forrest_m

sayjay - the classic "paine" circuit will give you a good overview of most of the climbing areas, esp. if you leave the crowds behind an hike up into the valle de silencio. prepare to be amazed. be aware that from p. arenas, you will have a couple of travel days unless you can get the bus schedules dialed in... in theory, you could get from PA to the trailhead all in one day - it's about 4 hours (by bus)to puerto natales, another 4 to the park entrance, then like an hour in a smaller bus to the trailhead, and it's hard to get it all coordinated w/o spending the night in natales. so you might want more than 7 days round trip from PA if you can swing it. Have fun!

ok, let me see if I can unobfuscate… I think the crux of godzilla, esp. for the “onsight”, is the burly layback section, i.e., you do the bottom part, clip to the block with all the slings, stand up on the flake to above, then the crux: about 20 feet of laybacking or jamming up a big flake/crack to where there’s a no-hands rest. above, it turns into more of a corner with a crack in the face of the wall, and there’s a lot more stances for placing gear. that layback is hard to do jamming and placing gear, easy to do by just ape-laybacking up the outside many people seem to think the last move before the belay is the crux, but I’ve never thought it’s that hard… one finger jam, a stem, and I can reach the ledge and mantle. i like taping my hands if i'm going to crack climb more than one day in a row.

the first couple of times i climbed 'zilla, i did the combo-jam/layback at the big flake, but now i just place gear from the bottom, layback up to the good stance in the middle (on that pointy projection), place another piece, then layback again up into the corner above. this gets you through it really fast - knowing that there are good stances, you can just chug through the layback with as little energy as possible. second pitch of local knowledge, at the bend at tieton, is a great 5.9. it looks like it's going to be about 5.11, but it's much easier, perfect fingerlocks on this crazy crack that's on the point of an arete with cool exposure.

oldfart – sounds like you need to get yourself down to the library. I’m sure a city as big as chicago will have a full run of the american alpine journal in the main downtown branch. take each issue starting about 1980, flip to the alaska section, and copy the appropriate pages. until the mid-90s, there won’t be little switzerland stuff every year. also, there’s an article with photos and descriptions in an issue of climbing about 18 months ago. you’re not likely to find much more than photos with lines drawn and written descriptions, not ‘topos.” If you can track that down, you’ll be ahead of the game. I think you will find that the best objective for the kind of routes you describe will be the “trolls”, a three-horned spire just west of the “Throne.” You don’t really need too much beta – you can really just follow your nose to find the easiest routes, which usually involve a little 5.8 and some easier climbing. Finally – I followed this same process before our trip in ’94. If you come up dry, PM me your address and I’ll mail you photocopies of what I have. I say leave this for a last resort mostly because there’s been a lot of activity up there the last few years and so the info I’ve got is pretty out of date.

arrogant incompetence is hardly the sole domain of the hippies. ask anyone with SAR experience how many good ol’ boys they’ve had to had to look for over the years… the usual equation is overconfidence + bad luck = hypothermia. but I think you make an interesting point – sort of a reversal of the usual freedom to vs. freedom from argument. freedom from rules in this case = freedom to die from hypothermia. lots of "hippies" deliberately ignore the way things were usually done because they find value in being free to invent their own system. this attitude may be more well suited to reexamining your role in society or rejecting your parents' narrow-minded religion than to surviving the alaskan winter.

i girth hitch a long sling through the top hole, then clip a biner through the sling and the bottom hole and wear them bandolier style. alternately, i stick them through the compression straps on the side of my pack, but clip in the sling to something. (i lost a picket once when i didn't clip it in, it fell down a steep buttress striking like a bell in a clock tower, bong, bong, our friends could hear it over four miles away!) finally, if it is steep, you can put the biner through the second hole and clip it to your harness - it won't poke your leg if the terrain is reasonably steep.

besides the glaciers, there's that whole "north face aura" thing. i think it's 'cause it's all about sunshine: north faces don't get much sun, so they are dark and scary, as opposed to south facing routes which are friendly and happy. always. without any exceptions anywhere in the whole world. except in the southern hemisphere.

