dberdinka

A little one sided? I finally read this article the other day. It's an implicit approval of Infinite Hubris and essentially claims the hubbub over the route centers around a misreading of maps and a few spoil sports who don't like new trails. It saddens me that the question of whether bolted alpine sport routes are ethical is never even raised. Am I that crusty? He certainly goes out of his way to slam users of an unnamed internet bulletin board. Hmmmmm....who could that be?

Ummm..can you leave climbing out of this......

Mount Olympus - Blue Glacier - A beautiful mountain Mount Redoubt - NE Face - Great, remote alpine ice route. Cathedral Peak - SE Buttress - Best rock in the northwest, maybe the world. Mount Slesse - North Rib - 25 sustained pitches on good rock Forbidden Peak - NW Face - Awesome & committing line Two of them I did this summer, so freshness of memory has an influence. They are all hard to get too and take time. It's hard to limit it to 5.

HAS THERE EVER BEEN A DOCUMENTED, REAL-LIFE ASS-KICKING AS A RESULT OF A CC.COM CONFLAGERATION? WHO? WHERE? WHO WON?

It is a very different line from the more standard aid lines on the UTW in that the rock is more massive and less featured. Interestingly enough it's also the only non-clean aid route (A) in the PNW I've been on that it not heavily scarred by pitons. The start of the crux pitch is definitely a bit sketchy. A mix of old rusty tied-off pins, hooks, expando cams in thin flakes and fixed heads for the first 30 feet. Then it gets easier. A3 for sure. There are rumors of it having gone clean. The corners generally don't take camhooks, so maybe on a triple set of Lowe Balls or something. Unless there is a definitive answer to that I say bring your hammer and have fun. It's a great place to beat lots of iron and a nice route to boot. Bring..... doubles of short LA's that's #1,#2,#3 two short, thick Bugaboos two baby angles hooks from small to big std aid rack to 3"

Anyone in B'ham have the skills and the equipment to fix the trigger wires on an Alien? Thanks. DB

For what it's worth..........

HOLY SHIT! go type the following four words into google and hit search. Look at the fourth link down.... uranium centrifuge misled Bush Do it. JUST DO IT! Afterwards click the link and read what someone else posted so as to have a better understanding of how full of shit Peter Puget is how, yes, Bush Co misled us (assuming you bought their bullshit to begin with).

That lump is actually a small bio-metallic "spider" thats has fused itself into Bush's spinal cord. The lizard people use it for mind control.

STATIC POINT 2 MILES TO THE WEST

I think Lance posted a aerial photo of Frostbite-Weber? For what it's worth here is an aerial photo of the Tang Tower and surroundings, I follow it up with a photo of Static Point to give an idea of how much granite is out there. TANG TOWER SLABS

MEC ain't the deal it use to be, bummer.... But the liquor at the duty free is still a steal! Maybe Sumas will once again be a bustling hub of Canadians buying dairy products. Goddamn Cheeseheads!

Approx dist and times from B'ham 110 miles, 2.5 hrs Yak Peak/Needle Peak/Coquihalla 115 miles, 3 hrs Anderson River Peaks (need a key) 70 miles 2 hours Slesse/Rexford TH 80+ miles 3+ hrs Old Settler (recently improved road access?) 93 miles 2 hours Squamish

I am all for this approach. All I ask is that you let me know what route you are doing and when so that I can, um... make sure your placements were good? I never claimed it was cheap. However it works and does have a place, particularly in an alpine enviroment where difficult sections are typically short and rock flakes abound for both anchors and pro. I used it once and felt fairly secure. Hi Rad

ummmm...... We would be spending 200 BILLION DOLLARS on a war. There wouldn't be a 1000+ dead americans. We might actually be pursuing the real terrorists threats. Countries like Iran, N Korea etc might not be so inclined to build nukes as a deterent to another preemptive strike. Iraq would be a tightly controlled dictatorship not a free for all of insurgents, terrorists, islamic extremists etc. Saddam would be no closer to having WMDs that he was before we invaded (see todays news on WMD report) The rest of the world powers might actually be interested in collaberating with us to eliminate terrorist organizations. We wouldn't have to listen to this shit every single day... Whether the Iraqi people are better off is a different question. In the long run I certainly hope so.

