Kevin Mahoney and I went to Cannon today. Things were looking interesting, but quite thin. Omega is forming (but not ready, unless you're insane) and Prozac might be approaching climbability (also for insane people). We did the Black Dike, which I hadn't done before. We didn't do a rock traverse; rather, we did a sometimes-formed direct start to the second pitch. After that, we rapped back down and did a variation to the second pitch called "Hassig's Direct." Instead of shooting off left into a rock traverse, you angle up right around some blocks to another ribbon of ice. Everything was super thin. There were some cool hook moves, but also a lot of dull pick-on-rock noises. I probably have to sharpen my picks again, and I just did them last night. We found some extremely sketchy rap anchors where people had evidently slung some blocks. Some of these were so solid, the blocks could be pulled out by hand! It looked like a little mousetrap for ice climbers. The approach/exit was quite slippery. I'm still recovering from some bronchitis I got a few weeks ago, so I'm not in stellar aerobic shape, but I trudged along anyways. Right now, I'd say it's some snow on ice-covered rocks, which is generally bad. There are a lot of fallen trees all over the trail. Apparently the people who made the trail got it wrong in a bunch of places, but our tracks have now corrected this. Of course, everything looks the same to me, especially in the winter. I'm not very good at that sort of thing.
No pictures yet...but Kevin will send them to me soon. In lieu of photos, some impressions: a pale sliver of a crescent moon at sunrise over the Notch; yellow, twisted ice in evil shapes strewn about wizened, leafless trees at the top of the Dike; and a patina of icy crust served on blocky Cannon granite.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Sodium/Benzophenone
In preparation to make [6Li]HMDS, I had to distill N,N-dimethylethylamine from sodium/benzophenone overnight. Here's the cool color change:
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Campus Training
[edit: on an unrelated note, here is an interesting discussion about winter gloves]
I've been bouldering a lot inside recently and I knocked off a bunch of V5s this week. I feel like I've broken through a bit of a mental barrier. I used to think that I might, maybe, one day be able to do a V6. Now I can see that's going to happen reasonably soon, and in fact, harder stuff is possible. I wasn't a gymnast, wrestler, or other sort of inhuman superman as a child. In fact, I decided un-athletic as a child. I'm certainly not a natural at climbing--it's taken lots of concerted effort.
Well, one direction I direct my efforts towards is campus training. Invented by the redoubtable Wolfgang Gullich in 1988 for his famous route, Action Directe (5.14d here in America). Basically, there's a bunch of wooden rungs which you climb up with no feet. It's primarily a form of neuromuscular training which gives you both the macroscopic coordination you need to execute big, dynamic moves and the microscopic coordination you need (muscle fibers contracting simultaneously) to be able to "stick" deadpoints and dynos. It's said there's not much muscular conditioning, but I bet it increases your tendon and even bone strength. I read an interesting article in the New York Times that seemed to suggest that strength training is not as helpful for increasing bone density as has been previously imagined. In fact, bones need "large forces released in a relatively big burst" to get stronger. I wonder if campus training qualifies? Hmm.
Anyways, each of the rungs are numbered (#1-10). On the one at Metrorock, ten rungs are arranged four or five inches apart. There are three ladders with small, medium, and large rung thicknesses. When I started doing it (six months to a year ago), I could barely hang from the large rungs, let alone do any campus moves. I started by sticking a foot on and doing "lock-off touches" on the large rungs. Both hands start on rung #2, say. One hand remains on #2, while the other bumps from 2-3-4-5 and back again. I figured that if it was, in fact, neuromuscular conditioning, then full body weight was unnecessary. I don't know if I was right or not, but it worked. After a while I progressed to doing it with no feet on, and then to "laddering," which is where your hands alternate 2-3-4-5... and then back down. Now, just this week, I've progressed to skipping rungs 2-4-6... which is a lot harder, believe me. I can do the single step laddering on the medium rungs now too. Next up is the "double dyno" which means both hands start on rung X and then explode up to rung X+n (n=1 if you're me, but much more if you're crazy). Immediately, both hands drop back down to rung X. It's not as hard as it sounds--but I almost fell over with surprise when I did it for the first time.
Aside from being just plain fun on its own, I've noticed that campus training has helped my bouldering and to some extent, route climbing. I can make big dynamic moves. I'm actually excited, rather than terrified, of making big moves or climbing on very steep terrain. Everybody complains that campus training is "too harsh" or "too hard" or whatever, but I think it's great. As long as you gradually ease yourself into it, stop if it hurts, and do it maybe two weeks on/two weeks off, I think it's fine. I make sure I take 5-7 days off climbing every two months or so. You'd be surprised what a difference that makes. I don't have a problem with skin rubbing off or anything either. I make sure I wash my hands after every climbing session and moisturize with something greasy before I go to bed that night. That, and cutting off any calluses that form with nail clippers, keeps my hands relatively smooth and functional. Some people think that calluses actually help their climbing, but I think it actually gets in the way of making good contact. And, of course, if they get ripped off, then that really puts a damper on things.
Note: Everybody says this, but you probably shouldn't use the campus board unless you can boulder at least V4 because you can get hurt (it's hard on the tendons, joints, etc.).
I've been bouldering a lot inside recently and I knocked off a bunch of V5s this week. I feel like I've broken through a bit of a mental barrier. I used to think that I might, maybe, one day be able to do a V6. Now I can see that's going to happen reasonably soon, and in fact, harder stuff is possible. I wasn't a gymnast, wrestler, or other sort of inhuman superman as a child. In fact, I decided un-athletic as a child. I'm certainly not a natural at climbing--it's taken lots of concerted effort.
Well, one direction I direct my efforts towards is campus training. Invented by the redoubtable Wolfgang Gullich in 1988 for his famous route, Action Directe (5.14d here in America). Basically, there's a bunch of wooden rungs which you climb up with no feet. It's primarily a form of neuromuscular training which gives you both the macroscopic coordination you need to execute big, dynamic moves and the microscopic coordination you need (muscle fibers contracting simultaneously) to be able to "stick" deadpoints and dynos. It's said there's not much muscular conditioning, but I bet it increases your tendon and even bone strength. I read an interesting article in the New York Times that seemed to suggest that strength training is not as helpful for increasing bone density as has been previously imagined. In fact, bones need "large forces released in a relatively big burst" to get stronger. I wonder if campus training qualifies? Hmm.
Anyways, each of the rungs are numbered (#1-10). On the one at Metrorock, ten rungs are arranged four or five inches apart. There are three ladders with small, medium, and large rung thicknesses. When I started doing it (six months to a year ago), I could barely hang from the large rungs, let alone do any campus moves. I started by sticking a foot on and doing "lock-off touches" on the large rungs. Both hands start on rung #2, say. One hand remains on #2, while the other bumps from 2-3-4-5 and back again. I figured that if it was, in fact, neuromuscular conditioning, then full body weight was unnecessary. I don't know if I was right or not, but it worked. After a while I progressed to doing it with no feet on, and then to "laddering," which is where your hands alternate 2-3-4-5... and then back down. Now, just this week, I've progressed to skipping rungs 2-4-6... which is a lot harder, believe me. I can do the single step laddering on the medium rungs now too. Next up is the "double dyno" which means both hands start on rung X and then explode up to rung X+n (n=1 if you're me, but much more if you're crazy). Immediately, both hands drop back down to rung X. It's not as hard as it sounds--but I almost fell over with surprise when I did it for the first time.
Aside from being just plain fun on its own, I've noticed that campus training has helped my bouldering and to some extent, route climbing. I can make big dynamic moves. I'm actually excited, rather than terrified, of making big moves or climbing on very steep terrain. Everybody complains that campus training is "too harsh" or "too hard" or whatever, but I think it's great. As long as you gradually ease yourself into it, stop if it hurts, and do it maybe two weeks on/two weeks off, I think it's fine. I make sure I take 5-7 days off climbing every two months or so. You'd be surprised what a difference that makes. I don't have a problem with skin rubbing off or anything either. I make sure I wash my hands after every climbing session and moisturize with something greasy before I go to bed that night. That, and cutting off any calluses that form with nail clippers, keeps my hands relatively smooth and functional. Some people think that calluses actually help their climbing, but I think it actually gets in the way of making good contact. And, of course, if they get ripped off, then that really puts a damper on things.
Note: Everybody says this, but you probably shouldn't use the campus board unless you can boulder at least V4 because you can get hurt (it's hard on the tendons, joints, etc.).
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Crow Hill, Headpointing
Jonathan and I went to do some practice aid today at Crow Hill. I led Intertwine and he jugged it:
It was sunny, beautiful, and wet. Then Jonathan did his first aid lead on Jane, which I'll call C2. I've decided I'm going to try to headpoint it, so I worked it on top-rope, figuring out gear placements and beta.
I've one hung it so far. I'm close, but the back of my hand hurts from jamming now, so I'll have to come back to it. It's supposedly easy 11, but it's hard for me--I'm not used to crack climbing. There's real jams and stuff on it.
I made a beta sheet for it, 'cause I think I might not get back to it for a while. I'm super psyched about it though.
It was sunny, beautiful, and wet. Then Jonathan did his first aid lead on Jane, which I'll call C2. I've decided I'm going to try to headpoint it, so I worked it on top-rope, figuring out gear placements and beta.
I've one hung it so far. I'm close, but the back of my hand hurts from jamming now, so I'll have to come back to it. It's supposedly easy 11, but it's hard for me--I'm not used to crack climbing. There's real jams and stuff on it.
I made a beta sheet for it, 'cause I think I might not get back to it for a while. I'm super psyched about it though.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Rufus
Rumney on Sunday was beautiful. The climbing was overtaken by a chocolate lab puppy named Rufus. Depending on who you believe, Rufus (a) is as much Rachel's puppy as it is Vanessa and Mike's; (b) might have Down's syndrome; or (c) is much more interested in unsuccessfully gnawing at over-sized plastic bottles than you. He's also very interested in midday naps, as shown above.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Mordor Wall
I went back to tackle the Mordor Wall again with Dunbar yesterday. It went all right, but not perfectly. We ended up doing the first three pitches and then bailing. We weren't moving particularly quickly, I was spooked by a slopey bat hook, a sketchy top-step, and a lot of running water, and time was running out. The sketchy top-step occurred because of the slopey bat hook, in fact. I'd set my talon, "ooze" onto the placement, and shriek when it fell out. Dunbar, on the other hand, led the second pitch, a bolted bat hook traverse, and seemed quite nonchalant. He's calmer than I am on stuff like this. I need time to get into a comfort zone; he seems at home. It's admirable. Anyways, more talking would only bore you, so here are a bunch of pictures:
Me leading the first pitch.
At a belay. There's a lot of stuff.
Dunbar jugging on a beautiful fall day.
Dunbar leading on the bat hook traverse.
Dunbar climbing out of Mordor.
Am I hooking a bolt with a grappling hook? Um, yes.
Dunbar looking like a stoic Russian general here. He's
usually more jovial than this, but you can't tell from this
picture!
Rack for the day: doubles in the C3s, double C4s up to 2",
double BD stoppers and micro nuts, 18 draws, a bunch of
hooks, etc. Can you identify everything in the picture?
Me leading the first pitch.
At a belay. There's a lot of stuff.
Dunbar jugging on a beautiful fall day.
Dunbar leading on the bat hook traverse.
Dunbar climbing out of Mordor.
Am I hooking a bolt with a grappling hook? Um, yes.
