Alpine_Tom

What'll likely happen is they'll spend five years and a bunch of money getting it put through and built, just about the time the NASCAR fad starts to fade, and Darrington will be left with a big, expensive track with nothing much to to use it for. Seems like if they built a track there, they'd have to widen the highway from Arlington to Darrington, and that'd take longer, and more $$, than building the track. And I bet neither the state nor the county has the money to do that. Just my .02

Got a pass, and need a partner. Possible objectives: Black Peak, NE Triumph, NE ridge Buckner, N. Face Prussik peak, W. Ridge Big Four, N. face or something similar. PM or e-mail tbreit99@yahoo.com

More than once I spent a four-hour bus ride to a wrestling meet sucking on hard candy and spitting into a drink cup to make weight. And I could never figure out why I got those terrible cramps in my arms during the matches! Bronco recommended an exercise bike: if you can ride one of those regularly, you have my respect -- they're excruciatingly boring! Around here you can bicycle outside all winter long, and a second-hand bicycle, if you don't have one, is probably no more expensive than a second-hand exercise bike. As I get older, I do find myself packing on the layers around the midriff over the winter, and it gets harder and harder to work 'em off in the summer.

I just looked at the illustration on p. 161 of the new edition of the brown CAG, and it appears that now you can traverse directly from Chair to the Tooth!

You can certainly get from the source lake trail to the NE buttress of Chair peak, if you don't mind some bushwhacking and tunnelling under trees. I haven't done the descent from Chair to Melakwa, but it's my impression that it's feasible if you don't mind crappy rock. I'd bring a rope for rapelling.

It's here: http://home.comcast.net/~tbreit/big42.htm Ignore the mock-heroic tone of the text, please. I haven't tried it again, but I did go up there with my kid a few weeks ago, and scrambled up the "ramp" most of the way, before coming down. The exposure is pretty heady, it's real "Beckey class 4" stuff, but it did seem feasible. It'd take a long day, though, and a pretty high tolerance for bushwhacking. (Bring long pants, a machete, and a headlamp!)

Say what you want about REI, but how many places are there where you can bring your toddler on a rainy day to play on an indoor playground while you sit and look at books from their library, and no one minds?

Drove down to Sonoma for a wedding; hiked up Thielsen on the way down, and Shasta on the way back. (mmm, choss!)

Yeah, it was a non-stop scree slog. The only snow I passed was little bits in the hollows, which looked like maybe it'd fallen sometime in the last week or two. I did manage to string together about 500' of glissading on the descent, though. It was an interesting experience; I mostly did it because I'm planning on doing a spring Shasta climb with my brother, and wanted to get familiar with it a bit, plus I was driving by and had some free time, so why not? Saw a couple of interesting birds up there, a perigrine falcon, and (I think) a kestrel.

Monday, on the Clear Creek route. e-mail me (tbreit99@yahoo.com) with the description and approximate altitude you left them. (wotta choss heap!)

I hiked up there Friday with the dog, up the dog route. From Gem Lake, though, it looks like there's a pretty interesting rock route up the east face(?) I was surprised to see nothing in Beckey about it beyond the SE ridge, which is just a scramble up through the heather. Does anyone have any information on that -- is that at all a descent route? From what I could see, the rock looks pretty sound (I forgot my camera, so I have no photos of it.)

Congratulations, Josh! As a married, once divorced guy with a 21-year-old daughter from yet another relationship, I offer the following: My take is that the biggest poisoner of a marriage (or any relationship, I guess) is unspoken expectations. Does she expect you to spend every holiday with her parents? Does she expect that once you're get married, you'll get rid of that cool Audi and get a mini-van? And that once you're married all your free time will be spent together, or, alternatively, that she has her own life that you're not invited into? It's extremely important to make sure she knows that climbing is a part of who you are, and it's not going away. You won't be going out every weekend and spend every summer evening at Marymoor, but you're not going to put your gear on eBay once you come back from the honeymoon either. Frankly, I'm glad I don't have a climbing wife. I don't get out as much as I'd like, but it'd be far worse to have to tailor my routes and objectives to her interests and pace, or have her decide that since she's suddenly tired of climbing, I should be too. A good friend of mine got married about ten years ago, and they went through a pre-marriage councilling with the Episcopal church (they got married at St. Marks.) The primary thing this counselling consisted of was taking a 100-or-so question multiple choice test, listing a whole bunch of things: religion, kids, sex, family, travel, money, and on and on. You were each supposed to fill it out separately, evaluating each item as to how important it was to you. The idea wasn't that there were right or wrong answers, but to make each of you aware of each others feelings -- and how strongly held the feelings are. She wants six kids, you want none: three is NOT a compromise. But I STRONGLY, STRONGLY, believe -- there's absolutely nothing wrong with two-year-long engagements!

