forrest_m

found 3 mylar balloons with "happy birthday" printed on them in mcmillan cirque. funny thing was, it was my birthday.

paddy sherman talks about the suitcase in "cloud walkers" and he claims that it is an urban legend. apparently, the rumor got into the newspaper, and the efforts at body recovery/identification were screwed up by the hundreds of gapers from vancouver who showed up and started carting away airplane parts, body parts, anything that looked interesting. but i like the idea of finding a suitcase full of cash "cliffhanger" style out in the woods.

i'd like to offer a note of defense for the mountie's MOFA program. obviously it is nowhere near as comprehensive as a WFR course. you knew that just looking at the number of hours. however... having when you say it is just a red cross first aid course with some bells, i don't think you realize just how lame a standard red cross first aid course really is. the MOFA is like three times as many hours and does involve some real simulation. in my experience, the instructors are very experienced (YMMV) and the overall course materials at least are designed to get you to think through the problem and deal with the situation at hand, rather than follow any prescriptive list. for people who are new to wilderness first aid, the emphasis on improvising with what you already have in your pack is invaluable. on another topic, does anyone know of a WFR course that is offered like some evenings and every weekend for a month or something? i really want to take the course, but i refuse to use up 3/4 of my year's vacation for it.

General - Conditions were good on saturday, but sunday was well above freezing. Not again! The climbs are starting to recover from the warm spell, but it's back to early season conditions. Capricorn - long, hard approach with 3 inches of powder over frozen dirt. the "approach" pitch mentioned in the guidebook is nowhere close to being in, jungle warfare is required to get through the brushy cliffbands. the upper pillar is in and forming fast, but is very chandaliered. 2 inch layer of new ice is not well bonded to older ice underneath, so lots of dinner plating and slushy patches. the top is very very wet. we bailed about 20 feet below the top when we ran out of daylight. Carl's Berg - i'll repeat the warning posted a few weeks ago about carl's berg in warm conditions. just as we reached the base, a coffin load of large ice chunks broke off the cliffs above the route and strafed the base. we ran away. i know, this is a hazard in all ice climbing, but i think carl's berg is particularly vulnerable because of the icicles on the cliffs above and because it faces south/west. the route is in (someone did it on saturday)but running water has worn a channel completly through the left side of the flow, visible from the highway as a vertical brown stripe. Loose Lady - The scramble approach is missing one whole section (just water over slabs), so cut into the woods on the left. the first pitch is about a cerebral as WI3 gets, 2 inches of ice over flowing water. same with the lower part of the upper tier. the top is a spectacular freestanding pencil, about 4 feet in diameter and composed almost entirely of hollow chandaliers. some more freezing and it would be very cool, but we didn't want to even touch the thing. Synchronicity - We scoped it from the road and appears to be all there, but significantly thinner than two weeks ago.

W - not to mention threads titled: "(insert potential sponsor) sucks!" actually, i'm not sure your argument about famous climbers not being online holds water, because rec.climbing has a number of very well known participants, but maybe the key is that it is a national (international) forum, while CC is, by definition, a local forum

hey dwayner - i got the scoop on mentoring from a frien who recently took the course. basically, they hook up four or five basic students with a "mentor," who schedules additional practice sessions, etc. outside of the regular course. The idea is to give people some additional practice time in a low pressure, non-graded environment with low instructor-student ratio. Many mentors also schedule extra climbs (for which students get credit) or conditioning hikes. I think that the mentors are supposed to be on the Mountie's "leader's list" (for what that's worth) and so at least usually aren't just first year intermediate students. according to my friend, the mentoring setup was the best thing about the course.

oh my god! its GODZILLA VS. MEGALON!!! battlecage in tokyo!!!

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.

selling the gregory on the theory that if it don't fit in the andinista, you don't want to carry it?

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…