Dunbar looking like a stoic Russian general here. He'susually more jovial than this, but you can't tell from this
picture!
Rack for the day: doubles in the C3s, double C4s up to 2",double BD stoppers and micro nuts, 18 draws, a bunch of
hooks, etc. Can you identify everything in the picture?
Monday, October 26, 2009
Ice Screw Sharpening
Despite the fact that many of us experienced a warm, comfortable day
yesterday at Rumney, I have to admit I feel the ice clasp of winter
approaching. Fortunately, I also feel feverish excitement for the
upcoming ice season. In the last few years, my ice rack has seen some
use, and I've been trying to figure out how to sharpen my screws.
Last year, I found somebody who would sharpen screws via mail, but as he
went out of business, I'm on my own now. There are other people who claim
to sharpen ice screws out there, but with all the mumblings I've heard
about bad results and machine sharpening, I don't trust them. Like most
people, I have an all Black Diamond rack of Turbo Express ice screws (some
of the older ones, some of the newer ones). According to BD (personal
communication), each screw is machine cut, and then hand sharpened. They
recommend against the use of machine sharpeners or grinders because the
heat generated can damage the temper of the steel.
BD gives some instructions for how to sharpen them on your own:
http://www.blackdiamondequipment.com/en-us/customer-service/faqs#climb
I tried it this afternoon and my impression is as follows. Any bozo, such
as myself, can sharpen screws to a mediocre level. It's easy to remove
any offending burrs, rust spots, or dull edges. However, it's very tricky
to get the screws back to their original geometry. If one carefully
inspects a brand new screw, it's obvious that there are subtle little
contours which end in a relatively sharply pointed tooth. These contours
were very difficult to replicate in my inexperienced hands. My sharpened
screws are still relatively sharp, but the teeth are not as agressive as
before. Still, according to BD, such screws will work much better than
their unsharpened counterparts.
In any case, I think there's a limited amount of sharpening a screw will
take before further sharpening will start biting into the threads. In the
future, I just plan to be very careful about not damaging the teeth of my
screws. The other thing is that screws are prone to rust damage, so
drying them out promptly after climbing is important, as is lubricating
their insides. I've settled on two quick shots of WD40, once from the top
and once from the bottom. I think this not only facilitates ice removal,
but also repels water and rust. I don't think the WD40 is very good for
the rest of my climbing gear, so I flicked and wiped the screws dry as
best I could afterwards. Too much oil probably means the screws will
start accumulating all sorts of dirt.
yesterday at Rumney, I have to admit I feel the ice clasp of winter
approaching. Fortunately, I also feel feverish excitement for the
upcoming ice season. In the last few years, my ice rack has seen some
use, and I've been trying to figure out how to sharpen my screws.
Last year, I found somebody who would sharpen screws via mail, but as he
went out of business, I'm on my own now. There are other people who claim
to sharpen ice screws out there, but with all the mumblings I've heard
about bad results and machine sharpening, I don't trust them. Like most
people, I have an all Black Diamond rack of Turbo Express ice screws (some
of the older ones, some of the newer ones). According to BD (personal
communication), each screw is machine cut, and then hand sharpened. They
recommend against the use of machine sharpeners or grinders because the
heat generated can damage the temper of the steel.
BD gives some instructions for how to sharpen them on your own:
http://www.blackdiamondequipment.com/en-us/customer-service/faqs#climb
I tried it this afternoon and my impression is as follows. Any bozo, such
as myself, can sharpen screws to a mediocre level. It's easy to remove
any offending burrs, rust spots, or dull edges. However, it's very tricky
to get the screws back to their original geometry. If one carefully
inspects a brand new screw, it's obvious that there are subtle little
contours which end in a relatively sharply pointed tooth. These contours
were very difficult to replicate in my inexperienced hands. My sharpened
screws are still relatively sharp, but the teeth are not as agressive as
before. Still, according to BD, such screws will work much better than
their unsharpened counterparts.
In any case, I think there's a limited amount of sharpening a screw will
take before further sharpening will start biting into the threads. In the
future, I just plan to be very careful about not damaging the teeth of my
screws. The other thing is that screws are prone to rust damage, so
drying them out promptly after climbing is important, as is lubricating
their insides. I've settled on two quick shots of WD40, once from the top
and once from the bottom. I think this not only facilitates ice removal,
but also repels water and rust. I don't think the WD40 is very good for
the rest of my climbing gear, so I flicked and wiped the screws dry as
best I could afterwards. Too much oil probably means the screws will
start accumulating all sorts of dirt.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Flesh
I'm still working Flesh for Lulu. I've fell on the last (serious) move for the fourth time today. I worked the top for about an hour though, so I think if I rest up it'll go. I hung out with Brayton and Devin and had a really fun, chill day. I feel winter coming soon, so I'm looking forward to making the transition to ice climbing.
Dunbar jugging a few weeks ago. Yay for aid climbing!
Brayton hooking hard on Riviera (5.13d).
Dunbar jugging a few weeks ago. Yay for aid climbing!
Brayton hooking hard on Riviera (5.13d).
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Crow Hill Aid
This weekend was really wet, so I just did a half day with Dunbar today at Crow Hill. It was pretty simple: I led Crow-Magnon, Dunbar jugged it, Dunbar led Jane, I jugged it, and then we both top-roped Jane. Dunbar had never led any aid or jugged before, so I think he was psyched. The gear at Crow Hill is tricky. There are a lot of flaring pockets. Fortunately, there was hardly anyone there to disturb us, which was surprising, given that the sun was out. We almost got Jane (5.11ish). It was getting dark and the holds seemed quite greasy, but I almost got it on toprope. I should think about leading it. I need to figure out exactly what gear it needs though.
Winter is coming! Winter means ice! Ice means ice climbing!
Winter is coming! Winter means ice! Ice means ice climbing!
Friday, August 28, 2009
Prow, VMC Direct Direct
There was another break in the weather over the last two days, so I went for it and had a big "weekend." Yesterday, Coz and I went to do the Prow at Cathedral Ledge. Although it's a 5.11d free route, it's a relatively easy C1-C2 aid route. There are six pitches. I led the first five, freeing the first and a lot of the third (aiding the rest), and Coz led the final "dreamy fingerlock" pitch. We moved a little slowly, but I thought it was a good time overall. We started around 9 and were done around 4. I actually thought things were moving well except for the fifth pitch, which has the notorious triangular roof. There was great gear in the roof, but I found the transition from below to above the roof to be very awkward. I also found it hard to test the pieces in the actual roof, because they were effectively behind me. I ended up giving them a mediocre foot test, and just going for it. I had bomber gear right below me, anyways. I brought a pretty light rack, considering, and it was sufficient, but I certainly would have liked more pieces. I back-cleaned a bunch. I never thought carrying 17 cams would be considered light, especially for relatively short pitches, but here we are... Yesterday's rack:
- 1 set BD standard stoppers
- 2 sets BD micro wires
- singles: BD C4s, 0.75, 1, 2, 3
- doubles: BD C4s, 0.5, 0.4, 0.3
- doubles: BD C3s, 00, 0, 1, 2
- single: BD C3 000
Yup, I'm a BD guy. I definitely could have used more...everything. Anyways, I climbed with Bayard today. He told me that a buddy of his and him did the route in a startling 39 minutes, using a mixture of aid, french-free, and free techniques. Shit. I guess I have a way to go. Coz did really well on the route, although it certainly seemed like it would be quite hard for a free climb. I won't be freeing the whole thing anytime soon, although I would like to at least work some of it.
Today Bayard and I went to Cannon. We did most of the VMC Direct Direct (supposedly a "5.10 route with a bit of 5.11 on it") and Sticky Fingers (another "5.10"). We did everything on VMC Direct Direct except for the third class stuff at the top. It was hard. Of course, I was tired from yesterday, but I think it would have been hard regardless. It's not super powerful, but it's technical in a way I'm very unaccustomed to. It's also got some spooky moves that would be very exciting on lead. There's a lot of smearing on insecure granite bumps, underclinging tight little pin scars, and tenuous stemming. I certainly need to get better at this sort of trad climbing, and I suppose the only way to do so is to do more of it. I hung a bunch, often to remove gear, but often because I was confused about what to do. It definitely wasn't my best climbing...my feet hurt from standing in my aiders with climbing shoes on from the Prow, so that wasn't helpful.
As if I weren't dead enough, we then went over to do Sticky Fingers, which is a two pitch route. The first pitch is a hard 5.10 finger crack. I liked trying to figure it out, but I must say I flailed all over it. I got a few good fingerlocks in it, but I had a lot of trouble figuring out where to put my feet. By this point, my big toe joint was killing me, so that probably didn't help either. The finger crack diagonals hard to the right so it's hard to figure out whether to put your feet in the little pin scars or on the little textured bumps on the face below the crack. I often found my feet crossed over each other very high, which seemed very awkward. Near the end I figured out you had to go between fingerlocking and gastoning/laybacking the crack's edges whenever possible (which is basically a mediocre sloper). It was cool, because it was all new to me. The second pitch is a sparsely bolted hard 5.10 slab. Well, I thought it was hard. I figured out a bunch of it, which seemed to involve smearing one foot on a mediocre bump and, with no handholds, just standing up very delicately. I thought I was good at slab climbing, but that pitch kicked my ass. I think I'm used to actual holds. Heh.
Anyways, it was a great weekend. Here's one random anecdote from today. We were taking a break at the base of the cliff before "cragging" when we saw four kids and two parents hike up. The kids didn't seem too psyched. Bayard gave me a look. Later he told me he had never seen kids up there before. I might understand taking your super-cool climbing protege/child prodigy up there, but these were definitely not climbers. I bet kids would hate the talus field. Plus they didn't have any helmets or anything. It was kind of like seeing a movie which vaguely involves a climber, but where the director had to skimp on the budget for hiring a climbing consultant. The dad had a BD pack on, with Petzl ice clippers on the ice axe loops. Why? I have no idea. He said things that sounded approximately climber-like, but made little sense. I'm a little baffled by all that, to be honest. Oh well.
- 1 set BD standard stoppers
- 2 sets BD micro wires
- singles: BD C4s, 0.75, 1, 2, 3
- doubles: BD C4s, 0.5, 0.4, 0.3
- doubles: BD C3s, 00, 0, 1, 2
- single: BD C3 000
Yup, I'm a BD guy. I definitely could have used more...everything. Anyways, I climbed with Bayard today. He told me that a buddy of his and him did the route in a startling 39 minutes, using a mixture of aid, french-free, and free techniques. Shit. I guess I have a way to go. Coz did really well on the route, although it certainly seemed like it would be quite hard for a free climb. I won't be freeing the whole thing anytime soon, although I would like to at least work some of it.
Today Bayard and I went to Cannon. We did most of the VMC Direct Direct (supposedly a "5.10 route with a bit of 5.11 on it") and Sticky Fingers (another "5.10"). We did everything on VMC Direct Direct except for the third class stuff at the top. It was hard. Of course, I was tired from yesterday, but I think it would have been hard regardless. It's not super powerful, but it's technical in a way I'm very unaccustomed to. It's also got some spooky moves that would be very exciting on lead. There's a lot of smearing on insecure granite bumps, underclinging tight little pin scars, and tenuous stemming. I certainly need to get better at this sort of trad climbing, and I suppose the only way to do so is to do more of it. I hung a bunch, often to remove gear, but often because I was confused about what to do. It definitely wasn't my best climbing...my feet hurt from standing in my aiders with climbing shoes on from the Prow, so that wasn't helpful.
