forrest_m

lamplighter/heaven's gate thread from may

i didn't put it together about the stronger beer until the next day... i knew i was hammered, but thought a nice, 25 minute walk home in the cold air would sober me up... i couldn't figure out why i kept feeling more and more drunk and not less...

I'm guessing that would be expensive. creating slides from large digital files can be done at most of the professional-type photo places (I like Ivey, some people prefer prolab, there are others). the quality depends on the quality of your original digital image, but can be quite good. runs about $10 per slide, with price breaks for quantity down to around $8. adds up quick if you are trying to do a lot.

david - digital projectors do exist that have similar image quality to a slide projector, but they cost tens of thousands of dollars. the relatively inexpensive projector we had last night(not that inexpensive - i think similar models sell for around $800 - $1000, plus you need a laptop to run them) is mostly designed for making powerpoint presentations, "our top three sales objectives for this quarter are..." while quality is improving, i think it will be several more years before dig. projectors in the regular consumer market can compete with slides for image quality.

just staggered into work, i'm getting to old to drink that much on a weeknight! good times, thanks to everyone who helped put it on, nice to put some more faces to names.

anyone know a WFR class offered on an evenings + weekends schedule? seattle area a +. i'm just not willing to use up half my yearly vacation to do an 8-day course.

personally, i'd find it hard to jump into a hard workout after the relaxation of a sauna or hot tub, but there might be something to the stretching + heat. isn't that the theory behind those "hot box" yoga places? i asked my yoga teacher about it once, but she was so incensed by that Bikram guy's over-commercialization that she forgot to answer my question about the method itself... for avoiding soreness (post-workout), i've had a lot more luck with the hot-cold-hot-cold shower than the hot tub. YMMV, but the theory is that by constricting then dilating your blood vessels, you supposedly are pumping waste products out of your system. plus, i have a shower at my house but not a hot tub - but the hot tub sure feels better after a day of skiing!

jesus, bug, give me credit for some level of humility... nevertheless, while my survival skills are not in the same league as someone like Nanook, practice has taught me that under certain combinations of temperature and type of snow, building an igloo is more difficult than some other kinds of snow shelters. for example, around here, where you often have a combination of soft snow and not-very-cold temperatures, the only way to get decent blocks for building is to stomp out a "quarry" and wait for it to freeze up. in the time that this takes when it is 30 degrees out, you could dig three caves of equivalent size. OTOH, when it is cold out, the quarry forms almost instantly and the igloo almost builds itself because the blocks adhere to each other as you place them. i suspect that an Inuit would not build an igloo just because he "could", but rather would choose whatever was expedient for the situation in which he found himself. of course, in balmy 30 degree temps., he might not bother to make a shelter at all. my comment about nanook's death was more related to the harshness of his environment.

i don't know, i think i've just watched the matrix movies too much the last couple of weeks (gotta get ready for revolutions!)

i actually did this just the other day. not only that, but i actually tracked the knife long enough to let the handle spin back to me so as not to catch the blade. i ended up down on one knee with the knife only an inch or two off the floor. i was alone in the kitchen, but i swear, for a second there i could hear the cheering of a full stadium... "what an amazing save, the crowd goes wild!"

amen. good snow = easy igloo, bad snow = impossible igloo and frustrating coldness despite his amazing survival skills, nanook starved to death two years after that movie was made. website the arctic plays for high stakes. on a totally unrelated topic this is my 500th post . i guess i can no longer consider myself an "occasional user" (jon, you'll be hearing from me via paypal...)

Cloud Walkers by Paddy Sherman, about the generation of brits that emigrated to british columbia after WWII. Don't know if it's actually great literature, but it was one of the two books about climbing that my high school library had, so I have a soft spot in my heart for it. (Harrer's The White Spider was the other) I strongly second the recommendations for Breaking Point, Eiger Dreams and Sherman Exposed. It thought This Game of Ghosts was anti-climactic. You realize that Simpson has to be a tough mother because he's so darn accident prone. Though you gotta love the part at the end where, injured again, being lowered down a big alpine face again, his partner turns to him and hands over his pocket knife.

"are you ok right there? i have to take you off for a second..." "dude! you're the hand!"

so W and I are sitting in Lisa’s tent at basecamp and one of the junior guides for the company that’s contracted to support the NG team comes in, he’s getting ready to carry a load of digital video cartridges up to the 14K camp. He’s planning just to run up with the stuff in the pockets of his jacket instead of carrying a pack, so he takes it out of the boxes and protective packaging and puts the bare cartridges in the pocket of his down parka. (The packaging was ridiculously oversized, for each audio-cassette sized cartridge, the cardboard and plastic was approximately the size of a brick). Turned out the joke was on him, though, because the cameraman wasn’t willing to waste time shooting onto possibly contaminated medium, and doug had to run down the next day and repeat the 7,000 vertical with a new batch…

let's have a show of hands from everyone who has ever used a tensioned sky-hook as lead pro.

