forrest_m

like, this is what i mean. note the shortness. as i said, a specialized tool, but one i wish i had in my quiver. this is what i will continue to call a north wall hammer. the people i know who own such things call them north wall hammers. if i'm wrong, i will at least continue to be consistent.

btw, at least two of the ones i was looking at (sorry, can't remember which right now) have stubby little spikes on the bottom. maybe this is a terminolgy thing, the tools dru mentions are what i'd consider a NWH (i don't own one (yet), but i've borrowed them or had a partner with one on several big climbs - and i'm sold on the concept for certain kinds of routes)

They’re not designed to be great on glaciers. They’re designed to be barely sufficient on glaciers to get you to the base of the rock. Once on the stone, they kick any ice tool’s ass in the placing pitons/cleaning aid nuts department. a specialized tool, to be sure... but considering that they weigh the same as a super-light ice axe, they're a lot more useful on technical rock routes

umm, no. a NWH is the size of a piton hammer, but has a pick on one side. much lighter and smaller than a technical ice tool. in a recent search, i found 4 on the market, one each from camp, grivel, c-m and one other i can't remember. they vary in weight - heavier seemed to get you a better ice tool.

OTOH, the Pilsner-lookalike, like many of the canadian rockies climbs it resembles, is very exposed to avalanche danger, as is much of the approach. the reason it exists is because a huge collection area of snow above drains down through a single trough. not to discourage anyone, just an observation - pick your conditions carefully! one of many avalanche paths you must cross on the approach

I did a similar trip, and later returned to live in Europe for almost 2 years. My advice, more or less in order of importance: 1) do not try to see “all of Europe” in six weeks. Pick one region (i.e. spain & italy, or scandanavia, etc.), or one large country (i.e. france or germany/Austria) and get to know it. In the end, having come to know one culture will be much more fun than having completed some impressive checklist of euro-capitals. Try staying in large cities for at least a week – long enough to go to the same café a couple of times, to find a favorite restaurant, to get the hang of the public transportation system. My memory of “checklist” traveling is chiefly of train stations and bus depots. 2) Find a theme for your trip. My experience is that it is hard to maintain motivation for random tourism for more than two weeks. All the churches, museums and discos start to run together. I’ve found it helps a lot to have some larger goal that you can use to organize your plans. It can be anything – visiting all of alvar aalto’s buildings in finland, every independent record store in the south of England, whatever floats your boat. 3) Be flexible. There is no reason whatsoever to have more than a vague plan beyond the next few days. 4) Pick traveling companions carefully. I really preferred traveling alone – with the whole youth hostel scene, you are only as alone as you want to be, and I liked being able to move on when I felt like it without any guilt. (as a side note, your friend can take comfort in the fact that youth hostels make hooking up about as easy as it will ever get. Everyone is traveling, everyone is looking for an adventure. If you can’t get laid at a youth hostel, you are not really trying.) 5) Don’t try to combine climbing/outdoor activity with your first trip to Europe. You will end up spending an inordinate amount of time shuffling equipment and luggage around and will just feel short-changed on both counts. 6) On suitcases – like alpine climbing, light and fast is best. I started out in one of those big suitcase/backpacks, but ended up ditching it for my bookbag. It’s Europe, center of civilization – anything you are missing, you can buy. You can wash your underwear in the sink every night. If you purchase keepsakes, wrap them up and mail them home – no reason to lug them around for a month. Luggage hassles are the number one bummer of traveling, even worse if you are moving around a lot. Your suitcase will never get stolen if it is small enough to keep in your lap rather than under the bus/in the luggage compartment/etc. 7) On guidebooks – IMHO, the hands down best are the Rough Guides, followed by Lonely Planet. Time out and Rick Steve’s fall a bit further down, Let’s Go is OK if it’s all you have, the “grown up” guides (frommers, Michelin) are pretty much useless. (I’ve found this ranking to hold true worldwide). One more note – consider your guidebook a consumable, not a sacred bible. Nothing makes you standout as a rube tourist more than hauling out a 3 inch thick Lets Go at every corner to check the map. Here’s a novel idea: TEAR OUT THE PAGES YOU NEED FOR THAT DAY. Wouldn’t you rather carry 4 pages than 400? Use a big rubber band to hold the whole book together. 8) Remember, you are supposed to have fun. If it ever starts to feel like work, take a day off, go to the beach, stay in your hotel room and watch MTV, call you mom, whatever.

Just to jump on the bandwagon, I think this is a great idea. I love those old Mountaineers Annuals from the 30s, where you could get a snapshot of the whole PNW climbing community in a single volume. In addition to new route reports, I think some regular sections would be cool. Such as: A Challenge Like washburn used to do in the AAJ, a couple of cool aerial views of a major unclimbed line or face, accompanied by an article describing the feature and the history of attempts. The recent thread about Mox peak is the kind of thing you might have. Accidents/Safety I think it would be very cool to have something about local incidents. Maybe one first-hand account of self rescue accompanied by an annual summary put together by someone involved in SAR? As for the production, people with graphic design and small-run printing experience are not hard to find these days. I think B&W printing on good quality paper would be a good compromise for quality/cost – that’s why the Elaho guides feel so nice.