As if I weren't dead enough, we then went over to do Sticky Fingers, which is a two pitch route. The first pitch is a hard 5.10 finger crack. I liked trying to figure it out, but I must say I flailed all over it. I got a few good fingerlocks in it, but I had a lot of trouble figuring out where to put my feet. By this point, my big toe joint was killing me, so that probably didn't help either. The finger crack diagonals hard to the right so it's hard to figure out whether to put your feet in the little pin scars or on the little textured bumps on the face below the crack. I often found my feet crossed over each other very high, which seemed very awkward. Near the end I figured out you had to go between fingerlocking and gastoning/laybacking the crack's edges whenever possible (which is basically a mediocre sloper). It was cool, because it was all new to me. The second pitch is a sparsely bolted hard 5.10 slab. Well, I thought it was hard. I figured out a bunch of it, which seemed to involve smearing one foot on a mediocre bump and, with no handholds, just standing up very delicately. I thought I was good at slab climbing, but that pitch kicked my ass. I think I'm used to actual holds. Heh.
Anyways, it was a great weekend. Here's one random anecdote from today. We were taking a break at the base of the cliff before "cragging" when we saw four kids and two parents hike up. The kids didn't seem too psyched. Bayard gave me a look. Later he told me he had never seen kids up there before. I might understand taking your super-cool climbing protege/child prodigy up there, but these were definitely not climbers. I bet kids would hate the talus field. Plus they didn't have any helmets or anything. It was kind of like seeing a movie which vaguely involves a climber, but where the director had to skimp on the budget for hiring a climbing consultant. The dad had a BD pack on, with Petzl ice clippers on the ice axe loops. Why? I have no idea. He said things that sounded approximately climber-like, but made little sense. I'm a little baffled by all that, to be honest. Oh well.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Accident at Rumney
I wish I could stop writing subject titles like this. Josh and I went up to Rumney today. A hanger fell off a bolt on Flesh for Lulu at the Meadows, so I got together my gear and headed up to fix it. I'm just fifi-ing into my daisy when I hear this incredibly loud crash from the Parking Lot Wall. It sounded like a bunch of stuff was falling, but I couldn't really tell what was going on. The sound lasted for a few seconds, so it sounded serious. There were a lot of people over there, and I was busy leading, so I couldn't exactly rush over there to find out what was going on. I got up to another bolt and hung there, trying to figure out what I should do. Then somebody came by and said that a tree had fallen on a climber, that they were sort of hurt, but everything was under control. So I kept going. I got up to the seventh bolt (the eight bolt's hanger was missing). I clipped the eight bolt like a rivet with a hanger, and pulled onto it. But I was sketched because it was a really far reach to the ninth bolt, and I wasn't sure if I could make it, even if I top-stepped like crazy. So I just dropped my gear and free-climbed/ran it out past the missing hanger, clipped the ninth bolt, and lowered down to put a new hanger on the eighth. After that, I went up to the anchor with the intention of replacing the quickclips, but I realized there were glue-ins there, and besides, the clips which I thought were really worn, weren't too bad. So I came down.
We still didn't hear any yelling or sounds of disaster, but we figured we'd head over to the parking lot and see what the hubbub is about. We'd heard a helicopter flying close by, so we thought it might have been more serious than we were led to believe. When we got there, we got the full story. A girl with MITOC (?) had been belaying and a tree fell a reported 70 feet and hit
her. A paramedic who was rescuing her had fallen on the trail as well, and banged up his head, so both needed to be carried out. We arrived just in time to help with both carry-outs. This carried some personal resonance with me because the exact same thing had happened to me a few years back.
The girl looked bad. Half her face looked purple and one of her eyes looked swollen shut. I could see her wrist was heavily bandaged, and there were grotesque looking open fractures on her lower leg. I've never seen anything that bad. We carried her hand over hand down to the trail, and the helicopter whisked her off to Dartmouth. I still haven't heard what happened yet, but it looked pretty life-threatening to me. She was still sort of conscious and could wiggle her toes, so that seemed positive. She was with a doctor, and there was a fair of some sort happening down the road, so the EMTs got there really fast. I really hope she's all right. I swear, the trees are a serious hazard. I find myself wearing a helmet a lot more when belaying and climbing now. You just never know when some stray rock or something is going to come down and fuck you up.
The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. I flailed on Flesh again (damnit) and did some miscellaneous other stuff with Josh. I think we both had fun climbing, considering. Be safe out there.
We still didn't hear any yelling or sounds of disaster, but we figured we'd head over to the parking lot and see what the hubbub is about. We'd heard a helicopter flying close by, so we thought it might have been more serious than we were led to believe. When we got there, we got the full story. A girl with MITOC (?) had been belaying and a tree fell a reported 70 feet and hit
her. A paramedic who was rescuing her had fallen on the trail as well, and banged up his head, so both needed to be carried out. We arrived just in time to help with both carry-outs. This carried some personal resonance with me because the exact same thing had happened to me a few years back.
The girl looked bad. Half her face looked purple and one of her eyes looked swollen shut. I could see her wrist was heavily bandaged, and there were grotesque looking open fractures on her lower leg. I've never seen anything that bad. We carried her hand over hand down to the trail, and the helicopter whisked her off to Dartmouth. I still haven't heard what happened yet, but it looked pretty life-threatening to me. She was still sort of conscious and could wiggle her toes, so that seemed positive. She was with a doctor, and there was a fair of some sort happening down the road, so the EMTs got there really fast. I really hope she's all right. I swear, the trees are a serious hazard. I find myself wearing a helmet a lot more when belaying and climbing now. You just never know when some stray rock or something is going to come down and fuck you up.
The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. I flailed on Flesh again (damnit) and did some miscellaneous other stuff with Josh. I think we both had fun climbing, considering. Be safe out there.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Super Psyched
My best friend keeps complaining to me that I sound like a "surfer" all the time when I tell her how "stoked" or "psyched" I am about climbing. In this case, Proper English will have to yield to unbridled youthful exuberance. I went up to Cathedral yesterday with Neal. I had heard various moanings and groanings from others about how wet and unpleasant it was going to be, but a 20% probability of precipitation is not to be passed up in this rainy season that is passing as July. In truth, things were wet, drying out halfheartedly, and most importantly, climbable. I led Still in Saigon (5.8) which I had done a few years ago with Kevin Mahoney, but remembered nothing about. It was my hardest trad lead so far, but I felt good about it. There were definitely a few dicey slab moves on it, but my time working the 5.11 slab on Gunboat Diplomacy and my many self-taught slab lessons at Metrorock have paid off, because I feel reasonably good on slab these days. Then we ventured over to Recompense (5.7), and while the upper pitches were wet, the first pitch was fine, and Neal led that. I think that was his first time with double ropes, and it was an educational experience for him. He got a bit off route, but with the help of the doubles and a lot of extended slings, he managed to salvage the off-route choss-pile into an overall route. In other words, he made it work with what he had, which I think is a really important skill.
We ran into the redoubtable Bayard Russell at that point, and they ran up the first two pitches of the Prow, so I went over to investigate. As it turns out, there's an easy variation and a standard 5.10a variation, so I chose to do the 5.10a version. It's a slabby thing with a few cam placements and a few bolts, so it felt very reasonable. I felt a little scared going over the crux, but my head is really in a much better place these days, and I just went for it and did fine. I took a look at the rest of the route, and it looked awesome.
[Advertisement. I want to go back and aid the route so I work parts of it. Eventually, I want to free it. Who wants to learn how to do some simple aid climbing and jugging? Let me know if you're interested! The route is A1 or A2 with a lot of fixed protection and goes free at 5.11d. You don't need to be able to climb harder than, say, 5.9, but you do need to be good with gear, very patient, and even more psyched.]
Neal finished off by doing some sort of very wet, scary crack at the North End. I didn't catch the name of it, but there were some exciting shenanigans required to clean the damn route. Today was brutally wet. It rained a lot. I tried to convince Dunbar, Jimmy, Alon, and Jim to climb at Sundown with Neal and I, but we were passed over. They did show us a cool little campsite though. Instead, we climbed with various North Conway Cool People like Freddie Wilkinson and Janet Bergman, who are to us as, say, a five course meal is to one of those oily rags which passes for burgers at Burger King. We got on Eyeless. Neal did quite well, while I flailed about ineffectually. Everything felt really greasy.
Driving home, we passed the exciting exit number of 26 on I-93 and I thought we'd go and check out Flesh for Lulu again, as the sun was poking its head from out of the clouds in an encouraging, but desultory fashion. Neal got on, and made good progress, but seemed to find it harder than Eyeless (12b), even though it's apparently graded easier (12a/b). But whatever--who cares? We had a great time. I got one good burn in. At the crux, you get this core-wrenching left hand gaston crimp (which is somewhat sharp and gave me a blood blister last week), hike your feet up, and dynamically (if you're me) or statically (if you're good, or maybe just tall) go up to this jug. Everybody uses this really high right foot that looks like someone's bottom lip, but I discovered today that the dyno was way easier if I used a foot that was closer in. Or maybe I was just feeling stoked. Who knows? I made a full on dyno and stuck it first try, which I felt great about. I shook out and traversed up to the final boulder problem, and blew one of the final moves before the last bolt is clipped. So that was, by far, my best burn on a 12 so far, so I'm really excited about that. I think it will actually go soon, just as soon as I get a little more endurance. I did feel slightly scared doing the last boulder problem, since I was so pumped, and as I deadpointed to this good three-finger sloper/jug thing, I felt my concentration wander slightly, and I missed it. I think this shows how important mental conditioning is. I probably haven't improved physically that much since last week, but I rehearsed the crux sequence in my head a million times this week, and when I went to do it, it felt great. The last boulder problem, however, I didn't really think that much about, and as a result, when I got up there, it was weird and I had to think, which was bad, because I was already super pumped. And being super psyched and unafraid really helped--I find I can never climb effectively if I'm worried my belayer is going to unexpectedly dirt me...
Well. I'm back to the lab. My complicated substrate synthesis is being delayed at present not just by all the climbing, but also by a lack of material. I'm spending a lot of time bringing up material and making reagents. I just made the beta-acylphosphonate reagent for installing E alpha, beta-unsaturated 2-oxazolidinones via Horner-Wadsworth-Emmons reactions, and it was brutal. First, you take the sodium amide resulting from the reaction between 2-oxazolidinone and sodium hydride, and acylate it with bromacetyl bromide. That works pretty well, and much better, I've found, than going with n-butyllithium. Then you treat it in an Arbusov reaction with trimethyl phosphite. Unfortunately, this generates a load of highly toxic bromomethane gas, which also has the effect of creating the undesired side product of methyl dimethyl phosphonate. This has to be distilled off, and the resulting nasty red-orange oil crystallized into the desired phosphonate, a nice white crystal. Well, while the NMR spectrum looked fine, it just refused to crystallize, so I was forced to run some flash chromatography in methanol/dichloromethane, which is definitely one of my least favorite solvent systems. I put my nice yellow solution on the rotovap, and went to the bathroom, and when I came back, I found that someone (probably me) had accidentally brushed up against the rotovap, and it was now at an undesirably toasty 70 celsius. Oooops. And now I had a red-orange oil again. But luckily for me, the whole thing started to crash out very slowly over the next few hours. So I'm stoked about that, too. Next up is allyl diazoacetate, which I've never been able to make very well, and may try to figure out. Something about the deacylation of the intermediate beta-keto, alpha-diazo allyl ester never seems to go according to plan.