Matt - I'm really sorry to hear about your friend. If you would like to share more stories about Ryan, I think many of us would feel privileged to get to know him just a little, even if it means coming to share a tiny part of your sadness as well. Forrest

I appreciate the thoughtful responses. I’ve been thinking about this since last night, and here’s maybe a clearer way to explain what I’m trying to get at. In any kind of risk-management plan, there’s usually some variation of the equation: P (probability of something bad happening) x T (time exposed to danger) x C (consequence of something bad happening) ________________ = R (total risk) Now I suppose some people who are very analytical may actually think in these terms in the field. Speaking for myself, however, its much more common to simply have an overall, gestalt sense of what R is, based on previous experience. It’s usually obvious when P increases. As someone noted, you’d have to be blind not to have your stress level go up when a storm rolls in. What I think is less obvious is when C increases, as in my forgotten jacket example and Fern’s forgotten beacon example. In both cases, P and T stay the same but R is increased (by how much is a different discussion, I think?). I find personally that I am far more sensitive/conscious of increases in P and T than I am to C. But I am coming to believe that this is a form of self-deception that I would like to reduce.

Jopa - I guess this depends on whether your objection is personal or philosophical, i.e. I don't feel qualified to judge other people vs. I don't feel ANYONE should judge other people. If the former, I think you can just follow the system. Go to jury duty, tell the truth when they ask you questions, and if you truly believe that you can't judge others, it is unlikely they will let you do so. If the latter, then I suppose civil disobedience would be justified. But I don't agree with that proposition, so don't ask me how that might be accomplished...

Jay – Thanks for the clarification, yes, that’s what I meant. Dane, I think you’re getting caught up in the semantics of the word accident. I don’t disagree that climbing (and life) are inherently unsafe and you can never eliminate the unforeseen. Sometimes shit does happen and all the preparation in the world won’t prevent it. Nor am I trying to make up any kind of “system.” I’m just interested in discussing judgment in alpine situations, particularly the decision to continue on or to retreat after some unexpected occurrence. Here’s another hypothetical. Two guys go up for a quick ascent of Liberty Ridge. They are trying to slip in ahead of an oncoming system, so they go super light. After spending the night at Thumb Rock, the weather is already changing, but they decide to push it to the top anyway, which they do, summiting in bad conditions. They are soon soaked by the wet snow, but they are able to find the descent. By the time they arrive at the car, every item in their packs is awash in water and they can no longer stop moving without beginning to shiver uncontrollably, but they are essentially fine. My point is that climbing Lib. Ridge in bad conditions isn’t - in and of itself - a bad decision. It depends a lot on the skills and experience of the climbers. But if they had set out to climb knowing that they would be climbing in those conditions, they might have brought different gear, a shovel to dig in, whatever. Once the bad weather happened, and they continued upwards, they were much closer to the edge than they had originally planned to be – BUT IN MANY CASES THEY WOULDN’T THINK OF IT IN THOSE TERMS. They might think "good thing we're strong enough to push through this added difficulty" but they might not consider it in terms of "I hadn't planned to push my limits today." I’m not saying that continuing up was right or wrong, just that it changed the equation. I’m trying to learn to be more conscious of moments when the equation changes, rather then letting them slip by without me really noticing. I’m wondering if other people have thought similarly.

CM pick only requires 1 allen wrench, there is enough friction between the female part of the bolt and the soft aluminum of the head to hold it in place. The advantage of the separate bolt system is that you can swap the whole thing out. My partner did the "tighten my BD tool with the other one" thing on a fairly serious alpine route and stripped the threads, which are on the tool head itself, i.e. impossible to fix in the field. He had to finish the route with a shaky pick which shatters the ice something fierce. On a CM, if you carry a spare bolt assembly (which weighs nothing, I keep one attached to my spare pick in case I drop something), you wouldn't have this problem. Seriously, I've never seen anyone try to deal with a loose or broken pick without having two hands free, either they a) place a screw and hang b) pull out their third tool or c) gut it out to the end of the pitch and fix it at the belay. Also, although the pulsar and axar are being phased out, the quasar picks have a second set of holes that fits these tools, so don't despair.

