[TR] Forbidden- East and West Ridges 7/2/2006

[Gary_Yngve]

Climb: Forbidden-East and West Ridges

 

Date of Climb: 7/2/2006

 

Trip Report:

 

smaller thumbnails:

http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gyngve/Forbidden/thumbs.html

 

Ruth and I rented a car and drove to Marblemount, intent on climbing NE Ridge Triumph on 4th of July weekend. We were denied a permit, but we were able to get permits for Boston Basin and get copies of the pertininent pages of Selected Climbs.

 

We climbed the East Ridge of Forbidden, leaving our boots, axes, and pons at the base (a snaffle nibbled on our boots overnight). Up top, we cooked a gourmet meal of tortellini with sundried tomato antipasto and goat cheese, plus some miso soup and avocado. We bivied just below the summit (there's a nice spot for one person about 20 feet below to the north, slept tied-in). After breakfast, we downclimbed the West Ridge and climbed back up. We descended the East Ledges with 6 single-rope rappels and then hiked out. We were surprised by the solitude we found in what is supposed to be a popular place.

 

Now for the photo enslaught.

 

 

 

Hiking in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Climbing the East Ridge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Summit.

 

 

 

 

More alpenglow (previously posted):

http://www.cascadeclimbers.com/threadz/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/590336/an/0/page/1#590336

 

 

 

Views during breakfast (I need to go back and correct a little tilt):

 

 

 

 

 

Climbing down the West Ridge.

 

 

 

 

Climbing up the West Ridge.

 

 

 

 

 

View South.

 

 

 

 

View North.

 

 

 

 

Descending the East Ledges.

 

 

 

 

Hiking out.

 

 

[Toast]

Nice pix!

[Weekend_Climberz]

 

Whoa, that chick is a giant

 

Nice crisp pictures Do tell us the setup, are they Yngve'd?

[letsroll]

Nice trip, Great photo's!!!!! Glad to hear the crowds were not crazy.

[roboboy]

Gary, please do a digital photo slide show sometime.

[mountainmatt]

Those are fantastic pics! Great TR!

[Jens]

That sound's like a cool outing. I've never heard of anyon doing it that way, but I'd like to! I love the J-berg pics!

[still_climbin]

Great pics. I've done both routes but not your way... Yours is a first.

[Gary_Yngve]

Whoa, that chick is a giant

 

Nice crisp pictures Do tell us the setup, are they Yngve'd?

 

That's the nice thing about a strong zoom (or a zoom plus a crop). The background is a single element, as opposed to being JBerg plus valley plus sky. By having the other elements omitted, the message "Jberg is f'n huge" is that much stronger.

 

Generally, my edits are:

-crops to remove distracting elements

-occasional heal/clone to fix bad flare, bug in sky, distracting element, etc.

-tweak color balance, gamma, saturation

-occasional digital split filter (blend of overexposed & underexposed images)

 

Finally after those edits on the fullsize, I resize to smaller, using a good downsampler (that blurs things a little bit to avoid jaggies), and then I do a final sharpen (unsharp).

 

On commandline (Imagemagick), it is:

 

for i in *jpg; do convert -resize @400000 -unsharp 0x1+0.5 $i z$i; done

 

The resize to 400000 pixels option is nice, as it behaves well regardless of orientation or aspect. I only do a 50% strength unsharp, as I've found that doing 100% strength can introduce halos or other ickiness.

[Mark_L]

The pictures that I was able to get loaded until I lost patience do look very good, but when the file size is about a quarter mB for each picture, those of us with dialup don't have the time or patience to wait for all of them to load. Perhaps you could provide links to your pictures in all of their printable glory, and post the 72 dpi versions for your trip report. The dimensional size of your pictures is fine, but a computer display does not distinguish any density greater than 72 dpi anyways.

[Gary_Yngve]

Mark, you're right that my filesizes are getting a little large (I'm on dialup at home too), though still much smaller than printing size. Though I imagine that we're among the minority. Maybe the solution can be to have a link at the top for thumbnails and big pics below for the fast majority (slow people should be able to click through while stuff are still loading). Try the link edited into the top of the first post...

[Mark_L]

Thanks for your reply Gary. The main point that I was trying to make is that you can reduce your file sizes by reducing the density without losing display quality. Here is one of your pictures that you posted on your "thumbnails" page:

 

 

It has a file size of about 100 kb. I took this image and reduced the density to 72 dpi using Gimp:

 

 

The file size is now about 26 Kb. If you like to batch process you can also use the "convert -density 72 [in file] [out file]" command in Image Magick, but it doesn't seem to give as small file sizes as I got with Gimp, (probably something to do with the jpeg compression settings that I have for Gimp).

[Gary_Yngve]

It's actually not a DPI issue. DPI is irrelevant for images on a display, as it's 72 by default. The difference between your file and my file is compression (75% vs 90+%). I'll have to look at my big pics to see what artifacts appear with 75% compression and decide from there (it's easy to add a quality parameter to convert). For some reason GIMP saved yours as 75%, whereas mine kept getting saved as 90+% because that's what the original camera settings were.

[Gary_Yngve]

Yeah, 75% quality looks good enough and shrunk my filesizes by about half. Also stripped another 10-15k per image by removing the EXIF data, which included thumbnails.

[Mark_L]

Yeah Gary,

 

I noticed that too. It was rather surprising that .75 quality gave close to half the file size of .90. I also realized that if you use the "save" comand in GIMP it remembers the quality setting that was used in previous sessions. Got to be careful about that when working with the original files.