We ran into the redoubtable Bayard Russell at that point, and they ran up the first two pitches of the Prow, so I went over to investigate. As it turns out, there's an easy variation and a standard 5.10a variation, so I chose to do the 5.10a version. It's a slabby thing with a few cam placements and a few bolts, so it felt very reasonable. I felt a little scared going over the crux, but my head is really in a much better place these days, and I just went for it and did fine. I took a look at the rest of the route, and it looked awesome.
[Advertisement. I want to go back and aid the route so I work parts of it. Eventually, I want to free it. Who wants to learn how to do some simple aid climbing and jugging? Let me know if you're interested! The route is A1 or A2 with a lot of fixed protection and goes free at 5.11d. You don't need to be able to climb harder than, say, 5.9, but you do need to be good with gear, very patient, and even more psyched.]
Neal finished off by doing some sort of very wet, scary crack at the North End. I didn't catch the name of it, but there were some exciting shenanigans required to clean the damn route. Today was brutally wet. It rained a lot. I tried to convince Dunbar, Jimmy, Alon, and Jim to climb at Sundown with Neal and I, but we were passed over. They did show us a cool little campsite though. Instead, we climbed with various North Conway Cool People like Freddie Wilkinson and Janet Bergman, who are to us as, say, a five course meal is to one of those oily rags which passes for burgers at Burger King. We got on Eyeless. Neal did quite well, while I flailed about ineffectually. Everything felt really greasy.
Driving home, we passed the exciting exit number of 26 on I-93 and I thought we'd go and check out Flesh for Lulu again, as the sun was poking its head from out of the clouds in an encouraging, but desultory fashion. Neal got on, and made good progress, but seemed to find it harder than Eyeless (12b), even though it's apparently graded easier (12a/b). But whatever--who cares? We had a great time. I got one good burn in. At the crux, you get this core-wrenching left hand gaston crimp (which is somewhat sharp and gave me a blood blister last week), hike your feet up, and dynamically (if you're me) or statically (if you're good, or maybe just tall) go up to this jug. Everybody uses this really high right foot that looks like someone's bottom lip, but I discovered today that the dyno was way easier if I used a foot that was closer in. Or maybe I was just feeling stoked. Who knows? I made a full on dyno and stuck it first try, which I felt great about. I shook out and traversed up to the final boulder problem, and blew one of the final moves before the last bolt is clipped. So that was, by far, my best burn on a 12 so far, so I'm really excited about that. I think it will actually go soon, just as soon as I get a little more endurance. I did feel slightly scared doing the last boulder problem, since I was so pumped, and as I deadpointed to this good three-finger sloper/jug thing, I felt my concentration wander slightly, and I missed it. I think this shows how important mental conditioning is. I probably haven't improved physically that much since last week, but I rehearsed the crux sequence in my head a million times this week, and when I went to do it, it felt great. The last boulder problem, however, I didn't really think that much about, and as a result, when I got up there, it was weird and I had to think, which was bad, because I was already super pumped. And being super psyched and unafraid really helped--I find I can never climb effectively if I'm worried my belayer is going to unexpectedly dirt me...
Well. I'm back to the lab. My complicated substrate synthesis is being delayed at present not just by all the climbing, but also by a lack of material. I'm spending a lot of time bringing up material and making reagents. I just made the beta-acylphosphonate reagent for installing E alpha, beta-unsaturated 2-oxazolidinones via Horner-Wadsworth-Emmons reactions, and it was brutal. First, you take the sodium amide resulting from the reaction between 2-oxazolidinone and sodium hydride, and acylate it with bromacetyl bromide. That works pretty well, and much better, I've found, than going with n-butyllithium. Then you treat it in an Arbusov reaction with trimethyl phosphite. Unfortunately, this generates a load of highly toxic bromomethane gas, which also has the effect of creating the undesired side product of methyl dimethyl phosphonate. This has to be distilled off, and the resulting nasty red-orange oil crystallized into the desired phosphonate, a nice white crystal. Well, while the NMR spectrum looked fine, it just refused to crystallize, so I was forced to run some flash chromatography in methanol/dichloromethane, which is definitely one of my least favorite solvent systems. I put my nice yellow solution on the rotovap, and went to the bathroom, and when I came back, I found that someone (probably me) had accidentally brushed up against the rotovap, and it was now at an undesirably toasty 70 celsius. Oooops. And now I had a red-orange oil again. But luckily for me, the whole thing started to crash out very slowly over the next few hours. So I'm stoked about that, too. Next up is allyl diazoacetate, which I've never been able to make very well, and may try to figure out. Something about the deacylation of the intermediate beta-keto, alpha-diazo allyl ester never seems to go according to plan.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Flesh For Lulu
Projected Flesh for Lulu (5.12a/b) at Rumney all day today. I was so psyched (and desperate) to get on it, I just showed up and projected it with random people. I had one good burn on TR where I almost got to the top and fell doing one of the last hard moves. Leading was harder though...I think the clipping is really pumping me out. Rachel showed up and TRed it really cleanly which was pretty impressive. She matched the crux hold, probably using her tiny little fingers, something I was completely unable to do. I did crimp the crux hold really hard. So hard, in fact, I have a huge blood blister there now. But I'm still super, super psyched. I was really stuck in the 11s there for a while, but now I feel like a bunch of easier 12s are within my reach! I just need a little more endurance!
[editorial note: I added some "quick reaction buttons:" yay! or nay! ?]
[editorial note: I added some "quick reaction buttons:" yay! or nay! ?]
Friday, July 10, 2009
Trolls, Mordor, and Flesh
It finally happened this weekend. No, not the apocalypse. The weather finally got nice in New Hampshire (sort of). Sure, it rained now and then, but for the most part, the sun was out, and so I put away my design draft for an ark, and clipped my daises to my harness. See, climbing is a cool sport *because* it's so "extreme" (read: unpopular). If I were into something lame like, oh, golf, I probably couldn't even hire Tiger Woods with a million dollars to glance in my direction, let alone coach me. Fortunately, in something as esotetic (read: stupid) as aid climbing, I can hire Mark Synnott, a bona fide big wall man. So, he took some time out of his busy adventure-related scheming and parenting schedule to teach me about aid climbing. You know, you flip through the aid climbing chapter in Freedom of the Hills, and scoff. Yes, you are ascending using gear, and a lot of gear at that. Yes, it's very complicated. But no, it doesn't appear to be any fun whatsoever. You didn't become a climber to become a bloody rigger, did you? Well, I decided to do it anyways because I had heard it teaches you a lot about placing good gear, seeing as you test every single piece, and unexpectedly found it to be really fun, as well. And that's what climbing is about, right? Yeah. I mean, try to explain even "pure" forms of climbing to people. Uh, yeah, I dip my hands in a pouch containing the ground up remains of ancient sea creatures and climb to the top of the scariest rock I can find. And if I manage to do it without a rope, risking my life completely needlessly, well, I'm extra badass, so can I have my unbridled adulation now? In this, at least, the existentialists have the right idea.
Nut? Ice tool? Pin? So many choices!
Friday, we went to Trollville. We were at Cathedral yesterday, and we explained this fact to a passerby, and he asked "Trollville? Never heard of it." How typical. An added bonus of it being completely deserted most of the time, particularly the summer, is no one gives a fuck if you pound pins, bolt, or drytool away. So this was the perfect place for me to learn how to pound in pins. I mock-lead this A4 seam on the diciest placements, with multiple pieces ripping out on tests, and trying to stack pins and nuts to make things work. I fell about halfway up, which I thought was pretty good. That thing is pretty hard. I fell because I had to get a very marginal micro BD stopper, which was fine when weighted from below, but terrible when I got a bit higher on it. I think if I were going to do it again, I would "free climb" the very blank section in the middle using ice axes. Yes, you can drytool in the summer with rock shoes, and yes, it's totally absurd, but I had a lot of fun doing it anyways:
Absurd drytooling in summer. M7?
I had tried the route before in the winter, and thought it was hard, but it went pretty well this time. I would have sent it, but I got my tool stuck in a slot. Oh well. It's not really a mixed route though, because it never gets any ice on it. However, topping it out was quite tough without any frozen turf at the top. It was totally cool though: leashless trickery, hand jams, heel hooks, torquing sidepulls... I also aided this climb, and it was much more straightforward.
Leading the Mordor Wall. A2, I think.
Well, yesterday I got my first aid lead in at the Mordor Wall on Cathedral Ledge. This thing is no trifle. The first move is off a somewhat dicey looking talon placement:
And you can't see in the pictures, but the next move is to thread a little rivet with the wire of a nut, and slide the nut up to make a "bolt." And then there were a lot of microcam and micronut placements. I think I used almost my entire rack. At one point, I was running out of pieces and had to place a BD C3 (#000) cam and a BD micro stopper (#2) next to each other and equalize them. Those are tiny pieces, to be sure, but I bounce tested them very aggressively and was impressed to see that they held fine. It also took forever...four hours to lead it and then a surprising two hours to jug it. Every time I did something slow, like fifi in too much, Mark would say "Ah, but what would Chris Mac do here?!" and I'd try to ignore him, only to discover an hour later that he was totally right. And jugging a traverse is not trivial. If you thought cleaning a traversing sport climb was hard, wait till you try to do this. Mark told me he's seen people on big walls stymied for hours trying to do stuff like that.
Hey, Mark? Why wasn't this in the brochure? Nobody said
this was going to be awful!
Well, I'm pretty pleased with what happened. I didn't whip, and I only had one piece blow out on a test. I did almost poke myself in the eye when I whipped out a nut, but fortunately, I was wearing safety glasses. I've decided that nut tools, despite their name, are virtually useless for taking out nuts. You can get out most nuts just by yanking up on them. Why didn't anyone tell me this before?! I learned a ton about placing gear and jugging properly, and feel ready to tackle harder aid objectives. I think it will make me feel more confident trad climbing, too.
Well, I polished off the weekend by going to Rumney and having a go at Flesh for Lulu. It actually went pretty well, and I linked a lot of it together. I think I can definitely send it this season. It's 5.12a/b, but nothing feels harder than V3 or V4. It's just very technical and pumpy. It's really my style--slightly overhanging, balancy moves on crimps. Jeremy and Chelsea had a great time on it too:
I also went to Mark's slideshow about his excursion to Borneo with various contemporary climbing luminaries including Alex Honnold, Jimmy Chin, and Conrad Anker. I won't ruin it for you, because I'm rooting for him to come back in the fall and give a slideshow to the HMC, but there was a lot of gossip about these guys. In no uncertain terms, it was made clear to me that: Mark is crazy and bases all of his sponsored adventures on books which document doomed expeditions where dumb people venture somewhere they have no business being and end up having to practically eat each other before being rescued; Alex Honnold is ridiculously good and has almost no fear, to the point where he makes fun of Mark for being "Mr. Safety;" Jimmy Chin is incredibly charming, to the point where he can solve problems with local officials by whipping out his iPhone and showing them cool videos ("Ah, here I am skiing down Everest. What have you got to say about that?" Incidentally, one dude walked out of the room before the slideshow started, as soon as he found out that Mark wasn't going to talk about climbing Everest. He mumbled something about not wanting to see the "Not Everest guy." What a tool.); and Conrad Anker is both a bloodhound when it comes to routefinding and also totally tough ("You guys want to go down because there's a little typhoon? You're such wimps!"). Well, I'm going to end the post there, with that incredibly long sentence. It was a great weekend.
