forrest_m

some of my coworkers gave me the "rock climbing action man" for my birthday. despite being made of plastic, he can still only dead hang for about 5 minutes before his fingers start to deform and he takes the big whip. however, when he throws a heel hook into the mix, he can hang out at the crux (a vicious mantle move onto the bookshelf next to my desk) for months at a time. i've learned a lot about climbing from action man.

Marko - it was cool, we put a pretty long trip report on the board, i'll bet you could find it with a short search in the north cascades section. Like everything in the cascades in winter, very conditions dependent. Dru - At the base of a climb in J-Tree, I once accidentally traded Aces with another climber. There was this big pile of gear, and I grabbed the wrong ones but didn't notice until we had hiked an hour to the next crag. He ended up with two rights, me with two lefts. We spent four days looking for each other before we finally ran into each other again and were able to trade back... [ 01-10-2002: Message edited by: forrest_m ]

Max wrote: quote: I think alot of people get tired of hearing horror stories. ...But these incidents are great opportunities to stop and look at what we do and think about the risks we take and if and how we want to minimize them. I was at a party a few years ago, not a climber’s party per se, but there were a several of us there, and naturally we clustered around the drinks table talking climbing. Overhearing us, a non-climber was horrified at how we were casually analyzing a recent fatal climbing accident, accusing us of being callous and insensitive to accuse a dead person of making mistakes. Our defense was provided not by us, but by another non-climber, who as it so happened worked for Boeing’s flight testing division. He went on to explain that one of the reasons flying is so safe is because the analysis of accidents is very strong in aviation culture, and there are official channels for the investigation and dissemination of information relating to virtually every accident. Not only do they analyze accidents, but pilots are encouraged to report incidents that, while they didn’t result in an accident, could have under different circumstances. The flight-test guy put out the theory that climbers’ obsession with stories of close calls and disasters was an informal version of the aviation world’s incident review system. I have always agreed. I don’t consider myself morbid, but I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about accidents. I know that you can’t ever be perfect, but it’s also true that most accidents aren’t the result of a single mistake, but rather the combination of several. The more you learn the less likely you are to make enough mistakes to get into trouble.

Here's one for the dumb-stupid rather than dangerous-stupid category. When daylward and I climbed the n. face of colonial, we drove up the night before, parked the car down at the campground and then got up real early to get an alpine start. We hiked a ways up the highway and started into the woods (about 20 minutes) when dan realized that he had forgotten the rope (!) in the car. I'm thinking "and you didn't notice that your pack seemed awfully light?" So he goes back to get it, while I hang out in the pitch black woods. Half an hour later, he's back, and we just started in again when dan turns to me with a guilty expression. Turns out he left his ice tool at the car; he set it down to open the car door and forgot to pick it up again. He turned around again and I went back to contemplating my navel. When he got back the second time, we had lost over an hour. Doh! I spent most of the day wondering if it had been some sort of omen...

there is a climb in leavenworth called "groping for oprah's navel." the crux is a longish move to a round hueco on a convex, smooth slab.

<2nd hand hearsay>From what I understand, Jim asked Brian for information on some of his routes, and Brian requested that Jim not include them in his books, presumably because he figured it would decrease sales of his own guidebooks. No hostility, just a favor. On the other hand, the Clean Break route is now such a well known classic (it's in the new Beckey guide anyway) that I believe Jim and Peter are planning to include it in the upcoming revised edition of Vol. 1.</2nd hand hearsay>

i always thought that thing was called a: glom1. v. the act of attaching to something, "I'm not that into her, but she just kind of glommed onto me", "I asked him if he wanted a corn chip and he glommed onto the whole damn bag."2. n. an object used to glom "hey, pass me the glom, I just melted a hole in my gloves with this pot of boiling water."

agreed... but check out the great photos on this trip report: http://staff.washington.edu/gregm/nosno.html

I recently got a pair and have used them on one long mixed route. They are very solidly built. I thought they climbed great, but I don't have much experience with vertical point crampons to compare them with. There are a lot of adjustments, it is true. Most of them are a big pain in the ass, but the flip side is that they seem extremely unlikely to fail. Several of the adjustments are to make them fit your boot precisely, so you would probably only adjust them once.

http://www.gravsports.com/Ice%20Pages%20Folder/Route%20Descriptions/Conditions.htmwill gadd's page also has some first hand reports

i'm not dissing your input, just trying to refocus. it happens a lot in gear discussions, someone want to know which is better, an accord or a camry, and pretty soon people are talking about how good a bmw m2 drives. noone denies that the beemer is probably the best car, but...