Two friends of mine did the complete s. buttress a few years ago (’96?), 28 days IIRC from the ruth to kahiltna base. sounds like the best part was being so acclimatized by the time they got across Thayer basin that summit day was an easy stroll. The worst part was the triple carries up the lotsa face, well basically all the load carrying. My impression is that neither of them would contemplate doing another route in this style. PM me if you want contact info.

thanks for the help. as of today, the following trails are closed: Lake Ck. #500 Andrews Ck. #504 Coleman Ridge #505 (up to intersection w/510) Diamond Ck. # 514 (up to intersection w/502) Crystal Lk. #517 Fire Ck. #561 Basically a circle around Coleman Peak &Cal Peak, but the majority of the Pasaytan is open.

anyone know a website where current fire closures can be checked? i'm particularly interested in access to the pasaytan wilderness area... TIA

i too will usually rap instead of lower, but not always. bird's list is a good one: to which i would add 4. i'm cleaning draws off a very overhanging/traversing route and want to use the trolley lowering requires good communication... especially when people start going on and off belay. if at all possible, leave your leader on belay while he/she is threading (a lot of people take them off, apparently to save the trouble of feeding some slack and reeling it back in.) my partner one time leaned back after threading before i had a chance to reel in the slack - he was still on belay, and so only fell 20 feet (what with pulling me 10 ft. off the ground) instead of all the way to the ground. we were having trouble hearing each other because of the wind. he was never actually in danger, but it highlighted for me the dangers involved in the rethread/lower operation. I also agree that the process of setting the ropes up for rappel leaves you less vulnerable to being lowered off the end of the rope. It leaves the climber in control of his safety, not someone on the ground. My experience is that the guy hanging 100 feet off the ground is likely to be more focussed on safety than the guy on the ground, who is chatting with other climbers, petting his dog, whatever. i think the issue of saving wear on the chains is worth thinking about, but is not critical. chain is neither expensive nor difficult to replace. yes, it's nice to save wear on it, but i'm not so concerned about it that i'll go way out of my way to rap when lowering makes sense for other reasons (see above.)

nice job you guys. i've made it into the more remote parts of the coast range a couple of times, and i always think to myself, "boy, this is what is must have been like for Fred in the cascades back in the day, unclimbed peaks everywhere..." i guess it's how it still is for Fred

hey thanks for all the response - best beta i've ever gotten from this board. and look how on topic y'all stayed! my personal verdict, after test driving many of your suggestions on friday night: trask's bombay recipie is not dry enough. the whispering and setting the vermouth next to the shaker was too dry (though fun to say). the pour in vermouth, swirl, and pour out was just right. we did a side by side taste test of shaken vs. stirred. about half the people in this blind test could not tell any difference, the others universally agreed that the gin flavor was more intense in the shaken drink. my friend's 1928 copy of "the gentleman's handbook" claims that this is because the bruising of the gin releases aromas, just as when you crush other spices. oh, and for another variation, make it with akvavit (someone brought a bottle and we eventually ran out of gin). good stuff!

what you are describing is the difference between a "gin martini" and a "vodka martini" - by definition, they have different "flavor volumes" (which is a techinical term that i believe you just invented). however, in terms of dryness, my understanding is that the proportions should be the same...

dru, i will stipulate that in terms of proportions, vodka may be substituted for gin. i myself tend to lean towards the "whisper vermouth over the shaker" school, but i'm thinking about an "average" martini, i've read 5:1 (gin/vodka : vermouth), 7:2 and other, less easily measured proportions.

trying to determine the perfect recipie for a dry martini. what is the right proportion of gin to vermouth? thanks.

douglas glacier TR (my very first post on this board, oh so long ago)

Sounds like a fun plan if you like solo stuff… personally, the only way I can stomach serious bushwacking is if I have someone to complain to about it, but to each his own. To get from the access creek basin to luna pass, you are correct that you must climb a gully (snow early season but probably talus by now). After climbing the long slope above the Beaver trail, you will break out into a more open, flatter valley area. This is slide alder hell, but you can escape slightly uphill onto talus slopes left of the creek. Not long after you pass the largest talus field, start looking for your gully. It ascends behind a rock buttress and is more-or-less in line with the axis of the valley, though it climbs up the left hand slope. There are several to choose from, but you should be able to tell from below which is easiest. Once on the ridge, follow the crest for a short ways (like ¼ mile), then leave the crest and traverse up and left across the slope to Luna Pass. This section is in the very last of the trees, so navigation is pretty straightforward (esp. compared with getting up access creek). From Luna Pass, the summit is about 45 minutes. haven't been since '98, so no recent beta, but search the board, there was a thread last summer about the log over the creek.