Nut? Ice tool? Pin? So many choices!Friday, we went to Trollville. We were at Cathedral yesterday, and we explained this fact to a passerby, and he asked "Trollville? Never heard of it." How typical. An added bonus of it being completely deserted most of the time, particularly the summer, is no one gives a fuck if you pound pins, bolt, or drytool away. So this was the perfect place for me to learn how to pound in pins. I mock-lead this A4 seam on the diciest placements, with multiple pieces ripping out on tests, and trying to stack pins and nuts to make things work. I fell about halfway up, which I thought was pretty good. That thing is pretty hard. I fell because I had to get a very marginal micro BD stopper, which was fine when weighted from below, but terrible when I got a bit higher on it. I think if I were going to do it again, I would "free climb" the very blank section in the middle using ice axes. Yes, you can drytool in the summer with rock shoes, and yes, it's totally absurd, but I had a lot of fun doing it anyways:
Absurd drytooling in summer. M7?I had tried the route before in the winter, and thought it was hard, but it went pretty well this time. I would have sent it, but I got my tool stuck in a slot. Oh well. It's not really a mixed route though, because it never gets any ice on it. However, topping it out was quite tough without any frozen turf at the top. It was totally cool though: leashless trickery, hand jams, heel hooks, torquing sidepulls... I also aided this climb, and it was much more straightforward.
Leading the Mordor Wall. A2, I think.Well, yesterday I got my first aid lead in at the Mordor Wall on Cathedral Ledge. This thing is no trifle. The first move is off a somewhat dicey looking talon placement:
And you can't see in the pictures, but the next move is to thread a little rivet with the wire of a nut, and slide the nut up to make a "bolt." And then there were a lot of microcam and micronut placements. I think I used almost my entire rack. At one point, I was running out of pieces and had to place a BD C3 (#000) cam and a BD micro stopper (#2) next to each other and equalize them. Those are tiny pieces, to be sure, but I bounce tested them very aggressively and was impressed to see that they held fine. It also took forever...four hours to lead it and then a surprising two hours to jug it. Every time I did something slow, like fifi in too much, Mark would say "Ah, but what would Chris Mac do here?!" and I'd try to ignore him, only to discover an hour later that he was totally right. And jugging a traverse is not trivial. If you thought cleaning a traversing sport climb was hard, wait till you try to do this. Mark told me he's seen people on big walls stymied for hours trying to do stuff like that.
Hey, Mark? Why wasn't this in the brochure? Nobody saidthis was going to be awful!
Well, I'm pretty pleased with what happened. I didn't whip, and I only had one piece blow out on a test. I did almost poke myself in the eye when I whipped out a nut, but fortunately, I was wearing safety glasses. I've decided that nut tools, despite their name, are virtually useless for taking out nuts. You can get out most nuts just by yanking up on them. Why didn't anyone tell me this before?! I learned a ton about placing gear and jugging properly, and feel ready to tackle harder aid objectives. I think it will make me feel more confident trad climbing, too.
Well, I polished off the weekend by going to Rumney and having a go at Flesh for Lulu. It actually went pretty well, and I linked a lot of it together. I think I can definitely send it this season. It's 5.12a/b, but nothing feels harder than V3 or V4. It's just very technical and pumpy. It's really my style--slightly overhanging, balancy moves on crimps. Jeremy and Chelsea had a great time on it too:
I also went to Mark's slideshow about his excursion to Borneo with various contemporary climbing luminaries including Alex Honnold, Jimmy Chin, and Conrad Anker. I won't ruin it for you, because I'm rooting for him to come back in the fall and give a slideshow to the HMC, but there was a lot of gossip about these guys. In no uncertain terms, it was made clear to me that: Mark is crazy and bases all of his sponsored adventures on books which document doomed expeditions where dumb people venture somewhere they have no business being and end up having to practically eat each other before being rescued; Alex Honnold is ridiculously good and has almost no fear, to the point where he makes fun of Mark for being "Mr. Safety;" Jimmy Chin is incredibly charming, to the point where he can solve problems with local officials by whipping out his iPhone and showing them cool videos ("Ah, here I am skiing down Everest. What have you got to say about that?" Incidentally, one dude walked out of the room before the slideshow started, as soon as he found out that Mark wasn't going to talk about climbing Everest. He mumbled something about not wanting to see the "Not Everest guy." What a tool.); and Conrad Anker is both a bloodhound when it comes to routefinding and also totally tough ("You guys want to go down because there's a little typhoon? You're such wimps!"). Well, I'm going to end the post there, with that incredibly long sentence. It was a great weekend.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Positive Thinking?
I wish this were about the route of the same name in the Daks, but it is actually about this:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1909019,00.html
People are always telling me to think more positively, and it seems like that might actually be counterproductive. Well, to be fair, I think psychotherapy, and for that matter, psychology and psychiatry, while sometimes undeniably helpful, are somewhat pseudoscientific. Along with the bias I have that says social science studies like this often have some sort of agenda, I do take the whole thing with a grain of salt. But nonetheless, I think it's common sense that striving for realistic pronouncements, and general honesty with yourself, is often helpful. Of course, if you're on lead, and you need to lie to yourself to make it work, then by all means. But once you're on the ground, don't tell yourself you're a 5.12 climber when you don't have any arms!
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1909019,00.html
People are always telling me to think more positively, and it seems like that might actually be counterproductive. Well, to be fair, I think psychotherapy, and for that matter, psychology and psychiatry, while sometimes undeniably helpful, are somewhat pseudoscientific. Along with the bias I have that says social science studies like this often have some sort of agenda, I do take the whole thing with a grain of salt. But nonetheless, I think it's common sense that striving for realistic pronouncements, and general honesty with yourself, is often helpful. Of course, if you're on lead, and you need to lie to yourself to make it work, then by all means. But once you're on the ground, don't tell yourself you're a 5.12 climber when you don't have any arms!
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Rumney Reportlet
Neal, Hannah, Claire, Jeremy, Chelsea, Philippe, Jonathan, Patrick, a variety of hangers-on, and I pounced on the brief respite from the continuing monsoon-like deluge to get some sport climbing in at Rumney. It was good to get back into projecting mode. Neal and I worked on Orangahang (12a/b), and I think we both made good progress on it. I still don't think I have all the footwork down quite right, but it's good enough that I think I can send it with a bit more endurance. I put Claire on Tropicana (11a), her first 11 outside, and she did great, contrary to pre-mumblings to the contrary. A lot of stuff was really drippy so we didn't do much else. I wanted to get on Flesh for Lulu (12a/b), but there was some camp of precocious teens on it so we went and ate delicious Subway sandwiches instead. I'll try to project that next week. It seems like more my style. Mark Synnott and I are headed out to do some aid climbing this weekend, assuming the clowns at the body shop ever decide to fix my car. Maybe I'll get to lead my first aid climb!
Thursday, June 25, 2009
RIP Johnny, Micah, Wade
I only knew Micah, but it sounds like they were all cool dudes. Micah came to give a slideshow here last year and it was a really cool, funny show. I even got to climb with him at Rumney once...he was totally psyched about everything. We're all going to miss them.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Unorthodox Nut Placement
My toaster broke, so that the handle pops up, whether the toast is done or not, so I have come up with an innovative solution involving a #5 BD micro stopper. Now, I wonder if I can do it in reverse...think I can use the toaster as an "aid only" piece? I bet *that's* not covered by the warnings. It just says not to soak it in the bathtub and nothing at all about falling on it as a piece of pro...
Monday, June 15, 2009
Black Diamond
BD, definitely one of my favorite gear companies was recently robbed by an idiot who thought that actually dealt in diamonds:
http://www.mountainproject.com/v/colorado/106460446
Kinda puts your problems in perspective, doesn't it?
http://www.mountainproject.com/v/colorado/106460446
Kinda puts your problems in perspective, doesn't it?
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Trad, Self-Rescue, Aid, Guiding, and Pouring Rain
I was up in the North Conway area this weekend practicing my trad, self-rescue, and guiding skills with Bayard Russell this weekend. Yesterday, atop the tourist "hello climbers, I'm gawking" lookout atop Cathedral, we basked in unforeseen sun and incredible clouds of pollen while practicing a lot of different skills: racking efficiently, placing gear, belaying and lowering from above, handling two seconds, extending the anchor, escaping belays, counterbalance rappelling, raising systems, etc., etc. I know one hardly ever has to use these skills, but I like to have a full toolkit of procedures to choose from if things ever get complicated. I also feel a lot better when I take out newer people, which seems to happen a lot.
Today we went to Sundown Ledge along the Kanc where it poured incessantly all day. We started by pounding in some pins. I learned that the micro hammer on a BD Cobra is absolutely awful as a hammer and hurt my wrist. Of course, as Bayard points out, I'm a chemist, not a carpenter. Then we practiced a technique called "belayed rappelling" which is a nice technique for situations where you have to belay from above, like Otter Cliffs. I will definitely use this in the future. The idea is to avoid letting the rope run over a sharp edge, which saves it from abrasion damage. You find the middle of the rope, and tie off to the anchor. You then drop down half of the rope (call this strand A). (Alternatively, you could let down one strand of rope until the bottom touches, and maybe give a little extra, and tie off what's left at the anchor. This would prevent rope from getting dunked in the water.) Now then, you have the climber tie into the other end of the rope (strand B). You put them on belay with strand B, while they single-strand rappel on strand A. You can use a redirected ATC or better yet, a Gri-Gri. You probably want to be able to see the climber going down, so it's a good idea to extend the anchor a bit (but not too much, otherwise, belaying will be really annoying). So there you go, a bit of guiding technique.
We also got on Eyeless in Gaza (12b) which actually felt really good to me. I had some trouble with one crux move at the very top, but I worked it a bit and eventually found some good beta. I think I can easily send this thing within a few more tries, especially if I work on my endurance a bit a the gym, which is, thus far, atrocious. However, the bouldering is coming along well, so my power is good. I'm sending a bunch of V5s, and it's not just inflated grades, because I feel stronger, too. I also mock-aid/bouldered for about thirty feet, which was not only my first attempt at aid climbing, but also took an hour and left me begging for mercy. You almost want to have a bandolier plus Santa sack of gear...you have four aiders, a fifi hook, a full rack, slings, plus an assorted gaggle of carabiners, kitchen sinks, and other hangers on. I learned that the scary "top-stepping" manoeuver actually works and greatly increases efficiency, although I certainly have not mastered it. I'm sure Bayard was very bored. But I had a lot of fun placing gear. There's nothing like aid climbing that will teach you how to place gear that well! Every placement gets tested (and welded, so you get the experience of how to place gear that can come out easily, too). I also learned that rotating pieces 180 degrees can often greatly increase their security. It's odd to think that works, but if you look carefully at most trad pieces, they are not C2 symmetric, at least, not under all such rotations. The BD stoppers, for example, of a large radius side and a small radius side, while the C4 cams have the inner lobes on one side while the outer lobes are on the other. Finally, I learned how to jug (I'm awful, but can at least sort of do it now). I thought it was really hard work physically, but I think I'm just not doing it that efficiently. I'd like someone to invent some sort of bicycle type invention where I can just pedal my way up the rope comfortably. Who will invent this for me?