ok, maybe I’m just making this up, but I seem to remember reading once that “sandbagging” comes from the 18th & 19th century tradition of press-ganging, where ships in need of crew would basically run through towns kidnapping people who would then wake up on board, headed for india or somewhere. this practice was legal in england for 200 years! the favorite weapon of these folks was a sock or bag filled with sand because it didn’t do permanent damage and it didn’t *look* like a weapon. the press gangers would mingle with other sailors, get them drunk, and then *wham*, welcome to the navy. I think the term sandbagging comes from the apparently innocuous appearance of the weapon… this probably won’t convince anyone, but I wanted you to all know what a book-loving nerd I am.

dru – is that the south face aconcagua ascent that was fueled exclusively by a thermos of coffee and a handful of methamphetamines? even lighter than gu…

btw, the photo of gorilla bar features daler, photo by tim matsui. dale, what are you doing reading cc.com? shouldn’t you be out enjoying those 361 days of sunshine?

i apologize in advance for posting something on topic: climbing at the toolshed

from what I understand, you don’t use just prussiks, most people use this y-shaped clip-in with 2 big biners (so you can move one without being totally unclipped) and some kind of screamer or sliding metal brake deal on the stem to reduce the shock if you fall. this is less because they worry about the steel breaking (a lot of them are very large diameter and they are largely wired together with continuous steel cables), but more to keep you from hurting yourself with a static fall. check out the petzl website, they have lots of cool gizmos… a friend of mine recently did a bunch of via ferratti in the dolomites, he said it was awesome, there’s some entire mountains that are sort of hollowed out (they would tunnel frantically to try to get better firing angles) with combination caving/climbing/hiking trips that go all over the place. I’d hate to see our wilderness areas get cluttered up with that kind of thing, but in europe, where the mountains have so much more human history, I guess it’s ok…

some winter cascades climbing memories: climbed franklin falls, above denny creek campground, during an arctic front in late december. only a small fraction of the falls was frozen, the rest was flowing at full blast, constantly misting us. when we stopped moving for half an hour at lunch time, we each had a solid frozen carapace. we could barely break free to move. awesome site, with an open pool just below the falls and the I-90 bridge 200 feet above you. frozen mist had coated all the trees and the walls of the cirque, making it look like that ice cave in Logan’s Run… dragging sleds 14 miles up the ingalls creek trail to attempt some first winter ascents in the nightmare needles. sleds, as you may know, are more suited to open glaciers and icefields than to sidehilling trails in narrow cascades valleys. they were constantly falling off the trail behind us, sliding down the hill and dragging us down behind them like a Florida State defensive back sacking a quarterback. we climbed 1 pitch in six days. soloed the ne buttress of chair peak on a crisp, clear day, terrifying myself on the snow covered slabs near the top. came back the next day with a partner and did the north face. getting six feet of new snow in less than 48 hours on a ski trip north of white pass. we woke up in the night with the tent bowed down within two inches of our faces, barely able to move. finally, one person was able to worm out to dig the tent clear, while the other two of us tried to contain our claustrophobia, afraid that if we moved too much, the whole thing would just collapse. and it was a 4-season tent! on a climb near washington pass right after the road opened, didn’t summit, but did my first dry tooling (including hooking, shaft camming and undercling-levering) and first tool placement into frozen moss, all within an hour. like most washington winter climbs, 90% of reliable pro was slings around trees. late season attempt on new york gully found it out of shape (too warm), so we hiked up the enigma couloir instead. strong sun was at work on the other side. we started a sitting glissade that turned into a slow, wet avalanche. we were able to sit on top all the way down; it carried us without any further effort from the summit of snoqualmie mt. to within 50 yards of the car.

not necessarily... i've celebrated new years on top of intersection rock in a t-shirt. i've also gotten 8" of snow in april. chances are you'll be chasing the sun, but you'll probably be able to climb just fine. (bring a down jacket for the evenings, though, for sure...)

