dberdinka

The UTW aid routes tend not to have consistent size cracks so you don't need a huge rack. A set of micro nuts, a complete set of stoppers, two sets of cams to 2" plus 1 set 2" to 4". 1 cam hook and 1 skyhook are neccessary as well. I've always used a big hook too but I doubt it's essential. Green Drag-On has a lot of pin scars compared to other lines so Aliens, offset brass and camhooks come in very handy.

This is the type of on-line advice I just love. Giving fairly serious advice to someone of unknown abilities about an "easy" day trip you recently did in For what it's worth a majority of climbers tend to climb north side routes from a bivi.

OUCH!

All this back-patting is BS. If your going to climb one of the most popular and classic 5.9's in the state, particularly if your going to do it on a weekend you should be a competent 5.9 climber. Is that so much to ask? By getting on the route full-well knowing you're going to be slow you're negatively impacting the experience of the all the competent climbers who will get stuck sitting on ledges for half the day. Why not climb the route when you ready for it and can do it in good style. There are plenty of other climbs on which to hone you technique or "work out the kinks". Did these guys who aid-sieged the crux pitch two weekends ago really have as positive experience as they could have? Going home with a story of yarding on gear, botching pitches and bottling up the route can't make one feel good about themselves. A few more weeks of dedicated training on other crags would have improved the experience for everyone that weekend. IMO - slow climbers on OS on a weekend suck ballz -- As for rating OS is a relatively soft 5.9 by pre-sport Leavenworth standards.

Huhhh, well at least he tried.

Whats up with the rap anchors about 40' below the ledge at the bottom of the first headwall crack pitch? Also near the top of Orbit where things ease of there is a mystery anchor consisting of two 3/8" bolts off to the left. Who knows what the hell thats for.

At $10 Sport Shirt it is! Thanks for the link. Maybe I'll post a review at some point. Darin

So no shit there I was sitting somewhere on Snow Creek Wall the other day in the shade. It was cold and windy and I thought....Damn I need a wind shirt. Something simple preferrably with a hood light of course abrasion resistant too Make it cheap and fairly water resistant. So I look around the internet and see there are lots of windshirts out there. I hear there's some real experts on the topic around here so I thought I'd ask? Which one should I buy?

I'm of the impression that Doug Klewin was a bad-ass aid climbing mother-f%#ker. If he fell off the fifth pitch does that mean it's friggin terrifying, and what happened to the guy anyway. Still out there crankin?

You're going to die!

I have no clue about the time and expense of llamas but the approach is pretty chill from the Big Sandy. While you're there check out the climbing around Deep Lake (Haystack/Temple/etc) 1/10 the people and just as much climbing.

I got my start climbing with the Olympia Mounties back in the day. I was a 16 year old who probably weighed a 135 lbs. The mounties attract all varieties of people (you've seen the photos ) some of which are packing on a fair number of extra LBs. There was a woman in the class who was LARGE, I guess you gotta give her credit though. Regardless our rock climbing class took place at the choss-errific Cushman Crags in a light but steady drissel. Near the end of the day I found myself belaying this woman using a HIP belay on some dank wet 4th class chimney. Should could not climb it, she will never climb it, it just wasn't going to happen. But for a solid hour she tried and tried and tried doing a fine job of hanging, sliding and falling as I held her on a hip belay with that rope slowly rubbing the sking of my waist. It still hurts.

Pics? How do the glacier/snowslopes below the south summit (start to SE Buttress) look? Thanks.

And where exactly are they getting their forecast information from? Another part of the bill should require those same commercial weather forecasting sites to develop their own private satellite networks etc from which to develop their forecasts. You gotta love what these assholes try to pass off as the free market, government welfare for the corporations so they can turn a profit. Sickening.

I didn't request it as much as point out to John that if he was going to create a gallery full of Slesse pics he should probably include "THE LAST GREAT PROBLEM..BLAHH..BLAHHH..SPEWW..SPEWWW...HEART OF DARKNESS". I've seen John fly by in mountains and the guy flys fuckin FAST. It's unbelievable the image quality he gets going a 150 mph with one hand on the camera and another on the controls. Very nice shots he managed there. Awesome looking line but what a friggin bowling alley that one would be. So what turned Guy around? Objective hazards or technical difficulties?

Be the CC.com you want to see in the world!

Route du jour! Nice work

It's Monday and I don't want to think and I just saw Paul's photo so I've attached an appended version with a topo of the the final 3 pitches of "Sine your pity". These pitches were very asthetic, linking thin finger cracks with clean moderate slabs.

Read the damn articles! We're saved..kinda...at least compared to the south.

