Water

awesome climbing! when I saw the video length was 20 minutes I figured it was 5 minutes of climbing and then done.. wow.. he kept at it! your wife's commentary is adorable and i mean that in a most sincere way - her quiet encouragement that is barely audible and then her calling out to him. great job!

hiking on the AT with my gf (now wife) we found more than our fair share of deer ticks in/around places that I am thankful I had the help of someone else. This was in PA and into the NE..lyme central chiggers suck for the itch, as bad as fleas or worse. but they are not a disease transmitting vector so... i rate tick as 'worse'. ill take a body of chigger bites than a case of lyme disease.

Skinning up Maiden Peak, OR

Rainier/Emmons at Dawn

Tumbling Glacier, Kootenay Rockwall Trail, Canada

Hood Wang

can you please show me where this posting rule is? I read the contest rules and saw nothing about the size of the photo.

i too have read that the Dynafit One is wider in the forefoot/toe box. Finding the TLT5 painfully narrow on my flat, splayed foot, I have hope for the One PX, but cannot say definitively.

of the 2010 model i have, i would not wear it above 15 degrees. my wife, she would enjoy it any temperature 32 and below. personally i'd say its usage begins at 10degrees but more likely single digits or even lower if you were going to be moving. there are lighter down coats that will keep warm at those teen temps and just below. this may be a coat to let go of worrying about unless you can find a 2010 version for sale in your size.

to my knowledge there are two version, but perhaps now a third? The 1st was all single material. The 2nd version added reinforcements to shoulders and arms, a bit of weight, not sure the down changed though that review is irate about a perceived change. as to reduction in down, the 10.5ounces is almost 300grams of down. thats not shabby. "8000m" down parkas seem in the range of 450-650 grams of down. (depending on 800/850/900fp). not sure what amount is in mine but I have a 1st model as I got it at an incredible discount (about $120).. it ends up serving duty for my too-cold wife when snowcamping. But functionally I'd only use it in a greater colder range or going up rainier in the winter.

newman, what kind of 'in the area' did you have in mind? a little to the east is indian heaven wilderness. surprise lakes camp ground (and others in that vicinity. An even closer one that I think is pretty slick is to go along the Lewis river trail. Its all flat, it goes through some pretty spectacular old growth, right along the river - you can snag a spot a mile or so from the car and about a 25 minute drive from MSH TH. There is even a spot along the river in the first mile or two with a rope swing out into a deep spot, though I've never swam in the upper Lewis. cheers

teh googs iz our friend: https://www.google.com/#hl=en&tbo=d&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=oregon+26+silent+rock&oq=oregon+26+silent+rock

ehhh... atlanta hawks are basketball as are the blazers.... unless i missed something more than face value there. ...atlanta falcons for football

getting to facts, seems like the use of O2 alone doesn't meet a single definition of the word cheat. if someone came back from a guided o2 trip and said they did it all alone without any aid then they are more of a liar than a cheat really. i could give fuckall about cheaters in sports--i mean really, cheating in sports, let alone insinuating that people are 'cheating' in non-competitive personal pursuits...haha what a laugh. A person who cheats in sports doesn't cause any impact to humanity. They taint ideals and possibly hurt themselves but please tell me how it impacts me. The idea that say USPS was defrauded by LA.. please, they gained huge publicity. there is something telling that there is debate over this (for 30 minutes on PBS news sunday night)..but we've moved past the people who cheated our economic system to its ruin, robbing jobs, savings, and livelihood from people. really cheating in climbing.. what about the whole 'hike your own hike'/climb your own climb. is somebody who trail runs the AT or PCT cheating compared to a person who completes it by foraging and taking 9 months? such a discussion is absurd. [cheet]verb (used with object) 1. to defraud; swindle: He cheated her out of her inheritance. 2. to deceive; influence by fraud: He cheated us into believing him a hero. 3. to elude; deprive of something expected: He cheated the law by suicide. verb (used without object) 4. to practice fraud or deceit: She cheats without regrets. 5. to violate rules or regulations: He cheats at cards. 6. to take an examination or test in a dishonest way, as by improper access to answers. 7. Informal. to be sexually unfaithful (often followed by on): Her husband knew she had been cheating all along. He cheated on his wife. noun 8. a person who acts dishonestly, deceives, or defrauds: He is a cheat and a liar. 9. a fraud; swindle; deception: The game was a cheat. 10. Law. the fraudulent obtaining of another's property by a pretense or trick. 11. an impostor: The man who passed as an earl was a cheat.