yeah, but if traffic is not an issue, it is more than an hour faster to go i-5. during daytime, however, i-90/97 is much more scenic and interesting.

let's review for a moment, shall we? dennis asked about moderate water ice and mixed alpine tools, and now everyone is dragging quarks and cobras into the discussion. for me, the difference between an alpine tool and an "ice cragging" tool is the head design, 'cause a huge amount of the time you are grabbing the head with your hand in cane or dagger position. most of the really high end tools don't allow for this very well, even the new axar i got this year is less comfy than my pulsars in this mode. my personal opinion is that the DMMs "feel" very heavy, because i have a small hand and their shaft is very large diameter. i've climbed a bit with predators, and they just feel big and clunky to me, i shatter the ice a lot more with them. the bd prophets are nice, but are also heavier than my pulsars. everyone i know with prophets has had the rubber grip come off, sometimes more than once. i really like how the axar climbs, and it's kind of halfway between a "performance" tool and an alpine tool. from what i can tell, the bd rage is a straight-out knock off of the shape, so i would probably like it too. as for lambone's comment about screws on the CM tools, without the head weights (like dru, i dropped mine in the garbage the first week), there's no more exposed fasteners than any other tool, and my own experience has been very good. but i like a light weight, narrow shafted tool. ymmv.

pulsars are super trustworthy. you know there's something right when they haven't substantially changed the design in a long time. i've had just the setup described - one multi-shaft, one bent shaft - for going on eight seasons of hard use, and they've never broken, loosened or fallen apart in any way.

afraid... should be and shouldn't be... my experience is that very experienced alpine skiers seldom have much trouble getting down the hill on tele skis, but learning to tele... much harder. the problem is that paramarking works fine in most area conditions. it's only in softer, off-piste conditions that it's a recipie for face-plants.

payaso - one other thing to remember about the mountaineers courses, it's not like a scuba course that you have to "pass" in order to get "certified" so you can go out. you can take the class, take what you want from it, and leave it at that. even if what you really want to do is just do more climbs at the same level, being in the intermediate class will mean that you are going to classes and field trips regularly, with a much smaller group of people (who just happen to be the most motivated folks from the basic course), so there is a great peer group atmosphere from which you can branch out. many, many people begin the int. course, learn what they need, but never actually "graduate" because they've met people and gained enough skills to just go climb, without the larger organization of the club. it's not that the club is bad, its just that most people eventually find that it is a lot more convenient to just go climbing with their friends, rather than calling some office to sign up for a climb with limited space, a "leader", other people they don't know, etc.

Terry - while I appreciate the story, I’m not sure what bearing it has on the EDK vs. DF debate. Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but it sounds like your partner(s) tied the knot incorrectly, not that the knot failed. In many alpine situations, speed is safety, and not spending a lot of time retrieving stuck ropes is an element in that safety. Stuck ropes happen! Here’s a story of my own: Me and Daylward were descending from doing the first ascent of the North Face of Mt. Marcus, in the Waddington Range. We had planned for a one-day push, but got caught out and spend the night shivering on a ledge. We rapped through the morning until we got halfway down the headwall that had been the crux of the route on the climb, and we were rapping the most direct line, so reclimbing it would be a major aidfest. Halfway down the overhanging wall, at a fully hanging belay, the ropes started pulling, but shortly after we lost the second end, they hung up. We started pulling for all we were worth – difficult at the awkward station – but no dice. After trying every trick we knew, we attached prusiks onto the ropes and alternated standing in slings, to pull on it as hard as we could. We had climbed on a pair of 8.5mm ropes, and being concerned with safety above all else on this remote climb, had joined them with a DF knot. The thin rope just stretched and stretched. Finally we gave up in defeat, putting our weight back onto the anchor and wondering if we had pulled enough rope to be able to protect whoever had to prusik the rope. I gave the stubborn cord one more yank, and suddenly, magically, it fell free. We finally figured out what had happened. Instead of being lodged in a “rope-eater”, the edge of the DF knot must have hung up on an edge, or a couple of edges, so the rope was stuck but not jammed. When we stepped out of our slings that were on the stretched rope, it must have rebounded back and over or around whatever it had been hung up on. We got very, very lucky. I have had to reclimb pitches/jumar or prussik the rope only three times (I’m not counting the many times I’ve scrambled up a little ways or had to cut the end as irretrievable). Twice it was a flailing end that jammed in a crack or wrapped itself around a block, but once it was that big fat DF knot jammed into a constriction where the EDK would’ve slid right through. A 33% lower chance of stuck ropes sounds like a worthwhile tradeoff to me. God knows, with all the shitty rap anchors out there, the chance of my overhand knot breaking is hardly the most worrisome part of rappelling for me…

and whats more, his most famous route? (drumroll please...) CAVEMAN M9+ (i'm not making this up)

i think lambone was just inspired by sean issac's slideshow the other night...