These people are freaking me out! Someone please convince me they're crackpots. The actual editorial The Rolling Stones Article it was based on ****** Editorial in Full ********************** The Earth is going down. Way, way down. To the mat, hard and painful and with a sad moaning broken-boned crunch. We are chewing her up, spitting her out, stomping and gobbling and burning and gouging and drilling and sucking her dry and we are carelessly replicating ourselves so goddamn fast we can't even stop much less even try to slow the hell down, and all we want is more and faster and with less consequence and pretty soon the Earth is gonna go, well, there you are, I'm finished, sorry, and boom zing groan, done. Don't take my world for it. Just read the headlines, the latest major, soul-stabbing report. It's one of those stories that sort of punches you in the karmic gut, about how they just completed this unprecedented, four-year, $24 million, U.N.-backed study involving 1,360 scientists from 95 nations who all pored over thousands of satellite images and countless scientific reports and reams of stats, and they all distilled their findings down to one deadly, heartbreaking summary. And here it is: We, humankind, people, sentient carbon-based biped creatures, only us and no one else but us because it sure as hell ain't the goddamn lions or caribou or meerkats or rhododendrons, we humans have, in our shockingly short time on this wobbly sphere, used up a staggering 60 percent of the world's grasslands, forests, farmland, rivers and lakes. That's right, 60 percent. Gone. Burned up. Used up. Much of it irreversibly. These are the basic ecosystem services that, simply put, sustain life on Earth. The glass ain't even half full, people. It's about three-fifths empty and draining fast and we are doing our damnedest to expedite the process because, well, this is just who we are. We reproduce. We consume. We use it up and dry it all up and move on to find more and it reminds me of that line from Agent Smith in the first "Matrix" movie where he stares menacingly at Morpheus and speaks about how every mammal on Earth instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, "but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague," and then Morpheus gets all huffy and righteous and goes on to inspire Neo to prove how we are also full of beauty and fire and life and he makes it all better by saving humankind so we can go buy the mediocre soundtrack. But it doesn't stop there. The study also reveals that our fair and gluttonous species has altered the planet more violently and rapidly in the past 50 years than in any comparable time in human history. Yay accelerated technology. Yay multinational conglomerates. Yay lack of corporate ethics and rabid unchecked capitalist consumer gluttony. Whee. And you read this horrific story about how we are mauling the planet at an unprecedented rate and you ask yourself the obvious question: Our government is doing what about this again? Oh right: nothing. Not one thing. They are, in fact, making it all far, far worse. Worse environmental president in American history, you remind yourself. Whee. And this heartbreaking study, it comes hot on the heels of one of the most distressing and sobering pieces of journalism I've read in ages, an excerpt from a book by James Howard Kunstler called "The Long Emergency," all about the imminent and staggering oil/natural gas crisis now looming large over the U.S. and the world, a crisis of such dire proportions that it will very soon reshape American life like nothing since the Industrial Revolution. Except in reverse. It's about peak oil. It's coming within a year or two. It means we've essentially siphoned off all the easily attainable oil on the planet (about 50 percent of the grand total) and getting to the remaining 50 percent -- the lower-quality stuff that's buried deep in rock or in impossibly difficult locations or that lies underneath countries where the people absolutely hate us -- will be so fraught and expensive and hypercompetitive that it will mean not only, in the immediate future, much more war and strife and pain but also, in the next decade or two, a radical -- and I do mean radical -- reshaping of life as we know it. Petroleum and gas will become incredibly scarce and everything we know about consumer culture, travel, products, Wal-Mart, easy access to all daily goods and services, will essentially vanish, and we will return to a intensely local, viciously competitive agricultural model of raw survival. Read this article, and be amazed. This is the incredible thing about humans. We are capable of such amazing extremes, such breathtaking beauty and such violent ugliness, astounding awareness to utter blindness, transcendental light to staggering dark. Some periods in our history, it feels like we're actually progressing, calming down, evolving, reaching new heights and new levels of psychospiritual awareness, as opposed to merely rearranging the puzzle pieces in a drunken haze of frustrating anxiety. And at other times, like now, like the new and violent and fractured Dark Age so savagely exemplified by BushCo, it feels as though we are working toward the other extreme, working our last raw nerve, seeing how far we can go before we implode, how much of the planet we can abuse and pollute and rape before something pops so violently and unexpectedly we can only sit back and go, oh holy hell. Maybe the nutball evangelical born-agains have it right: Maybe it's best to just burn up this whole godforsaken lump of Earth as fast as possible and then watch in giddy flesh-rended glee as Armageddon rains down and only those who've given tens of thousands of dollars to secretly gay televangelists will rise up and be saved and the rest of us will merely drive our Priuses off a collective cliff into the fiery pits of gay-marriage-friendly hell. Ah, but we have bad news there, too, because, according to the cute Rapture Index, that adorable little Web site o' righteousness that charts the various global "signs" leading up to the impending Second Coming, the Rapture should be happening, like, right now. Or maybe last week. In fact, the index now stands at 152, well above the "Oh sweet Jesus take me now" threshold. Which means, of course, that the Second Coming might have already come and gone, and Jesus may have swooped down and taken one look at what we've done to the place and said, you've got to be freakin' kidding me, and said, sorry but no one here deserves much of anything illuminative or enlightened right now. Can't you just hear all those gay-hatin' born-again Christians saying, what the hell? Of course, no one said this was gonna be easy. Not Christ, not Buddha, not Allah and not Lao Tse and not Rumi and not Krishna and not the light beings right now swirling around your head and trying to get the message across that this earthly plane is one of the harshest and more difficult and bloody messy ugly lessons in the universe, which is also why it's so valuable and mandatory and why so many souls want to come here, to learn. Trial by fire, is what it is. This is what they say. But if these scientific studies and stories are to be believed -- and there's little reason to think otherwise -- that fire is about to get one hell of a lot hotter. Stock up on duct tape. And water. And hope.

Education requires being, in fact demands being, open to new ideas. Right? Learning means considering and either accepting or rejecting thoughts you haven't had before. Definitions Liberal: Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry. Conservative: Favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change.

Warbonnet Peak. The approach is a solid day including a lot of off trail travel. The basin below the peak consists of meadows, granite slabs and a series of beautiful lakes. Warbonnet Peak itself is reminisent of the Beckey Route on Liberty Bell. A little longer with an awesome summit block. I climbed it in late September of 2002 and was maybe the third or fourth party to sign the register that year. There are several other large and good looking spires on the same crest that must have some descent routes on them. Cehck it out.

So...how much longer until the next 62 million years is over?

What the hell type of car gets 500 MPG? Can some physist here compute the maximum MPG attainable if you used the energy in gasoline with 100% efficency in a vehicle weighing X lbs traveling an average of Y mph? There's gotta be some upper bound.

They stretch plenty, you'll be fine and they'll be very comfortable. I wear a sz 43 in boots and have 41.5 Mythos.