well, let’s see, after all the excitement, can we restart this? I think a really interesting idea that’s come up again and again is not the “defeat and redemption” arc that someone disparagingly referred to, but the recognition of paralysis through fear of failure. Have you ever noticed how relaxing it is to realize that you are fully committed? When you can no longer turn around, you no longer spend your energy deciding whether it would be wiser to go down, you can concentrate on going up, and this is incredibly freeing. I’ve found this is as true on a backpacking trip as it is on a climb: the first day, you always feel like if the weather goes to hell, you can always go back, but later, you realize that, rain or shine, you are going on to the end, and it changes your attitude. There’s a line that is crossed, at some point on most serious climbs, where going down is no longer a real option. matt story was about sitting a inch before that line and deciding not to cross it, and I think wallstein’s original post was about, in part, how he hadn’t crossed it either, and he saw that as a failure, despite having had what most people would consider success. I’ve always found that the most satisfying and intense climbing experiences share the sense that, for that period of time, nothing existed outside me, my partner and the route. Becoming committed to the route is the process of closing the door that shuts out everything outside.

matt – I have to admit, my first reaction to what happened to Round 1 was the same as yours. Great, thread, thoughtful responses. Then, once the spray started, it was like a dam breaking, and I thought, “well, there goes that thread…” I even started to write an angry post about it. But then I realized that it’s like blaming the puppy for peeing on the carpet – the board is how the board is, and once past the tipping point, there’s no bringing it back, so you might as well go with the flow. I do think it is really interesting how for most of yesterday, the thread was left alone, but then suddenly, once it became “safe for spray,” it quickly filled a second page. Was this an example of the “self-moderation” that Tim was posting about a few days ago? What caused it to end? Just that noone had added to the thread in several hours? I think we would probably all agree that a moderated “spray-free zone” would be ridiculous. When chuck tried to protest, he was slapped down by the sprayers, so it seems like it was voluntary respect for the discussion, not outside moderation, that kept the thread serious for as long as it did. I was sorry to see the thread take the turn it did, but is there really any solution?