Today we went to Sundown Ledge along the Kanc where it poured incessantly all day. We started by pounding in some pins. I learned that the micro hammer on a BD Cobra is absolutely awful as a hammer and hurt my wrist. Of course, as Bayard points out, I'm a chemist, not a carpenter. Then we practiced a technique called "belayed rappelling" which is a nice technique for situations where you have to belay from above, like Otter Cliffs. I will definitely use this in the future. The idea is to avoid letting the rope run over a sharp edge, which saves it from abrasion damage. You find the middle of the rope, and tie off to the anchor. You then drop down half of the rope (call this strand A). (Alternatively, you could let down one strand of rope until the bottom touches, and maybe give a little extra, and tie off what's left at the anchor. This would prevent rope from getting dunked in the water.) Now then, you have the climber tie into the other end of the rope (strand B). You put them on belay with strand B, while they single-strand rappel on strand A. You can use a redirected ATC or better yet, a Gri-Gri. You probably want to be able to see the climber going down, so it's a good idea to extend the anchor a bit (but not too much, otherwise, belaying will be really annoying). So there you go, a bit of guiding technique.
We also got on Eyeless in Gaza (12b) which actually felt really good to me. I had some trouble with one crux move at the very top, but I worked it a bit and eventually found some good beta. I think I can easily send this thing within a few more tries, especially if I work on my endurance a bit a the gym, which is, thus far, atrocious. However, the bouldering is coming along well, so my power is good. I'm sending a bunch of V5s, and it's not just inflated grades, because I feel stronger, too. I also mock-aid/bouldered for about thirty feet, which was not only my first attempt at aid climbing, but also took an hour and left me begging for mercy. You almost want to have a bandolier plus Santa sack of gear...you have four aiders, a fifi hook, a full rack, slings, plus an assorted gaggle of carabiners, kitchen sinks, and other hangers on. I learned that the scary "top-stepping" manoeuver actually works and greatly increases efficiency, although I certainly have not mastered it. I'm sure Bayard was very bored. But I had a lot of fun placing gear. There's nothing like aid climbing that will teach you how to place gear that well! Every placement gets tested (and welded, so you get the experience of how to place gear that can come out easily, too). I also learned that rotating pieces 180 degrees can often greatly increase their security. It's odd to think that works, but if you look carefully at most trad pieces, they are not C2 symmetric, at least, not under all such rotations. The BD stoppers, for example, of a large radius side and a small radius side, while the C4 cams have the inner lobes on one side while the outer lobes are on the other. Finally, I learned how to jug (I'm awful, but can at least sort of do it now). I thought it was really hard work physically, but I think I'm just not doing it that efficiently. I'd like someone to invent some sort of bicycle type invention where I can just pedal my way up the rope comfortably. Who will invent this for me?
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Return to Rumney, Food Gripes
Like NASA's "return to flight," my return to Rumney had its ups and downs. I haven't really sport climbed in some time now, and I wasn't feeling totally psyched this morning when I got out to climb, but I quickly remembered how much fun it was. Who was there? Harvard Forest Dunbar, Astrophysics Claire, Norwegian Henning, Hannah "I like China" Waight, Eric "I am not a time traveller" Engberg, and Zeb "hello, do you like math?" Engberg. It was a blast. I normally like to project outside, and do a relatively small amount of intense climbing, but Dunbar, who was my main partner today, really turned up the fire. I did get on Orangahang (12a/b) and felt really good. Things that felt crazy last year felt totally static and do-able. There's a V4ish section where there are some deadpoints involved, and it felt totally OK to me. I think I can send it if I build up a bit of power endurance. My endurance is always terrible. I tried to "onsight/flash" Sally's Alley (11c) and Millenium Falcon (10c) today and it was kind of embarassing. I've done them before, but I remember basically nothing, so that's why I've used quotation marks. Dunbar, on the other hand, is a motoring Energizer bunny, who insisted we should try and climb dozens and dozens of 10s, declaring, as usual, that "sport climbing is just training for trad, trad is just training for alpine, etc., etc." I'm just happy he doesn't give the hard trad he-man catch I so dread. Zeb climbed hard, although I didn't get any specifics. I overheard something about him being too scared to lead something, but when asked about this, he assured me in no uncertain terms that this was a filthy, filthy lie. Hannah did Prime Climb (11b), I think. Henning led Underdog (10a), and Claire followed up (first 10 at Rumney?), which was awesome for both of them I think.
Anyways, I think fun was had by all. We retired to The Common Man, where the bread, cheese, and crackers flow with famous vigor. I had a cucumber salad (not that good, especially for $7) and some mussles (also meh, for $7). But then the people in lab are always taking me to truly delicious food, so I'm probably somewhat spoiled. The food was good, just not great. Let me assure you, however, in no uncertain terms that, unlike pernicious reports to the contrary, that I am not a monocle-wearing fatcat who will only eat the finest lobsters and steaks. In point of fact, I quite enjoy McDonalds. I don't know why people are always complaining about that. Of course, I stay away from their burgers (which I don't like in general anyways). However, after an unfortunate rest stop on the way to Acadia, I have developed a deep personal loathing for Burger Kings everywhere, which I consider to be only slightly better than eating a filthy, oil soaked rag.
Anyways, I think fun was had by all. We retired to The Common Man, where the bread, cheese, and crackers flow with famous vigor. I had a cucumber salad (not that good, especially for $7) and some mussles (also meh, for $7). But then the people in lab are always taking me to truly delicious food, so I'm probably somewhat spoiled. The food was good, just not great. Let me assure you, however, in no uncertain terms that, unlike pernicious reports to the contrary, that I am not a monocle-wearing fatcat who will only eat the finest lobsters and steaks. In point of fact, I quite enjoy McDonalds. I don't know why people are always complaining about that. Of course, I stay away from their burgers (which I don't like in general anyways). However, after an unfortunate rest stop on the way to Acadia, I have developed a deep personal loathing for Burger Kings everywhere, which I consider to be only slightly better than eating a filthy, oil soaked rag.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Crow Hill, or, Jamming 101
Jimmy, Dunbar, Karen, and I headed out to Crow Hill today. It was really nice in the morning, but then the weather really rolled in around 3 or 4 o'clock and we stopped climbing, did some self-rescue, and then called it a day. We started on some sort of chimney climb, which I lead (trad), as part of my new "OK, I guess I better learn how to climb trad" kick. I discovered that I'm actually not only a huge chicken when it comes to trad, but also just kind of bad. I got up this slab to this ledge, and then started climbing up this somewhat overhanging face. It was a little surprising, because I thought it was supposed to be 5.easy. I got in a bomber 0.3 C4 in, and then tried to exit the climb directly upwards, only to find that there was a bit of rope drag, and more to the point, no gear. Worried about decking on the slab below, I just set an anchor and finished the climb with an easier variation. As my guide Sean says, you want to have some balls, but you never really want to paint yourself into a corner.
Well then. We moved over to Intertwine. The whole world was waiting to do the climb, so Jimmy quickly led it and I quickly followed it. I found it hard to take out one nut while hanging from a fingerlock, so I ended up hanging on the rope. I would have liked to do it clean, and suss out all the moves properly, but there wasn't time. It was mostly a sequence-y fingerlocking lesson. OK. Then we headed over to Jane, which people had set up a top-rope on and kindly let us use. I flailed all over it on the first attempt, but then I taped my right hand up a bit, and tried it three more times. I think I have everything but the exit move dialed now. There were all these cool jams...hand jams, wrist jams, fingerlocks, etc. On my fourth and final attempt, I sent it all the way to the exit move and then came off. I think I've decided the key to sending it is to grit your teeth and really jam very, very hard. I have a huge bruise on my hand from all the jamming I did. Finally, I went over to clean Diagonal. Dunbar led it impressively, and took an even more impressive whip trying to top it out. It was quite an exciting 20 or 30 foot fall which took him kind of close to the ground. I was impressed, anyways, and I bet it got Karen's (his belayer) heart racing, too. The whole climb is really greasy, but it has locker wrist jams, and I think I could do it cleanly if I got another try at it. There's a direct variation on it to the left, and it's full of slopers and tension-y moves, too. I think western Mass. climbing is just really hard; full of greasy slopers and jamming moves I'm not used to. But I've decided I'm going to teach myself how to jam properly because it's embarassing that I can do 5.11 sport routes and WI 5 ice routes but not 5.7 trad cracks.
We reviewed a little self-rescue after that: escaping a belay off your harness, lowering off a weighted Reverso, making a Munter and mule, passing a knot while lowering, 2:1 drop loop, simple 3:1, simple 5:1, etc. It felt good, but it's a little disconcerting that even after having plenty of guiding on it, and seeing things a bunch of times, it's still hard. I've got two days of guiding with Bayard in a few weeks, and he's going to show me some more stuff. I do feel like I'm getting better and better at rigging anchors efficiently and getting out of tough guiding-type situations though. I still don't hold a candle to Bayard, Kevin, or Sean though (my regular guides). Of course, they'd probably be confused as all hell in a chemistry lab. But it's interesting how stuff Kevin showed me a few years ago, which I found totally baffling at the time, makes much more sense now. I remember he showed me the "block and tackle" method for unweighting something and something just totally clicked about it recently. Anyways, it was a fun day. I want to go back and work on these trad things and eventually lead them.
I just spoke to Zeb and found out about the HMC part of things at Rumney. There were shennagians, a gong show, and a failed practical joke, by all accounts. Rachel showed up and Zeb (who evidentally can tell Rachel apart from Vanessa at a glance) pretended it was Vanessa. Now I think I can tell them apart by the shape of their faces, slight difference in height, and slightly different spots, but the easiest way is that Vanessa always has the necklace thing around her neck. They're both super cool, though. Anyways, Zeb pretended Rachel was Vanessa, and it kind of worked for a few minutes, but then he blew it by accidentally referring to her as Rachel again. Oh well. I saw on Facebook that Vanessa has a climbing wall at her place now. That's pretty sweet.
Well then. We moved over to Intertwine. The whole world was waiting to do the climb, so Jimmy quickly led it and I quickly followed it. I found it hard to take out one nut while hanging from a fingerlock, so I ended up hanging on the rope. I would have liked to do it clean, and suss out all the moves properly, but there wasn't time. It was mostly a sequence-y fingerlocking lesson. OK. Then we headed over to Jane, which people had set up a top-rope on and kindly let us use. I flailed all over it on the first attempt, but then I taped my right hand up a bit, and tried it three more times. I think I have everything but the exit move dialed now. There were all these cool jams...hand jams, wrist jams, fingerlocks, etc. On my fourth and final attempt, I sent it all the way to the exit move and then came off. I think I've decided the key to sending it is to grit your teeth and really jam very, very hard. I have a huge bruise on my hand from all the jamming I did. Finally, I went over to clean Diagonal. Dunbar led it impressively, and took an even more impressive whip trying to top it out. It was quite an exciting 20 or 30 foot fall which took him kind of close to the ground. I was impressed, anyways, and I bet it got Karen's (his belayer) heart racing, too. The whole climb is really greasy, but it has locker wrist jams, and I think I could do it cleanly if I got another try at it. There's a direct variation on it to the left, and it's full of slopers and tension-y moves, too. I think western Mass. climbing is just really hard; full of greasy slopers and jamming moves I'm not used to. But I've decided I'm going to teach myself how to jam properly because it's embarassing that I can do 5.11 sport routes and WI 5 ice routes but not 5.7 trad cracks.