That's why God made bicycles, man!

I heard about this article over the weekend: http://slate.msn.com/id/2085417/ The salient point: In Gore's marketing pitch, the key component of GORE-TEX is a sheet of Teflon (that chemical coating on your frying pan) stretched out to form tiny pores that are big enough to allow air vapor to pass, but too small for water droplets to get through. Voila: waterproof, breathable. This membrane is then laminated to a regular fabric (like nylon). In pure form, expanded Teflon membranes are incredibly breathable. But there's a flaw. Sweat and oil that touch the membranes can act as a conduit to sneak water droplets through the pores. Thus, Gore is forced to cover its Teflon with a special coat of polyurethane, or PU, to protect it from sweat and oil. But now what's really keeping the water out is the PU (which is itself 100 percent waterproof), not the Teflon. The PU is breathable but far less breathable than the Teflon would be alone. In the end, the GORE-TEX membrane ends up doing nothing at all. It's just there so Gore can say it's there. Says Gibson, "I don't really see the point of the Teflon, but that's part of their patent. The Teflon is just a skeleton. The functional part is the PU." So, GORE-TEX is effectively no different than all the hundreds of other fabrics out there that use PU coatings, including those in nearly all my test raincoats. GORE-TEX is a scam! One notable fabric—it's called eVENT, and I tested it in the Pearl Izumi Channel Jacket (my priciest model at $199.99)—uses expanded Teflon like GORE-TEX does, but its makers claim they've found a way around using a PU coating. They use some sort of complicated, proprietary treatment to make the Teflon itself oil-repellent. Gibson's lab tests bear this out—eVENT was the most breathable rainwear fabric out there. GORE-TEX was just average.

The beauty of global warming is that you can't really experiment usefully. You just have to keep running your Cadillac Escalantes and pumping the greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and wait to see what happens. The prediction I've read for the cooling of Europe is that, as the ice in Greenland melts, the N. Atlantic will be come less saline, which will prevent the gulf stream from coming as far north. England (and, I guess, northern France, Belgium, etc?) would become colder without that warmer ocean water. Certainly the warming has been going on for a while -- when Vancouver discovered Glacier Bay, the bay was choked with glacier: it's taken a while for them all the melt away and leave it empty. But the industrial revolution and the associated burning of large amounts of coal for power has been going on for about two centuries now. I don't think anyone is claiming that the human activity contributing to global warming is only the last few decades. Maybe Bush and Sphinx and the rest are right, and it's all natural, and we can keep on doing what we're doing. Maybe cigarettes don't cause cancer, it's simply bad genes. It does seem, however, like a rather large gamble to make.

There's really no rockfall danger on the Emmons (unlike DC where this time of year it's a bowling alley.) You could safely bag the helmet, I'd say.

to the left of the gully, you can climb up the face. It's moderate 4th class, and might be quicker than slogging up the couloir, even earlier in the season.

I didn't see a bit of rockfall (okay, a really minor amount, self-caused.) You could use an ice axe climbing up the snow slopes, but it was just as easy to walk up the rock next to the snow. The most remarkable thing about the outing was -- no bugs! I guess it's been too dry a summer.

By coincidence, I was up there yesterday. I didn't think it was too difficult, similar to Mt. Pugh or the corkscrew route on Sloan, but I had the benefit of talking to a couple of guys just descending the gully. About 20 feet below the notch at the top of the gully, there's a ledge that leads off to the left. (These guys said it was "obvious" and "bomber" but if they hadn't told me about it, I might not have noticed it.) The ledge goes off to the left twenty feet or so, and there's a little cairn that they built. From there, you just scramble upwards. It's solid 4th class for about 20 feet, but from then on it eases, and you can pretty much follow the dirt trail wandering around on the rocks up to the summit, very like Pugh. And, hey, there's a summit book! If I was to do it again, I'd probably do like Rastus says and just climb the rocky "face" to the left of the gully that leads up to the notch and not mess with the scree in the gully, and that'd be easier. I was a little surprised that there were no webbing nests up there, it would be a fine place to rappel down from. This is the first time I was in Gothic Basin, and it's pretty impressive! Budget the time so you can do an overnight up there. I've added it to the list of places I want to take my son to, when he's a bit older (the trail is pretty stiff for a five-year-old.) I was a bit pressed for time; I made it from the car to the summit in 4 hours, and back to the car in 3:20. The trail is completely easy to follow, in good condition. There's snow up there, so you don't have to pack water for the descent.