the double fish vs. overhand (aka Euro Death Knot, or EDK) question has been debated at great length on rec.climbing by people who actually have access to testing equipment. the latest "consensus" is summarized in the FAQ at tradgirl.com http://www.tradgirl.com/rc/faq5.htm#rappel which includes a link to some spreadsheets of testing, discussions of failure mechanisms, etc. the argument basically comes down to this: the double fishermans is unquestionably far stronger than the EDK, especially if tied poorly. however, the EDK is by far strong enough for rappelling, and has other advantages (primarily that it is less bulky and the knot rotates upwards when pulling the ropes so your ropes are less likely to get stuck). some people say: i want the strongest knot, period. some people say that reducing the risk of a stuck rope is worth the reduction in strength. you make the call. tech geeks of the world unite.

holly - well, it's the internet, so you have no 100% guarantee. the tradgirl stuff all names its sources, i.e. if you look at the spreadsheets, they have explanations of where they come from, mostly testing performed by the poster him/herself. you implied earlier that you trust the breaking strengths given on the camalot tag, so i guess you consider the black diamond catalog authoritative? most manufacturers have this kind of stuff on their website. i have read that the uiaa has done a bunch of knot testing, but as far as i know, the raw data were published in academic-type papers. probably in the library. if you want to have a 100% guarantee of testing accuracy, i guess you should go do the tests yourself. (some of the tradgirl test were done by a guy with a strain gauge a comealong, and a bunch of retired ropes of various diameters.)

I did a really cool climb in august of Mesachie Peak via the Mesachie Icefall/East ridge, it was a really fun weekend out. It was pretty melted out, so we didn't rope up, just simlulsoloed the whole thing. One 10 foot vertical ice step, 300 feet of 50 degree snow, then a long moderate (5.5 max), mostly solid ridge, with several sections of almost perfectly flat "sidewalk" with great exposure. We didn't bring a rope, but you might want one if the glacier was snow covered. We left easy pass trailhead at 4:30 pm and were back by 1 the next afternoon. From easy pass, climb about 2-300 vertical feet then traverse level for about a mile into a small bowl beneath mesachie pass (bivy spots). Cross the pass, drop down and traverse under the icefall, climb up to the ridge and to the summit. Descend to the top of the gully, then traverse the south side of the peak back to camp. You could also go do daylward and my new route on mt. hardy :-) http://www.cascadeclimbers.com/ubb/Forum2/HTML/000184.html

just getting this back up to the top... please come to our slide show!

PP - Actually, my feeling is that very few climbers with a broad range of experience would choose to define themselves in such limited terms as "trad" or "sport", whether or not they engage in sport climbing or some other facet of the sport. So I was implying that the people who do (self) define themselves as "sport climbers" are very often people with less experience and therefore much of the abuse that they suffer is the veteran-novice razzing that happens in any activity, made more complicated by the fact that many "old-school" climbers are disconcerted by the incredibly fast progression through the grades that most people make today (compared to 15 or 30 years ago.) Obviously the bolting issues you raise are far from settled. I'm just saying that it's getting a little ridiculous around here that everytime someone says "quickdraw", the thread turns into "Dan's Dreadful Direct Part XVIII"

quote: Originally posted by Peter Puget: Forrest – Since the bolting question has been killed would you please provide the definitive answers to my three questions? I must have missed them while the debate raged! PP - although I am all knowing and all powerful, I choose not to provide you with the definitive answers to your open ended questions. ;-) I'm not dissing your posts or the seriousness of the issues you are raising, I just feel that they have been discussed as nauseum lately, and it seems to me that you and some other posters use even the most tangential link to drag threads onto the bolting soap box. Again, these are important issues, but I thought that in this case, MN had started the much more entertaining thread of "why do old-school climbers dis on sport climbers." If you want to make a serious discussion out of it, you could inquire into why some people define themselves as sport climbers or "trad" climbers, but I think the discussion of "what is a sport climb" is boring.