So 4th class rock likely has small trees or good rock flakes on it. Bring an 8mm dynamic rope, hopefully something short like 30 meters long. Tie into one end of it. At the base of a stretch of rock you want to self-belay tie a sling around a solid anchor (tree,flake,nut,piton). Pass your rope through the sling and tie into it with a clovehitch on a biner maybe 20' from the end you tied directly into your harness. Now you can climb 10' before the loop of rope comes tight against the anchor. Now tie several clovehitches on seperate biners with about 20' of slack between each one. Now you can.... climb 10' and undo the first knot. climb another 10' and undo the second knot climb another 10' and undo the last knot now the single strand of rope from your harness tie-in is just lying through the anchor. Keep climbing, having left only a sling behind. Need be you could place pro as well, leaving it behind or pulling it as you go. The whole point being at the top of the hard bit you don't need to anchor the rope,rappel, undo the lower anchor and reclimb the pitch.

I'm no physicst but there is a HUGE difference between a suborbital vs orbital flight and the resulting reentry. To achieve orbit a vehicle has to reach some insane speed, I want to say 16,000 mph (I could be wrong). The Rutan vehicle reach Mach 3 or about 2,200 mph. Upon reentry a vehicle like the shuttle has that much more speed to blow off through braking i.e. friction with the atmosphere. Hot! Hot! Hot! What the guy did is certainly cool but it's a LONG way from orbital entry/reentry.

Man confuses own penis for chickens neck, dog eats it BUCHAREST (Reuters) - A elderly Romanian man mistook his penis for a chicken's neck, cut it off and his dog rushed up and ate it, the state Rompres news agency said Monday. It said 67 year-old Constantin Mocanu, from a village near the southeastern town of Galati, rushed out into his yard in his underwear to kill a noisy chicken keeping him awake at night. "I confused it with the chicken's neck," Mocanu, who was admitted to the emergency hospital in Galati, was quoted as saying. "I cut it ... and the dog rushed and ate it." Doctors said the man, who was brought in by an ambulance bleeding heavily, was now out of danger.

Nice work and great photos. How were the roads getting in there? Was it the Chehalis tank-trap junk?

I have a Silent Partner that I've used quite a bit for both aid climbing and free climbing. It feeds great! In fact it feeds rope better than most of my living, breathing climbing partners. Furthermore you'll never look down while sketching at the crux and see it digging around in the pack for another Snicker bar. How well it feeds depends highly on what type of rope you use. I use 10.5 mm Stratos for bigwalls. It feeds like shit when I'm trying to do free moves, the rope is just too stiff and thick. In the past I used a 9.6mm Marathon while free climbing, with that it fed great, in fact it fed damn near perfect. A relatively new 10mm rope would work fine for free climbing, Sterling Marathons are very durable for the diameter. As you'll be jugging a lot that's a good thing. One thing a SP does not do well is top-rope. If that's your bag use something else. When you start out rope soloing you will quickly find that it's 75% rope management and 25% climbing. It can be an entirely frustrating experience at first. I'd also say it shares as much in common with free-soloing as it does with roped climbing. Be careful, think hard about the systems you use, have fun. $135 is a steal.

The only hairy mountain devil I saw was Gene. What exactly is Ragged Ridge? The headwaters of the Sultan River are indeed incredible (this is the valley Static Point slab is in). The potential for ice routes was noted, with large plateaus above steep cliffs. There is a prominent spire on the south side of valley you can see from the Static Point approach. It's backside, facing northeast, is an incredible wall. Looks excellent and near impossible to get too. It was great fun to experience so much cool topography so close to home.

The crags near town, over by the nude beach if I remember, are overgrown ass. Go to the mountains.