A guy I know (J) was on a trip into the kichatna spires in the early 80, just him and one partner. The day after they arrived, the weather shut down, and it rained and snowed for 15 straight days. They huddled in their dripping snow cave, trying to conserve food and trying to think of something new to say to one another. One night, J wakes up to see his partner hunched over him, ice axe raised over his head. He looks J in the eyes and says calmly: “I could kill you man.” J is 5’-4”. He’s zipped into a mummy bag with his arms at his sides, head scrunched up into the hood. His partner is 6’-2, a blond viking type with a dreadlocked beard. It takes J two hours to “talk him down” before (viking-dude) collapses in tears “I can’t take it any more, I have to get out!!!” Fortunately, the weather opened up enough for them to fly out two days later. J regards it as his closest call in the mountains.

I agree with what everyone has been saying about 100m ropes being a huge potential cluster. OTOH, I’ve been climbing a lot lately on a 10mm x 70m and have decided that it definitely has its place. Not so much on moderate alpine terrain, where a shorter rope is usually less of a pain to deal with, but on harder alpine/multi-pitch routes that often have 5.10 or harder pitches separated by relatively short sections of somewhat easier ground. (i.e. Slesse E. Pillar or Navigator wall, etc.) The key here is that the easier sections have to be short enough that you probably wouldn’t bother changing the system around for simulclimbing, because you’re going to have to go back to belaying in a second anyway. In this case, the longer rope often allows you to combine several pitches into one. (i.e. we did Rock On at Squamish in 2 pitches with only 5 feet of simulclimbing). Often you have to be a bit creative with gear management, but we haven’t been bringing a larger rack than usual. This system falls apart (for me, anyway) on steeper wall-style routes (grand wall, davis-holland, etc) because once the climbing reaches a certain difficulty, I need to carry more gear for the longer rope, and if the climbing is challenging, it’s not necessarily faster to have extremely long pitches where you move slowly because you’re tired from skipping the rest at the normal belay… The longer rope is also kind of nice when lowering off sport routes, since most lowering stations are set for 60m or shorter ropes.

Lowell - here's another personal anecdote... I took the mountaineer's basic climbing course in '86 and there was definately no mention of simulclimbing. The closest thing was on a climb, one older guy showed me the technique of "carrying coils" where you each coil up the rope and climb together to move the belay up across easy terrain. This was imparted in a whisper as being somewhat unorthodox. I carried a lot of coils in the early years (the entire upper half of serpentine arete, large portions of the n. ridge of stuart) where we would obviously have been better off just soloing. The first time I personally employed simulclimbing was on the NE ridge of Triumph in the early nineties, my partner had read something about it in one of the climbing magazines. We had independently reached the conclusion that carrying coils for any distance was pretty silly. We had probably read about simulclimbing before, but this time the idea fell on fertile soil. I just re-read Harrer's The White Spider, and he describes protected simulclimbing on ice on the Eiger in 1938. The leader placed "ice pitons" periodically as they moved up the ice (this is what saves them when the avalance hits them on the white spider icefield below the exit cracks), but they didn't use it on rock. Instead, the leader climbed each hard bit to a stance, put in pro and belayed the others to the stance, then continued, kind of halfway between simul-climbing and belayed climbing...

Yeah, well, I would never advocate monkey wrenching here at home. No sir. Absolutely not. Anyway, whose lawn would you leave a Fee Area sign in? Since the program originates in DC, it’s hard to see what effect it would have (as satisfying as it would be to leave a big pile of 'em in the FS district HQ parking lot...) They’d probably give you a ticket regardless of whether there was a sign at the trailhead or not.

do: do a search on cascade climbers for simulclimbing to read the previous discussions on this topic tie in short so that you are ~100 feet apart to reduce rope drag and facilitate communication carry a larger than normal rack (extra small pieces don't weigh much) so that you can lead longer pitches stop to belay *after* a hard section (instead of before) - leading through it (as long as the rope is tight) you are as well protected as with a belay, but you don't want the second to fall and pull the leader off. with the hard bit below you, you can continue simulclimbing without having to waste time changing "modes". esp. on ridges, take advantage of natural pro, i.e. weaving back and forth around towers and such dont: fall lead while leaving your newbie buddy to follow. the person less likely to fall should climb second, as it is relatively easy to hold a leader fall while simuling but very hard to hold a real second fall. thus, the leader, even if of lesser ability, must still be efficient at route finding and placing gear, or the system doesn't work too well.

So we pulled into the parking lot at Murrin Provincial Park on Sunday, resigned to paying the $3 parking fee, only to discover that the pay box had been pulled from the ground. A pile of concrete rubble was testimony to the effort the angry taxpayer had gone to. According to the park maintenance guy we talked to, the vandal had then gone on to leave the destroyed mechanism on the front lawn of the government official responsible, but this sounds a bit too good to be true. In any case, for the moment there is no fee to park at Murrin… as always, things are just better in Canada.