Alan Trick

The snark here sounds an awful lot like the Linux Kernel mailing list. Is one of you guys secretly Linus Torvolds?

Having taken a solid back-hit on a hard-hat style helmet, they're probably a little better than you think, though it wouldn't at all surprise me if it varies significantly between models. I'm sure the risk of concussion is worse, but you also get a tougher helmet :-/ And then there's the aesthetics, but we live in the PNW where everyone is inclusive and accepting of all ways of life, right guys?

My personal favorite feature on a headlamp is the ability to "lock" it so it doesn't accidentally turn on in your backpack. Other than that, it mostly depends how big you want it. Bigger ones are typically heavier, brighter, more expensive, and more durably/waterproof. I'm personally a fan of the BD Storm for mountaineering. Older folk will probably want brighter lights than younger people because their vision isn't as great anymore. It's a good idea to bring spare batteries, sometimes people bring a spare headlamp. Headlamps work much better than flashlights or lanterns. They don't take up your take up your hands when your climbing/holding poles/looking through your backpack and you don't have to worry about them rolling down the mountain if you drop them. Often, if you are using your headlamp it's because your late and it's dark, or a storm has come in, and it's "don't fuck around" time. Headlamps are good for that. That said, lanterns can be nice when camping and you don't want people shinning their headlamps in your face when talking to you.

The navigation apps are usually independent of their data source. So you can look at USGS topo maps with Gaia GPS or with RMaps and they'll look the same, or you can look at Google Terrain and they'll look the same. What will differ is the selection of map sources, and the user interface and whatnot. Here's an overview of the different data sources: * USGS topo: probably the best thing there is in the US, great coverage, pretty decent accuracy, and the resolution is good enough. Sometimes things are a little bit out of date. The biggest downside is that it only works in the US. In Canada, we have CanTopo, but it's not as good. * Google Terrain: I don't know where they get it from, but Google has surprisingly good elevation data, and their maps are nicely "hill-shaded". Unfortunately, apart from bodies of water, they have pretty sparse coverage of the backcountry. * Openstreetmap: May appear as other names, comes in a lot of different styles. The best outside of North America, for the most part. The elevation data that comes with this is some form SRTM data, which is pretty good, but it has funny blind spots here and there, particularly on pointy features or sharp notches.

I use OSMAnd. It uses openstreetmap as its data source instead of USGS topo, and places that see a lot of traffic are better mapped out, but places that are out in the middle of nowhere are often poorly mapped.

I think the problem you're running into is that the phone's GPS is just telling you basically how far you are away from the WGS84 ellipsoid, and not mean sea level. In other world, it assumes the earth is more circular than it actually is. A good GPS application will provide a way to correct these values, with OsmAnd you can download a thing called "World Altitude Corrections" which will fix the problem. Using USGS topo data like Gaia reportedly does will work too, but only in the US. Note that using a barometric altimeter won't give you very accurate values either, unless you like the height of your mountains to be depend on the kind of weather you're getting. Gory nerdy details here http://stackoverflow.com/a/11503937.

They would have skied down the Coleman-Deming which is the other standard route. Skiing unroped on glaciers is safer here than it is in Alaska because the snow is heavier and stickier. And at least on Baker it's a lot safer if you've been there a bunch have have a good memory of the layout of the crevasses. I'm not sure if anyone has a good handle of how risky it is, but it's fairly common practice, and I don't remember hearing of any accidents from controlled & unroped skiing over a glacier in this region recently.

While this would probably be more useful 95% of the time, I'm still not sure this is current practice, at least in Squamish. For example, when leading, I often find sustained 5.8's to be more difficult than 5.9's. That said, maybe it's just because I'm a crappy climber, and have absolutely no endurance.

My experience is (relatively) limited. I've never climbed Split Pillar or Caboose, but I imagine that the last pitch of Ultimate Everything (which I have climbed) is a fair bit easier than Split Pillar. Both are 10b, but Split Pillar is much more sustained.

Mmmm, food. Signed up. By the way, that web page's title (what appears in your browser's tab) is just "Landing page |". I don't know how convertkit works, but people will be abler to find you easier on Google and other search engines if you can get your book's title in there.

Do you mean how you feel it ought to work, or how it works in practice? My experience has been that it usually refers to the hardest move, which does make for some pretty wonky grades (Assholes of August in Skaha is probably the worst offender I've climbed).

Probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise-induced_nausea (particularly: "Exercising at a heavy rate causes blood flow to be taken away from the stomach, causing nausea.")

He could just be referring to paying for the cost of gear, the cost of free time, or the cost of travel. Those things are generally out of reach for most students. To me, mentor usually implies a non-professional. Still, it's good to mention the guides.

I have no actual experience with this, but my impression is that titanium is bad at being sharp, so a titanium ax will make an excellent dead-man/anchor, but might be poor at climbing technical ice.

If your child was this poorly behaved in public, and you ignored it, I might be liable to contact Child Protective Services. I would be fine with "good dog owners" taking their dogs along as long as there was someone I could notify that this so-called "good dog owner" was no good at all and should be barred from owning pets.