We reviewed a little self-rescue after that: escaping a belay off your harness, lowering off a weighted Reverso, making a Munter and mule, passing a knot while lowering, 2:1 drop loop, simple 3:1, simple 5:1, etc. It felt good, but it's a little disconcerting that even after having plenty of guiding on it, and seeing things a bunch of times, it's still hard. I've got two days of guiding with Bayard in a few weeks, and he's going to show me some more stuff. I do feel like I'm getting better and better at rigging anchors efficiently and getting out of tough guiding-type situations though. I still don't hold a candle to Bayard, Kevin, or Sean though (my regular guides). Of course, they'd probably be confused as all hell in a chemistry lab. But it's interesting how stuff Kevin showed me a few years ago, which I found totally baffling at the time, makes much more sense now. I remember he showed me the "block and tackle" method for unweighting something and something just totally clicked about it recently. Anyways, it was a fun day. I want to go back and work on these trad things and eventually lead them.
I just spoke to Zeb and found out about the HMC part of things at Rumney. There were shennagians, a gong show, and a failed practical joke, by all accounts. Rachel showed up and Zeb (who evidentally can tell Rachel apart from Vanessa at a glance) pretended it was Vanessa. Now I think I can tell them apart by the shape of their faces, slight difference in height, and slightly different spots, but the easiest way is that Vanessa always has the necklace thing around her neck. They're both super cool, though. Anyways, Zeb pretended Rachel was Vanessa, and it kind of worked for a few minutes, but then he blew it by accidentally referring to her as Rachel again. Oh well. I saw on Facebook that Vanessa has a climbing wall at her place now. That's pretty sweet.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Acadia
A bunch of us (Hannah, Jessie, Neal, Eric & Zeb Engberg) went up to Acadia this weekend for the Memorial Day holiday. The weather was sort of cloud/rainy on Saturday and Sunday and then cleared up nicely for Monday. I wanted to do some trad, but it was kind of wet, and I didn't feel like I was in top form, so we mostly just top-roped at Otter Cliffs and Great Head. The setting was super cool, but I wasn't sure the climbing justified the nightmarish drive. Jessie did this cool chimney climb with neat stemming moves:
Jessie (bottom) styling the chimney. You can't see my face
(I have a red thing on my head) but I looked suitably impressed.
She did it with no problems on her first try, which I thought was rather nice. We ate some delicious sea creatures (a 2 lb lobster for me) on Sunday night. There were a lot of stars. On the negative side, it was a rough weekend for gear. Neil lost a BD C4 cam, I lost a BD #6 stopper, and Hannah's brand new 70 m Maxim rope got a core shot about 10 m from the end, which is a real bummer. I don't think it was my fault, but I was using it lower someone on Sunday when I noticed it has a substantial abrasion in the sheath. When I went to use the rope on Monday, it had become a complete core shot...completely flat when bent over on itself, with abraded fluffy white core everywhere. I think if I ever go back there, I'll bring a bunch of static line and try to bring some carpets or something to pad rock lips with.
So all in all, a very nice weekend. I mean, how often do you get to say that you went and explored the sea cliffs of Maine on the weekend? That you went and rappelled the ones that took your fancy and climbed back up?
Jessie (bottom) styling the chimney. You can't see my face(I have a red thing on my head) but I looked suitably impressed.
So all in all, a very nice weekend. I mean, how often do you get to say that you went and explored the sea cliffs of Maine on the weekend? That you went and rappelled the ones that took your fancy and climbed back up?
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Gunks
So this weekend I went back to the Gunks for the first time since I started climbing about three years ago. As part of the AMC new seconds program, I took these two astrophysicists I know, Jessie and Liz, on their first multipitch rock climbs. Anywhere else, that would be an utterly absurd statement, but as I write this, I feel perfectly calm, a condition I tried to replicate on lead. I've led some ice which most reasonable people would consider a bit scary, and felt OK, but as a relatively inexperienced trad climber, the 5.0-5.7 terrain we were on felt hard enough to get my attention. I write those grades not only because the Gunks grades are notorious sandbags but also because I haven't climbed that much on granite. Or maybe it's nerves. So, I'm 20 feet up on a delicate, muddy slab with a nice ledge with blocks on it, and my last piece was a marginal #0 C3 30 feet ago? How nice! I think the climbs we did were actually PG rated, but probably PG for someone who really knows how to find gear very well. As it is, I still haven't learned the art of placing offset nuts or tricams. I just found out there are two sizes below the pink, which are black and white, so I'm psyched about that.
Well, the leading was exciting enough, but the guiding aspect of things was really interesting. Now Jessie and Liz are very smart people, but they're definitely new, so I tried to make their experience as safe and pleasant as possible. We got on Ribs (a good 5.4) and Red's Ruin (a terrible 5.2). I would like to have topped out on Ribs, but there were a zillion people on the GT ledge just waiting to continue up the third pitch (which I think is the same as Arch or something). By contrast, there was no line on Red's Ruin, but then I found out that was for a very good reason--the climb is an incredibly chossy pile of shit, with loose rocks, lichens, mud, and slugs everywhere. I think I even found a dead mouse on it. Anyways, I think I managed to hit a good difficulty level, despite my complete lack of familiarity with the area.
Liz looking serene on Ribs (5.4).
It was their first time lead belaying, too, so I climbed like I was soloing and tried to protect them as well as possible by placing lots of gear to protect traverses. Sometimes I'd clip both double ropes to the same piece. Alternatively, I'd ask the first simulclimbing second to unclip their rope from a piece and clip the other rope into the same piece. (Yes, I'm well aware that's an entirely inappropriate use of the word "their." And I know you're not supposed to clip both double ropes to a piece, but it seemed like a reasonable enough thing on easy terrain.) And I'd watch them coming up the tricky parts and try to help them along with beta, or order one second to stop while the other one continued climbing to make sure one climber couldn't hit another.
There was definitely some excitement caused by rope drag and rappelling. I wove back and forth seeking out gear and avoiding these damn flaring pockets, and even with sling extensions, there was a ton of drag. I still haven't figured out what to do in those cases. Sometimes I just gave up on getting a marginal nut or whatever, and ran it out. I think I'd rather run it out with a loose rope, confidently climbing, than "protect" something and have horrendous rope drag, and barely be able to climb. It's that, or quit, I think. So I used a standard guiding technique to set up my "clients" for rappel, which is to place their belay devices on tethers off their belay loops and have them pre-rigged for rappel. That way, I can go down with an autoblock, untangle the ropes, and give them a fireman's belay. Then, they'd just unclip from the anchor, and always be "on belay" with a system that I had personally checked first. I thought I had explained this pretty well, but evidentlly, they had never done it before, so were feeling a bit antsy about it. There was another party on the GT ledge which chose (unwisely) to climb with a single 50 m rope, and wanted to use our double 60 m ropes to get down in one rappel. So they decided to "help" by re-rigging my seconds. Although everything worked out fine, I wasn't too pleased about this, because if anything got messed up, I'd feel very responsible. But I explained everything better for the next climb, and it worked out fine. There was a definite "cross your fingers" moment after we rapped, because although the rope went down in a straight line, it crossed through all these branches and bushes. So I just used the minimum EDK/overhand knot, with no backups, to hopefully let the rap knot flip over any obstructions, and fortunately, it did. It was pretty cool to actually watch it flip over branches and stuff on its way down. In the end, everything worked out pretty well. Liz and Jessie were totally great, and I've decided they're good, nice people, which is...a substantial statement, at least from me.
So, it rained all night, and it totally soaked the rock, my tent, and my shoes. I put a tarp down under my tent but so much water somehow got in between my tent and the tarp that it felt like I was on a water mattress after a while. I'm pretty impressed that my tent only felt a bit damp afterwards. Now I have to hang the whole thing out to dry so that mildew doesn't get into it.
Jessie, left: "I'm so upset with you right now. When are
you going to put in a nut so I can use this brand new
nut tool?!" Sorry, Jessie. I let you down on that pitch.
Anyways, over dinner, we were all talking, and somehow things turned to Top Gun. Now I thought Top Gun was a boy movie, about fighter pilots, loud motorcycles, and raw testosterone, but I found myself corrected. Actually, Jessie says, it's a relationship movie, with a conveniently awesome backdrop of half-naked Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer (here, she takes a moment--to do what, I'm not sure). Well, then. I think all the climbers in the club should adopt awesome fighter pilot-style callsigns. That way, when we're yelling at each other on the cliff, no one will mistake one Dunbar for another (there are too goddamn many Dunbars in this world, I swear!). There are so many options: maverick, goose, viper, wolfman, stinger, ice man... Which one do you want to be? The roster is wide open...
Well, the leading was exciting enough, but the guiding aspect of things was really interesting. Now Jessie and Liz are very smart people, but they're definitely new, so I tried to make their experience as safe and pleasant as possible. We got on Ribs (a good 5.4) and Red's Ruin (a terrible 5.2). I would like to have topped out on Ribs, but there were a zillion people on the GT ledge just waiting to continue up the third pitch (which I think is the same as Arch or something). By contrast, there was no line on Red's Ruin, but then I found out that was for a very good reason--the climb is an incredibly chossy pile of shit, with loose rocks, lichens, mud, and slugs everywhere. I think I even found a dead mouse on it. Anyways, I think I managed to hit a good difficulty level, despite my complete lack of familiarity with the area.
Liz looking serene on Ribs (5.4).
It was their first time lead belaying, too, so I climbed like I was soloing and tried to protect them as well as possible by placing lots of gear to protect traverses. Sometimes I'd clip both double ropes to the same piece. Alternatively, I'd ask the first simulclimbing second to unclip their rope from a piece and clip the other rope into the same piece. (Yes, I'm well aware that's an entirely inappropriate use of the word "their." And I know you're not supposed to clip both double ropes to a piece, but it seemed like a reasonable enough thing on easy terrain.) And I'd watch them coming up the tricky parts and try to help them along with beta, or order one second to stop while the other one continued climbing to make sure one climber couldn't hit another.
There was definitely some excitement caused by rope drag and rappelling. I wove back and forth seeking out gear and avoiding these damn flaring pockets, and even with sling extensions, there was a ton of drag. I still haven't figured out what to do in those cases. Sometimes I just gave up on getting a marginal nut or whatever, and ran it out. I think I'd rather run it out with a loose rope, confidently climbing, than "protect" something and have horrendous rope drag, and barely be able to climb. It's that, or quit, I think. So I used a standard guiding technique to set up my "clients" for rappel, which is to place their belay devices on tethers off their belay loops and have them pre-rigged for rappel. That way, I can go down with an autoblock, untangle the ropes, and give them a fireman's belay. Then, they'd just unclip from the anchor, and always be "on belay" with a system that I had personally checked first. I thought I had explained this pretty well, but evidentlly, they had never done it before, so were feeling a bit antsy about it. There was another party on the GT ledge which chose (unwisely) to climb with a single 50 m rope, and wanted to use our double 60 m ropes to get down in one rappel. So they decided to "help" by re-rigging my seconds. Although everything worked out fine, I wasn't too pleased about this, because if anything got messed up, I'd feel very responsible. But I explained everything better for the next climb, and it worked out fine. There was a definite "cross your fingers" moment after we rapped, because although the rope went down in a straight line, it crossed through all these branches and bushes. So I just used the minimum EDK/overhand knot, with no backups, to hopefully let the rap knot flip over any obstructions, and fortunately, it did. It was pretty cool to actually watch it flip over branches and stuff on its way down. In the end, everything worked out pretty well. Liz and Jessie were totally great, and I've decided they're good, nice people, which is...a substantial statement, at least from me.
