dberdinka

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.

I don't believe it either, I think Colin spent the last two weeks reading Alpinist 10 a few to many times.

2 lbs a day sounds pretty fair for an extended trip in the mountains.

Like smelling dirty armpits and letting the filthy dog clean the dishes?? Thank god I was never a climbing bum. I coulda done without.

$150 + shipping ? before I move to the evil Ebay?

Thanks for the beta, sounds tough. Is this Eric one and the same as ERIK who was once a crowning spraylord?

I've always drueled over LoveLace, that line and all the others on that wall look spectacular. What resulted in failure? Aren't the cruxes down low? How much OW? How was the aid? Tell me! Tell me! Bigwalling...I climbed the Titan a couple times two years ago. The Fishers are great. All the stories of horrid, terrifying, insane climbing are completely blown out of proportion by CO climbers trying to inflate their egos. ...well at least on the trade routes .

That ain't Zion fooooo

On the 1st ice pitch Below the in-famous crux pitch Bob yelling at me to not tangle the rope Topping out on the North Ridge

Climb: Cutthroat Peak-East Couloir Date of Climb: 3/24/2005 Trip Report: Bob and I climbed the East Couloir of Cutthroat on Thursday. We found the route to be in excellent condition. After postholing up to our knees on the approach and wallowing up the start of the gulley we found lots of water ice and relatively compact neve on the rest of the route. Due to the low snow year there is an additional 40 meters of thin, somewhat poorly protected, ice below the “crux” pitch and more ice above. While the climbing was no harder than WI 3+/4- the ice is always thin, sometimes aerated, sometimes brittle. The crux pitch itself is beautiful, a steep smear in a nice corner with great rock gear and occasional stemming and chimneying. We descended the west ridge, the first rappel station being difficult to find and reach. Its hidden just below the end of the slabby “a-cheval” ridgeline about 30’ west of the actual summit. Best done with a single rope. Evidently NOAA is predicting snow levels more akin to February for the next couple weeks. If so I’d venture to guess that the route should remain in condition for quite sometime. Put it on the list! I’ll post some photos later. Gear Notes: 1 60m rope stubbies KBs and LAs

Hey now, as an Outback driving yuppie all I can say is...my heated seats ROCK!

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