Promotional material for a climb for cancer is not reputable source for physiological and meteorological information. They are just chestbeating about Denali. Do the search for the thread from last year in which this factoid was compellingly debunked. The only reason I used that quote is because they expressed the information more succinctly than I would have (plus, they had more accurate numbers for the lattitudes of Denali and Everest than my son's globe.) It's a matter of metorological fact that the tropopause (top of the troposphere) is lower near the poles than at the equator, no matter who on this site has "debunked" it. Perhaps a less comercial link would give a little more credibility to the physics? It's actually a far more interesting topic than I'd at first assumed from the factoid I was carrrying around in my head, and so I appreciate being challenged. http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap01/tropo.html http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~hakim/tropo/ http://www.fofweb.com/Subscription/Science/Helicon.asp?SID=2&iPin=enweath3421 If I HAVE to, I suppose I could actually bestir myself to go look up the relevant information in a book, but that's so, well, tedious. At any rate, it's beside the whole point of ehmmic's question, about which I don't have any useful information...

"The difference in the barometric pressure at northern latitudes affects acclimatization on Denali and other high arctic mountains. Denali's latitude is 63° while the latitude of Everest is 27°. On a typical summit day in May, the Denali climber will be at the equivalent of 22,000' (6900M) when compared to climbing in the Himalaya in May. This phenomenon of lower barometric pressure at higher elevations is caused by the troposphere being thinner at the poles." from http://cancerclimb.thepeaks.com/facts.htm It's not that the concentration of oxygen molecules is less at the poles, it's that the density of the air is less.

The best possible advice is: go to someone who knows what they're talking about, and has a good selection to chose from. REI has a wide selection, but I don't know if I'd trust the salespeople much, and you'd have to do a lot of the research on your own. I'd try Pro Mountain Sports if you're in the Seattle area, or Marmot, or Feathered Friends. The thing is, different boots (or shoes) fit different feet differently. (That's why the pro football players who get $$$ for endorsing one brand of shoe often wear a different brand, with the endorsed brand's logo magic-markered on.) So a boot that fits me, or your climbing buddy, perfectly, might fit you poorly. And a poorly fitting boot, no matter how high a rating it gets from Outdoor Review, is NOT your friend.

I've had asthma for years, and managed to keep it in check without much inconvenience. (Before I had the proper meds, there were times when it was pretty f&%$in' scarey.) There's a (rather common) variant called "exercise-induced asthma" which gets me on cold days, but an ear band over my mouth takes care of that. Alexi Grewal the bicycle racer, had this too. But it's not like 20 years ago, if your friend is under any sort of medical care, it shouldn't be any sort of problem. There's a book called "Asthma and Exercise" worth looking at if further reading is desired.

My feeling is that Gore-Tex is sort of a scam. It may be, in fact, that under laboratory conditions it does behave as advertised, but in the real world I haven't seen it. If you're hot and sweaty, you'll probably take off the shell, anyhow, right? So it being able to breathe isn't such a big deal. And if you are out in the rain, eventually it does seep through goretex, even new, clean goretex. (maybe it is the seams, or imperfectly cut clothing, but in the real world, you can't separate the components.) And, in fact, Jim Nelson has the same opinion: he says that a $50 wind shirt treated with Scotchgard keeps him drier than a $300 goretex shell. Ray Jardin in his hiking book recommends using a lightweight umbrella, and I tried that once, on a drizzly hike, and it worked wonderfully well: plenty of ventilation, kept dry, didn't get sweaty the way I would have with a shell, goretex or otherwise. It wouldn't have worked on a scramble approach, but with a free hand, I was really impressed at how effective it was. OTOH, Gore spends a LOT more $$ on marketing than Jardin does.

My father is a (now retired) history prof. A buddy of his taught with Pirsig, and said that Pirsig's reason for writing that book was so make some money off these gullible kids and get out of teaching.