jon

John, which LittleLife did you get? What logic are people using for this, getting a light carrier for the mom to carry the kid and the dad carries everything else, or getting a big carrier for the dad to carry and mom carries as much as she can. He's in the 98th percentile so mom is going to be carrying him for a pretty limited time. A bit off topic but what age did people start doing overnights?

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What are people using and liking? Both the Deuter and Osprey look like pretty good options.

Hey Everyone, As I'm sure everyone has noticed we've been having some problems the last week or so which culminated in today's downtime. There are two issues behind this. First, our database for the forum has grown in size to the point where some of the queries are bogging down the database server. As a short term solution we are looking at getting our databases on some better hardware. Second, our web host, who we've been with for 10 years, appears to be having problems keeping up with their growth. They have served us well (no pun intended), but it's time to find something that fits us better. Before these issues even came up I started looking at our options, and we are still evaluating those. I'm hoping to get our servers in Seattle to remove one weak link in this puzzle. There is actually one last issue. There might be a misconception that there are several of us working full-time running cc.com, which is far from the truth. There are two of us right now, just Porter and myself, and we keep this up, dealing with host issues, tech support, help desk support, all the non-sense, in our spare time. So with that in mind I hope everyone can hang in here with us as we work through these server issues. Thanks!

It looks like we are back up! I'll have more about this and what we are trying to do to rectify this tonight.

I found my max HR by going down a deep dark hole. Max HR isn't a measure of fitness, just a measure of what your genetics gave you. Training can make it go higher. More importantly though is to be able to do an effort at that level and be able to recover from it repeatedly. Saying your 205 doesn't mean anything if you are curled up in a ball barfing on yourself. OBLA = Onset of Blood Lactate Accumulation. You measure it with a blood lactate meter and it is basically the balance point of when lactate is produced faster then it is removed. Unless you are training by power or distance/time it's not a terribly useful test because in a lot of individuals HR can be effected by how rested your are, time of day, caffeine intact, stress, etc. A pretty good way to determine your aerobic threshold it to do a 20 minute time trial/workout on whatever it is your doing, whether it is the bike, running, stair climber, and take your average HR from that effort.

That is the formula stamped on all exercise equipment. It's irrelevant. I'm in my 30s and have a max HR of 205. I've bike raced with guys the same age who's max HR is 178, which was my aerobic threshold. It has nothing to do with fitness, more genetics. You can have a high max HR and have a low OBLA value, or vice versa.

60 minutes @ 158 on the stairs made you throw up and use all of your glycogen? Maybe you're doing it wrong Or maybe her max HR is 175. Everyone's is different.

I was under the impression we did cardio all the time?

So these guys post a poster of an Eagle on monkey face and in the process kill three hatchlings?

I've had to make a temporary change to our search function. The biggest range you can search now is just 1 year. I will change this back after we get a better handle on this.

MySQL. We've had a DBA look into things. The problem is we have some pretty expensive queries, mainly the forum search query. I've been working on moving the forum search over to Solr which is insanely fast. We are also looking at moving the db onto a separate VPS or maybe a dedicated.

It looks like we have some of the issues worked out for the time being. Please don't hesitate to let us know if you run into performance issues.

Ditto on the IB 260. I've abused the hell out of mine and I sweat like mad. Check out the MEC T3. It's been a good hooded top as well. http://www.mec.ca/AST/ShopMEC/MensClothing/Hoodies/PRD~5016-259/mec-t3-stretch-hoodie-mens.jsp

We have are on a dedicated dual core 4Gigs ram, standard LAMP setup. Our db is on a shared DB server. We are looking at moving the DB onto the dedicated and putting nginx in front of apache to serve static content.

We now have the dog on the problem. We are sorry for the continued problems. Some of our database queries are taking up to 91 seconds which is totally unacceptable.

Tecnica's fit wide feet better. If you ski a lot I'm of the opinion finding a good fitter comes first, then have them recommend the best boot for your feet, then have them tailor the boot if necessary. Why spend all that money to ski to have your feet ache/hurt/kill the entire time? I have odd feet and I was lucky in that the shop owner had the same feet as me and knew exactly which boot to put me in.

What are you in right now? What are you feet like? Do you have kancles?

Coquihalla Hwy, a few miles err kilometers west of the pass.

Jim Nelson, owner of Pro Mountain Sports and author of Selected Climb in the Cascades 1 and 2, has written a great piece on how to choose the right ice axe. http://cascadeclimbers.com/blog/2012/02/23/ice-axe-review-how-to-buy-an-ice-axe-by-jim-nelson/ Thanks to Jim for the great article. They are coincidentally haveing a BD sale right now so if you are in the market for a new axe check out the article and head over to their store.

We've got another great article by Blake in the blog about gear you should leave behind and what to use in place of it. http://cascadeclimbers.com/blog/2012/02/23/forget-that-bulk-webbing-by-blake-herrington/ I've posted this here because I'm sure this is going to generate some great discussion. Feel free to reply in the blog as well.

We're having some server troubles today, sorry for the slowness. We have everyone in our corporate office working on the problem.

You guys made the right choice. We went touring in Manning on Thursday and there was a pretty good crust.

Can we save all the speculation and poor choices talk for another day? Let's let people grieve for the loss of their friends, and then hopefully gain some insight into what happened so the rest of us can learn from what happened. Thanks.

@ryanb interesting about the Plums. I might have to read more about it. Nick, I think the answer depends on a few factors including how light and how rich you are. If you are neither, I would go with the Fritschi since it sounds like you are a lift skier. Reason is they are more bomber and generally cheaper then other setups. You can ski them like a normal ski including fast GS turns. They also ski better inbounds if you are doing a lot of side-country. I just got back from a trip where we did some side country and some of the skiing out in the resort was survivalist, and I was glad I wasn't on my Plums. If you feel after a season or two you want a higher performance touring setup, then move to a dynafit setup. In that progression you end up have a quiver that works for everything instead of a rather big gap between skis.