mike – I think you have identified the most dangerous siren call of expedition climbing – the willingness to take risks that you might not take on some lesser peak. I know the fear of which you speak – the fear that you will give it less than your all and your trip will have been for nothing. It you didn’t want a life-changing experience, you wouldn’t go in the first place. Pushing it to the limit is also the source of the greatest satisfaction. My first trip to patagonia was a big disappointment. Our first objective was a route on the west face of Poincenot, totally out of our league in a place like that. It would’ve been a fine route for us to do in the Valley, so needless to say we were soundly spanked and bailed at the first hint of bad weather. We made a few more attempts on other routes and then a stupid basecamp accident effectively ended my trip. After all that planning, I made me almost crazy to not be allowed to at least fail heroically on something, for the trip to end with a whimper, not a bang. We went back in Jan. ’01, and ran into the worst weather in 40 years. 8 times the normal precipitation left many routes in even worse conditions than normal; it was the first season in almost 20 years that noone summitted either Fitzroy or Cerro Torre. We trekked out onto the icecap only to find the west side routes undoable (for us, anyway), el cap sized walls with a meter of snow plastered onto vertical surfaces. back to rio blanco, and we bailed in bad condition off of several attempts on smaller peaks. To access normal route on poincenot, you have to traverse a hundred yards of 50 degree snow perhaps 100 feet above a 1500 foot cliff. we felt the whole slope of new snow settle with a whumph – geeezus, if you could die from adrenaline overdose, I would be dead for sure. we ran away as snow started to fall again. at this point I had mixed feelings – still disappointed, but at least I had the conviction that we had taken every possible opportunity to climb that had been presented to us. Finally, we got a short good weather window. The first sunny day, we let the snow melt and hiked up to our snow cave at paso superior (a sort of advanced base camp); in the morning, we set out for the north ridge of Aguja Gaullumet. Snow still covered all the higher peaks, but since this buttress faces due north and the peak was low, we hoped it might be in condition. The lower pitches were ok, you could tiptoe around the snow that was still there. We reached the upper headwall, which had two very steep steps. The crux was the last pitch of my block. The first half went very well, beautiful golden granite with parallel hand cracks. Higher, though, the cracks merged into a single fissure and slanted strongly to the right, gradually widening as it went up. Our largest piece was a #3 camalot, which I pushed as far as it would go, then we struck a bargain with two dutch climbers behind us: we would borrow their 3.5 friend and they would jug our rope. I hauled it up and continued free climbing, shuffling that 3.5 twenty feet further until it, too, was tipped out, enough that though I hung from it, I feared falling on it. I contemplated the remaining 20 feet to the end of the pitch, obviously the crux: a 5.11 leaning offwidth. I tried out the moves a dozen times, each time backing carefully down to the friend. To make things even worse, the interior of the crack was filled with ice, leaving only the outer 4 inches or so clear. I remember my internal dialogue very clearly. If I could climb this, we would surely summit. If I backed off, nobody else was going to do it, and we would blow the only day of climbable conditions we’d seen in 6 weeks. I though about the trip in ’94, how that – not failure, but lack of trying - had hurt my pride and gnawed at me for years. How badly did I want this? I wanted it bad. Bad enough to risk it. It wasn’t one of those situations where you climb into the red zone without realizing it. No, I sat there and consciously decided that this was a gamble I was going to take. I shouted down “watch me,” which was surely unnecessary as I had the full attention of both my partners and the euros on the ledge below. I began a series of arm bars with my left arm in the shallow slot above the ice, laybacking with my right hand on the lower edge and camming my foot and knee below. I shuffled up past the initial good edges, and soon I was beyond the point where I could climb back down. I swam. I snuffled. I scraped and smeared on imaginary nubbins with my outside foot. I was maxed out. I looked up. Five more feet before a good ledge. Five feet, but my leg wouldn't stick in the crack and my arm bar was slowly, inevitably, losing friction. I locked off my right arm, still laybacking the lower edge of the crack, and scrabbled desperately for any kind of handhold. My flailing fingers flopped across the ice in the crack and as if by magic, fell into a slot where the ice had melted back in one pocket the size of a decent pin scar. My fingers locked automatically into a finger jam between the ice and the rock. The rest was automatic, I committed to the move and was standing on the ledge before I was aware of what I was doing. There were two more hard pitches after that, but nothing like the offwidth, and besides, I was done leading. After, we had a bunch of simulclimbing. I drifted to the summit with a mix of euphoria and horror. We soloed up and down the final snow slopes, and I climbed with exaggerated care, like a man who somehow survives a horrible car wreck and fears the irony of later being hit by a bus. The top was certainly something of an anticlimax. On one hand, you are on the summit of a peak in patagonia. On the other hand, a quarter mile away, the north buttress of Fitzroy rises above you the height of el cap. Aguja Guallumet is pretty small potatoes. So I still wonder about that decision. Good weather never came back, so it turns out that if I had bailed, we would all have gone home without a summit. But if I had fallen – and the climbing was absolutely at my limit, it was a real possiblity – I would have taken a minimum 40 footer, probably more like 80 if that tipped out cam had blown. Was it worth it for such a minor summit? On the other hand, I’m satisfied that this time, I did everything I could do on the trip – hell, we climbed more pitches than dean potter, who was camped next to us. But I still wonder if I was tempted by the siren. Did I only escape through luck, or if did the circumstances of being in the big mountains simply force me to climb up to my true potential, freeing me of my normal restraint? I ask myself this question often.

my friend dan had a cool short sleeved polypro top from the north face, functional and sharp looking... but $50. but then i realized, i've got a closet full of short-sleeved synthetic shirts that are even cooler looking. i picked them up during a 70s retro phase in college and never got rid of them, they are like $3 at any used clothing store. big collars keep the rack from rubbing a raw spot on your neck. patterns and colors to suit any style. plus, polyester never needs ironing.

btw, TG, this is a great line: quote: It is the mountain that I partner with to fight against gravity (and gravities buddy the weather). i might make it my autosig...