Dryad’s thread about reactions to risk and injury brought to mind another line of thought I’ve been having lately about risk assessment and acceptance. People who write about extreme-level single push climbing note that you have to be prepared to turn around if the slightest thing goes wrong. I think this also applies to less-than-cutting-edge ascents in lightweight style as well. Suppose that at the base of a the NR of Stuart, I discover that I’ve forgotten my shell jacket. The weather looks great, so I keep going. The climbing is within my abilities and the route goes without a hitch. I descend and head home, another casual day in the mountains. Or was it? In climbing safety systems, we rely on single redundancy. We make anchors so that any one component can fail but not necessarily to resist the failure of two separate things simultaneously. Similarly, on a alpine climb, you generally assume that if one major thing goes wrong – weather goes to shit, an injury, getting way off-route, lost or forgotten gear – it may be a PITA, but you will probably be ok. However if two or more of these things happen, you will have an epic. If you are strong, skilled and/or lucky, you may survive an epic, but the outcome will be in doubt. I don’t have any problem with accepting a certain level of risk – that’s what climbing is about, and it’s a very personal decision what your tolerance is. But what I think it’s important to understand that if you set out, or keep going, in the face of one of these incidents happening, you have cut your margin of safety WAY down. You have already spent your redundancy. In hindsight, I can see that through ignorance or self-deception I have often miscalculated what the risks are and ended up accepting a level of risk greater than I had intended. To get back to my forgotten jacket, since the weather is nice and I don’t need the jacket, it would be easy to continue on thinking that nothing has really changed. But the reality is that my risk assessment SHOULD change. Had I deliberately left my jacket behind, I would have gone into the climb with a completely different mindset. My point is not that it was inherently dangerous to climb without a jacket, but rather that my calculation of what degree of risk I was accepting should be different. Finally, I think it’s important to be wary of negative feedback: “nothing bad happened, so it must have been safe.” To repeat myself one more time, it’s not that I think consciously accepting risk is bad, it’s the accidental assumption of risk that I try to avoid.

I’ve made this analogy before, I couldn’t find it with the search… I was a dinner party a few years ago and ran into a climber I knew. The conversation turned to a recent climbing accident. A non-climber listening in accused us of being morbid by discussing the details, but then another guy chimed in who was a commercial pilot, ex military pilot. He thought it was the most normal thing in the world. He explained that in aviation culture, pilots are encouraged to report even minor mistakes that didn’t lead to an accident, and discussion of accidents and close calls made up a large part of pilot shop talk. In his view, it was this ravenous dissection of incidents that kept aviation relatively safe – considering that it is an inherently dangerous enterprise. Obviously, some of the post-accident chatter (climbing or flying) is Monday morning quarterbacking of the “it wouldn’t have happened to me” variety. Nevertheless, in a lot of cases, the cause of an accident is not obvious. Usually, more than one thing has to go wrong before someone gets killed. If we are to learn anything from these incidents, we have to analyze them. It’s not as simple as just “don’t repeat the mistakes.” I think the key is to try to be a bit humble – how many things have you done that make a funny story now that would appear foolish if they had happened in the prelude to a serious accident? At the same time, I think it is important to try to maintain a certain level of decorum in this kind of discussion. I personally know of one accident after which the parents of the deceased spent weeks scanning the internet for any mention of their son. My guess is that this is not uncommon.

Bug – I’m really interested in your perspective. I’ve heard many people say that they didn’t feel they could justify hard climbing anymore after they had kids. But it sounds like you don’t buy into that. (I don’t have kids, yet, but for my wife it’s definitely when, not if). I can imagine having less time for climbing in the future, but I know for certain that I’m not going to be happy if I give up serious routes, either. I feel like it is the intense self-centeredness of pushing my limits at certain times that gives me the energy to be able to be good at my job, good at my relationships, and, I hope, good at being a dad. My wife sometimes asks me to think about her when I’m making decisions on a climb, but the truth is that I don’t. It doesn’t enter into my thoughts at all. I don’t think “gee, if I was still single, I’d cross this avalanche path, but since I’m married…” I’m completely focused on getting up and down, on keeping myself and my partner safe. Good judgment is good judgment whether or not anyone is waiting for you back home, right?

JayB – My observation has been a bit different than yours. I have seen a lot of “sports ADD” too, people who climb for a few years, even obsessively, but the give it up to move on to the next thing. Some people wrap their whole life up in their sport of choice. Being talented athletes, they may climb (or do triathalons or SCUBA dive or…) at a fairly high level. But when they realize that, though talented, they will never be at the elite level, they move on, looking for the thing that they are good enough at to justify centering their life around it. However, my experience has been that people who climb seriously for more than 5-7 years tend to be lifers. Is this because climbing is engaging mentally as well as physically? Or because it functions well as a metaphor in every day life? Even if work/kids/etc. prevent them from actually getting out much, they tend to still self-identify as climbers. When circumstances permit, they roll back into the game. I admire a lot of these guys – I have a friend who is teaching his grandson to tele ski. How cool is that? BTW, I do not personally know anyone who has given up climbing permanently as a result of losing a friend in an accident, though I know several who thought they would for a time.

or they don't because they quit skiing at the age of five because skiing in the east sucks so bad.