Climb: Tang Tower-Sine your Pitty on the Runy Kine Date of Climb: 10/3/2004 Trip Report: Back in March Chuck posted a TR on climbing Static Peak with Klenke. Chuck and Klenke explorerate Static Peak and a good time was had by all! Several photos were posted of rugged granitic peaks encircling the North Fork of the Sultan River. Of particular interest was a collection of spires and buttresses located two or three miles east of Static Peak. On a map they sit due south of Boulder Lake with the highest summit having an elevation of about 4800 feet. Their south faces looked enticing with long sweeps of clean white granite. Unfortunately getting there looked to be a bitch. As one person said, "I have stared at that picture for years, it...haunts me. If you survive the ten foot high brush and prehistoric ferns, pot farmers and the local Sasquach, a most heavenly reward awaits the faithful. ( the bigfoot part is true...)" On Sunday my buddy Gene Pires and I finally got around to giving these peaks a go. As neither of us brought a camera I'll have to make due with a thousand words. I woke up way too early and met Gene in the pre-dawn hours in Monroe. We headed east to Sultan where we followed the Sultan Basin Road about twenty-one miles to the Boulder Lake Trailhead. Its's about four miles to the lake on a great trail that gradually switchbacks through some stupendous old growth. Once you leave the lake the suffering commences. The entire area is inundated with thick brush. It's friendly, no thorns, just a jungle of head-high alder and huckleberry everywhere. We thrashed around the south side of the lake for about fourty-five minutes (Gene estimated it at five hours) aiming for its southeast corner. From here a long boulder filled draw led up to a 4480' col maybe a third of a mile to the east of our objective peak. The south side of the col was steep and we found ourselves doing two short raps from stout trees. This was all taking a lot more time than we had expected, the feeling of commitment was growing and the anticipation level was high. Traversing down and across more thick brush and granite slabs we turned a corner and could finally see the walls and buttresses we had come for. They are big and complex. There are sweeping buttresses, scraggily ribs, slabby bowls, steep headwalls and solid towers. The rock is clean white granite much like Static Point but has features reminiscent of Exfoliation Dome, heavy on the overlapping dihedrals and corners. We staggered past a large smooth buttress and continued until we reached the main drainage below the highest summit. The final headwall of the main summit was steep, broken and general unaesthetic however clean slabs led up right towards a beautiful tower. We christened it Tang Tower after our favorite black, crime-fighting, super-hero Pootie Tang and decided to head that way. We simulclimbed about 400' of 5.0 slab to a point below a rock rib that separates the slabs below the main summit from those below Tang Tower. We then trended right, climbing three rope-stretching pitches of friction slabs split by intermittent cracks to the left edge of where the tower steepens. Gene led a long, exciting pitch following a thin crack up a smooth face to a hand crack and a belay. The final pitch consisted of more thin cracks and friction followed by a traverse right to a prominent left facing corner split by the only finger crack around. Easier climbing led to a suitably small summit. We had climbed about 1400' of rock in six pitches. The crux was probably 5.8+ though most of the route was considerably easier. The rock was clean, solid and compact. About a third of our gear placements were knifeblade or lost arrow pitons. They were critical for protection particularly at the cruxes. It was a good climb, not great, but good, the line is just a little too indistinct. We called it "Sine your Pitty on the Runy Kine" III 5.8+. To descend we scrambled down exposed third-class blocks on the east ridge until we could follow a mossy gully down to a talus field on the north side. Steep forest and more intense brush thrashing got us back down to Boulder Lake in maybe an hour. We reached the car at twilight twelve hours after leaving. Plenty of potential back in there, but the epic thrash to reach it will relegate this area to the realm of Cascade esoteric a. If you’re a jaded alpine titan who's done it all and have a (long) day to spend in the mountains it might be worth checking out. If anyone has a better image of these peaks let me know! Gear Notes: Medium Rack. Bring some knifeblades, lost arrows and a baby angle. Approach Notes: Cascade Classic!

The guy is a waaaay left but the following should appeal to all. Ted Rall on the right to vote

Some people think it's FUN! SAVE IT FOR THE SHOWER! RATHER THAN FUCKING UP THE MOUNTAINS