anna, I am glad that you are ok. I think you have gotten some good advice about how (if you choose to) you might go about learning to lead in a safer, more controlled fashion. a few other topics have come up that I’d like to address: sayjay wrote: quote: Personally, I think that the fact that most people get into climbing trad these days by starting off in the gym or on sport routes then move on to wanting to lead trad is causing too many people to have an experience like Anna's. one often encounters the attitude that if you aren’t pushing yourself all the time, you are somehow missing out or not “really” climbing. and I would argue that the greatest rewards in climbing do come when you push your limits. but the baby steps are fundamental, placing gear and making anchors are technical skills that require a lot of time to master. if you were to take flying lessons, you would spend a LOT of time doing “boring” stuff like sitting on the ground going through your pre-flight over and over, memorizing the layout of the controls, etc. before proceeding to short level flights. noone would accuse you of not “pushing” your limits while you were still learning the basics. because sport climbing makes it easy for people to lead almost at their limit very quickly, many people don’t realize that trad climbing is as much more complicated that sport climbing as flying a plane vs. driving a car. (lots of people do a lot of unsafe things while sport climbing, also, but that’s another thread…) another thing we tend to dance around is the face the climbing really is dangerous. I know I spent a lot of years telling my loved ones that “actually, it’s really safe,” and fooled myself for a long time into believing that all those people in ANAM had made mistakes that I was too clever to make. I know most of the obvious responses to this: some kinds of climbing are more dangerous than others, you could get hit by a car on the street, etc. But if we are honest with ourselves, we will realize that by climbing, we are deliberately taking risks and we should keep our eyes open to the price should we might pay. I think a lot of people pay lip service to this, because they like the thrill of participating in an “extreme” sport, of doing something that others think is foolhardy, without really believing that they themselves might be hurt. To me, this is like climbing with your eyes closed. It can be pretty hard on a sunny afternoon at Smith, but I truly believe that one of the best ways to reduce the risks is to keep in the back of your mind that every decision you make while climbing may have life & death consequences. [ 11-01-2002, 12:26 PM: Message edited by: forrest_m ]

dang you matt, you beat me to the draw... but i'll post it anyway: actually, I think the friction in the rope setup would decrease the total force, i.e. force on the anchor is (2x weight of climber) – (amount of climber weight absorbed by friction an therefore not held by belayer) – (amount of climber weight and belayer strain absorbed by rope rubbing on rock). here’s my thinking: if the climber weighs X pounds, the line from the climber to the anchor has X# of tension in it. anchor feels these X# completely. Friction at the anchor prevents some of this weight from being transferred to the other strand of rope, therefore the tension in the belayer’s strand of rope is less. Seems like rope friction on the rock would be greater in a lowering situation, since when rapelling, the rope below the rapeller is slack.

Is “verticle” a new term for ice that feels vertical when you are on it but is actually only about 75 degrees?

but let me know if you do, maybe they'll like 'em so much they'll want 2 pairs... my pulsars are my backup tools, but if i could get $400 for 'em, i might let go of them...

the teeth at the top of the quad pick (also known as the 4x4, right?) are nice for hooking as well, especially when you are hooking your way up some picked out waterfall like IcyBC in february... they keep your tool from sliding sideways when you are hooking big rounded features (as opposed to drafting on pre-existing pick holes) the cascade is thinner and supposedly displaces less ice, sticks better, less likely to dinner plate, more secure with less energy, etc. the "b" vs. "t" referrs to UIAA standards for breaking strength of the pick - being thinner, it doesn't meet the higher rating. i currently have one of each on my tools, but have only used them in alpine ice and i can't say i have noticed a big difference between them, but people i've talked to rave about the cascade for pure water ice.

ok, that's wierd, because that picture does not look like my 4x4 picks. i'll have to bring in my spare pick and stick it on the scanner tomorrow, 'cause it has a curved flange with little spikes around the inside radius on the left edge of the picture you attached... you're probably right about them changing the design, (i bought my axars about 2 yrs ago), seems a shame because i'm thankful for those teeth every time i hook a big icicle...