... On the hour long approach, he tells me he wears a butt plug when backpacking so as not to have the shits the whole time. .... wtf wtf wtf wtf

sounds identical to the 'technology' that hi-tech boot company was suppose to embrace and implement (all i saw about 2 years ago was very limited--a single pair of boots). never seemed to get off the ground really... http://www.hi-tec.com/us/v-lite-mt-nevis-ii-wpi.html I'm just going to go out on a limb and suggest that at least in hi-tech's operation the implementation and results of ion-mask probably fall way short of the theory described above. i recall reading all the same type of buzz back then about how you could make a white shirt stainproof to red wine, etc.. maybe hi-tech screwed the pooch but like many things i am guessing real world isn't quite as idylic as the gore/polartec/eVent graphics showing warm air/moisture escaping with the cold/blue water bouncing off the outside of the shell.

the insulation on the bottom of a sleeping bag does very very very little compared to the sides and top. I don't know what the R value is but for the reason down is lauded for its weight&compression to warmth ratio makes it that much less useful when it is actually compressed. As a stomach sleeper in a down bag I compress a ton of the down under there and those spots offer probably less insulation to my pad than synthetic bag would. That said there are definitely small areas, pockets [like vert or horiz indentations of the sleep pad) where you are not compressing it that puff out and certainly helps. What I have found when one doesn't have down on the bottom of a mummy bag, actually means that it isn't at the sides really either--just kind of on the top draped over but not tucked in like a quilt. then it certainly feels colder.

I get it mr. warfield! Looks like the band is playing in the loft of the maiden peak shelter just about 6 miles from the fuji shelter. well played!

this will be interesting because i have a decent sized group of 65 (or so) that will be heading up there at the same time.

we went up there the weekend before new years and there was a dad and 2 daughters and then a group of 3. We expected a lot more folks for a saturday night during a holiday break. personally i would plan on sleeping in there. the amount of space is huge--it would take a fullon group of 25 or a boyscout troop to really compromise space between the two levels. if you give me a few hours i can look up my GPS point from when we went (via rosary lakes), once i get home from work. the point I get when I put those coords off the FS site into google-maps is plainly wrong/or i'm doing something wrong. The shelter is located more like this: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=43.634895,+-122.001075&num=1&t=h&vpsrc=0&gl=us&ie=UTF8&z=16&iwloc=A if you look at the sat image the shelter is more or less due north perhaps half a mile or so from the large brown/dry basin that runs N/S just north of climbing up out of the rosary lakes area. it is in a 'bit' of a clearing--definitely more sparsely treed in the immediate 100yrds around the shelter

yes yesterday and while i would have thought given that storms came in from the west last week that the west side would be more consolidated. NWAC spoke of lee slopes.. The wind was confusing-high clouds came from NW, but we got blasted by west wind and east winds/downdrafts. I figured cooper spur would be the loaded slope being in the lee from storms in the west but perhaps it is an awesome windpacked consolidated conditions. the vast majority of reid traverse area twas not and was a lot of lousy trudging and thick yet breakable crusts with loose almost sugary snow beneath. we stuck to the left margin of the couloir up to the hourglass for somewhat more firm conditions, but not great. the hourglass was a bizarro river of rime ice, crust chunk, and snow, which flowed through a 2-4ft deep channel with vertical and undercut side walls.. im not sure if that is a just a winter 'runnel' but i had never seen that before. it ebbed and flowed but if you were in it when a new stream started you risk it suddenly bunching up and piling up immense weight on you/pushing you back down/covering you in waterboard fashion (not necessarily bury you in feet of snow). i didn't snap a picture but the way the river of debris was coming down to the hourglass it was really whipping and scouring through there just like fast moving water would do if it came to a quick zig-zag in a stream. no rope/pro and the flow seemed sketchy, then a helmet hit from ice enough to give an immediate headache we retreated. from an acquaintance and from someone on here (maybe going together) I believe two people are up there right now/earlier today.

move fast if there is still 1 spot available in this avy course ($200 which is a steal!), likely meet some folk in it, ready made partners to head out with, or maybe they have friends they can refer you to: http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/1093882/Searchpage/1/Main/90960/Words/avalanche/Search/true/Seattle_Mt_Rainier_Avalanche_C#Post1093882

ask your friends for help. look for PCT hiker peeps gatherings.. i can put you in touch with a few PDX folk who hiked last year or the year before.. i recently saw a handful of them discussing a get-together specifically cause there was someone who wanted to do it in 2013 who wanted general advice. otherwise guide companies or mazamas offer different things, but honestly i think those avenues are overkill for the PCT, not that they couldn't be applied to that end. send a pm if you want me to pass your info onto some '11 or '12 hikers in the area.

not sure much summer volcano climbing in the NW will really give much denali aid other than general familiarity with some hardware and travel techniques?..but that is #6 so I think that means least important. Baker for plenty of glacier travel adams is a long slog--i know your wife wants a guide but if you've done rainier and hood unless you're doing adams glacier, i wouldn't invest the money for southside at all. really you can walk up it without crampons as my fearful of heights and climbing hardware wife has done in the summer. the 'mazama glacier' variation of it...you would be better served on baker. look into a more challenging route on rainier: kautz? for a variety of terrains consider mt. shuksan fisher chimneys. some rock, some snow, some glacier, very beautiful. more mental complexity to keep you entertained with variation. as a two-fer it is very near baker it would be very plausible if weather cooperated to do both in a week.

lewistown...property by/on the south moccasin mountains.. water access on big spring ck and on warm spring ck... beautiful smallmouth bass caught while tubing on the warm spring. browns and rainbows on the big spring. i was blown away by the life there, so different than what i knew growing up next to the Ottawa river in toledo ohio.. and seeing and doing just a bit of the work required for ranching, the complexity of it all was impressive to juxtapose with the simplicity of a lot of the tasks, hard to get further from a timecard/40hrs and a paycheck.