principles in the style of Goldwater and Eisenhower, if that's even possible now. Add to that that the country is currently tectonically shifting towards socialism to stave off utter collapse. I'd like to see such a principled shift, but I'm not sure the party has the intellectual fire power or political smarts to pull much of anything off. On the flip side, there will always be a backlash to any adminstration's policies, Obama's included. This is not a great time for predicting with any certainty, that's for sure.

Since you brought up the Universal Health Care issue, I just read a good article in the New Yorker on the subject. According to the article, the U.S. ranks 37th in the world in terms of the overall quality of its health care. It is the ONLY industrialized country in the world that does not yet have Universal Health Care. The rhetoric, such as the quoted example above, and the ignorance it reveals about how Universal Health Care in other countries works is common. Many assume that our present system, which many employed and covered people are reasonably happy with (unless they lose their jobs and/or contract a condition that isn't covered, of course), will be destroyed and replaced with Soviet style long lines and dirty, re-used needles. This is simply not a view of reality. All the world's civilized countries that enjoy universal health care, save ours, of course, built their systems incrementally on their pre-existing health care systems, and they are all unique. Nearly all of them are enormously successful and popular, as well. If such an incremental, build on what you already have approach were employed here, the move to some form of Universal Health Care in the U.S. would probably not be even noticed by the majority of already covered individuals here. Such a move would eliminate the massive, inherent cruelty that is systemic in our health care system today.

The racism-fest here speaks more to a couple of posters' inabilities to grasp political satire than to anyone's actual bias. The question is whether the GOP's choice for Chairman was a cyncical one. Given the Palin fiasco, they are certainly capable of some serious cynicism in their choice of leadership. Even if Steele was chosen to win favor on the racial front, however, his selection still provides a symbolic win for blacks; that attaining the highest positions of leadership is actually possible. The transformative power of such a gesture should not be underestimated. Yes, it's true that GOP inspired policies have done great harm to American blacks; primarily by putting historical numbers of them in prison and keeping historical numbers of them below the poverty line. In addition, the GOP has been publicly and vociferously racist of late (the whole Obama as Muslim/Terrorist/Arab campaign, which came directly from the RNC, comes to mind). Could the choice of Steele signal a change in thinking? I would say that's unlikely right now, but after a fews years with Obama, some softening on race attitudes might happen among enough republicans to move the party where it has long needed to go. Finally, what are Steele's politics? After all, he's an individual. Is he automatically more moderate because he's black? Let's ask Clarence Thomas.

Barney Frank can suk it.

Le Choadette

Choaduapan.