So, it rained all night, and it totally soaked the rock, my tent, and my shoes. I put a tarp down under my tent but so much water somehow got in between my tent and the tarp that it felt like I was on a water mattress after a while. I'm pretty impressed that my tent only felt a bit damp afterwards. Now I have to hang the whole thing out to dry so that mildew doesn't get into it.
Jessie, left: "I'm so upset with you right now. When are
you going to put in a nut so I can use this brand new
nut tool?!" Sorry, Jessie. I let you down on that pitch.
Anyways, over dinner, we were all talking, and somehow things turned to Top Gun. Now I thought Top Gun was a boy movie, about fighter pilots, loud motorcycles, and raw testosterone, but I found myself corrected. Actually, Jessie says, it's a relationship movie, with a conveniently awesome backdrop of half-naked Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer (here, she takes a moment--to do what, I'm not sure). Well, then. I think all the climbers in the club should adopt awesome fighter pilot-style callsigns. That way, when we're yelling at each other on the cliff, no one will mistake one Dunbar for another (there are too goddamn many Dunbars in this world, I swear!). There are so many options: maverick, goose, viper, wolfman, stinger, ice man... Which one do you want to be? The roster is wide open...
Monday, May 11, 2009
Star Trek
[No spoilers here.]
I went to see the latest Star Trek movie last night. Now Star Trek is something I really grew up with. It captured my imagination. So while I wasn't about to dress up in morally-tinged 1960s pastels for this occasion, I was excited when I heard rave reviews for this new movie. Unlike most, however, I was a bit disappointed by the movie. It's everything I've come to expect from J.J. Abrams: the elements of exciting action but no actual substance. It really reflects what's wrong with much of the science fiction movie genre: a total lack of ideas. Oh, sure, there are incredible visuals of people diving into Vulcan's fiery forge from space, lots of phaser fire, hot people making out, and mysterious looking red substances, but what you get in the end is simply what the game of tag would look like if the players were TOS characters. Need I point out that the movie's plot makes no sense? In fact, it's much like Abrams' Alias, where a hot secret agent pranced about, equally lithely, from underground lair to designer cocktail. It didn't matter that the series literally made no sense, because it wasn't about sense. They both even have the damn red balls, which are, I suppose, the most Vulcan, logical, way to illustrate a MacGuffin. Now, I rant about how they've turned my imaginative series into the latest Transformers movie, but admittedly, a lot of the Star Trek franchise was totally unwatchable garbage. Have you seen the odd numbered movies? They don't make any sense either and they're horrible. So they haven't ruined anything, really. I just feel a sense of emptiness where a sense of wonder should be. You know, I watched the HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon" recently. In it, they take what might be considered largely dry material (engineers flipping switches, designing spacecraft, and dropping a feather and a weight on the airless moon) and made it fascinating and wondrous, at least for me. America's first astronaut in space, Alan Shepard, is plummeting to Earth after his orbit, much like the TOS characters in the Star Trek movie, but it is riveting. He, too, is cocooned in a (retroactively) ultramodern shield, but he's experiencing incredible G-forces, and there is the terse suspense of the unknown, rather than the casual acceptance of a yet another spectacular CGI. Later, the astronauts are orbiting the moon, demonstrating that spacecraft can successfully dock and undock a quarter of a million miles away, and they're looking out their window at the moon. They marvel at the lunar landscape, which, to me, rather than being a barren, lifeless surface, is a richly textured thing of fine sands, blazing ejecta, and dark regolith. That mere rocks would be fascinating and wondrous is well beyond the scope of Star Trek, and I suspect, most audience members these days. Certainly, if I were directing Star Trek, it would be a huge flop. But it's still sad to me...
I went to see the latest Star Trek movie last night. Now Star Trek is something I really grew up with. It captured my imagination. So while I wasn't about to dress up in morally-tinged 1960s pastels for this occasion, I was excited when I heard rave reviews for this new movie. Unlike most, however, I was a bit disappointed by the movie. It's everything I've come to expect from J.J. Abrams: the elements of exciting action but no actual substance. It really reflects what's wrong with much of the science fiction movie genre: a total lack of ideas. Oh, sure, there are incredible visuals of people diving into Vulcan's fiery forge from space, lots of phaser fire, hot people making out, and mysterious looking red substances, but what you get in the end is simply what the game of tag would look like if the players were TOS characters. Need I point out that the movie's plot makes no sense? In fact, it's much like Abrams' Alias, where a hot secret agent pranced about, equally lithely, from underground lair to designer cocktail. It didn't matter that the series literally made no sense, because it wasn't about sense. They both even have the damn red balls, which are, I suppose, the most Vulcan, logical, way to illustrate a MacGuffin. Now, I rant about how they've turned my imaginative series into the latest Transformers movie, but admittedly, a lot of the Star Trek franchise was totally unwatchable garbage. Have you seen the odd numbered movies? They don't make any sense either and they're horrible. So they haven't ruined anything, really. I just feel a sense of emptiness where a sense of wonder should be. You know, I watched the HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon" recently. In it, they take what might be considered largely dry material (engineers flipping switches, designing spacecraft, and dropping a feather and a weight on the airless moon) and made it fascinating and wondrous, at least for me. America's first astronaut in space, Alan Shepard, is plummeting to Earth after his orbit, much like the TOS characters in the Star Trek movie, but it is riveting. He, too, is cocooned in a (retroactively) ultramodern shield, but he's experiencing incredible G-forces, and there is the terse suspense of the unknown, rather than the casual acceptance of a yet another spectacular CGI. Later, the astronauts are orbiting the moon, demonstrating that spacecraft can successfully dock and undock a quarter of a million miles away, and they're looking out their window at the moon. They marvel at the lunar landscape, which, to me, rather than being a barren, lifeless surface, is a richly textured thing of fine sands, blazing ejecta, and dark regolith. That mere rocks would be fascinating and wondrous is well beyond the scope of Star Trek, and I suspect, most audience members these days. Certainly, if I were directing Star Trek, it would be a huge flop. But it's still sad to me...
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Farley
Jimmy and I investigated Farley today and met up with some friends from Metrorock. It was pattering steadily as we drove up, but magically, when we got there, things were damp, but it wasn't raining. Now, I'm a *terrible* onsight climber, but I have been working recently to improve my skills by doing a wide variety of climbs at the 5.10 and 5.11 grades. I think it's really improving my confidence and will help me on the more traditional routes I do in the winter. Conversely, leading ice this season gave me a very good lead head, and I find that I am executing sequences without fear and reading challenging moves with far more poise than I would have last year. Certainly, I still feel scared, but I find myself breathing more regularly, visualizing a lot, and falling and trying instead of taking and not trying. I tried to onsight a bunch of 5.10s today, and did really well on all of them. I didn't send any, but I still think it was a great time. I almost made it to the anchor on one, and as I slapped the top-out, I discovered that the holds were literally soaking in water, and little insects were emerging to express their displeasure at being disturbed. So I whipped off. Jimmy worked some 5.12 roof which seemed a little too powerful for my poor shoulder at this point. We also did a 5.10 sport/5.6 trad mixed route and I practiced placing gear, which was a good time.
I just got an email from Eric. He said he planned to use me "as an example." When I asked for clarification, he amended it to "as an excellent example." Of course, the addition of this adjective did absolutely nothing to clarify his sentence. Maybe I should watch my back.
I just got an email from Eric. He said he planned to use me "as an example." When I asked for clarification, he amended it to "as an excellent example." Of course, the addition of this adjective did absolutely nothing to clarify his sentence. Maybe I should watch my back.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Rumney Report
I headed up to Rumney with Dunbar, Keller, their associated padres, and some of the newer members of our club yesterday. It was my first time back to Rumney since last season and it was a gorgeous day. I wasn't climbing that well, but I did find I was mentally really focused, which has been a problem for me. Instead of wasting time being scared, I was quite calm and thinking about the climbing. I tried my first 12 at Waimea, the ultra-classic Technosurfing (12b). It's no joke (obviously). There's a big dynamic move off a sidepull and a very low foot to a crazy move where you have your hands matched on this slightly slopey rail. Then you have to heel hook above your head and make these powerful moves on these little crimpers, slopers, and one really big pocket. It's a little heady to be doing all these moves with a foot above your head, to say the least. I also tried to onsight Goldbug (10d) at Main Cliff, and blew it when I got the wrong hand on a clipping hold. But I was still pretty happy about that. I'm generally not a very good onsight climber, and Rumney is notorious for very beta-intensive climbs. Everyone else seemed to have a good time as well. Dunbar got up Flying Hawaiian (11b). Karen on-sighted Junco (8+). Lauren onsighted Lonesome Dove (10a) and took some impressive whippers on Poly Purebred (10b). Rikka managed to do the crux on that same climb, which was pretty impressive. And Keller literally fell on the last move on China Beach (14b). I heard there were other impressive things going on, but that's all I remember. I'm taking a week off to rest and let my sore shoulder fix itself. I'm trying the 3 weeks bouldering, 2 weeks endurance, 1 week rest cycle that Eric Horst says you should do. And since I'm also taking a break from cardio (good for me, but it's just too mentally gruelling for me to be a grad student, train for climbing, *and* do cardio all year round), I can relax a little this week.
I've been teaching myself all about the product operator formalism for NMR spectroscopy. It's quite cool, but very complicated. But beyond being complicated, they're really difficult to get a good physical intuition for, as they are mostly abstract symbols, rather than moving objects I can picture easily. Of course, on some level, you have to regard these quantum mechanical equations as magical widgets which let you predict things. Certainly, I can competently manipulate the operators and maybe even speak sensibly about which part of the density matrix they're from and what they mean. But as for a deep understanding? I think that's going to have to wait. I need to review some of the "basics" first: lots of linear algebra, some differential equations, and lots of quantum mechanics. At this point, my poor math skills are just holding me back. I just got myself this book by Tannor which *says* it's an introduction to quantum mechanics, but really isn't. It takes a really interesting approach to quantum mechanics. Instead of going through the usual rigmarole of "define the potential, write the Hamiltonian, find and sketch the eigenfunctions," it talks about time-dependent phenomena, which are easily the most interesting bits of quantum mechanics. It talks about femtosecond laser pulses, coherent control, and all sorts of other goodies I know basically nothing about. But I want to post-doc in non-linear spectroscopy, so it's got the double bonus of being super interesting *and* relevant to my life. How many people can say *that*? There sure are a lot of horrible, mean things about being a grad student in this department, but at the end of the day, I'm learning cutting edge science in an ultra-modern laboratory. There's people all around me doing cool stuff. Most of them are smarter than me. What more could you possibly ask for in life?
I've been teaching myself all about the product operator formalism for NMR spectroscopy. It's quite cool, but very complicated. But beyond being complicated, they're really difficult to get a good physical intuition for, as they are mostly abstract symbols, rather than moving objects I can picture easily. Of course, on some level, you have to regard these quantum mechanical equations as magical widgets which let you predict things. Certainly, I can competently manipulate the operators and maybe even speak sensibly about which part of the density matrix they're from and what they mean. But as for a deep understanding? I think that's going to have to wait. I need to review some of the "basics" first: lots of linear algebra, some differential equations, and lots of quantum mechanics. At this point, my poor math skills are just holding me back. I just got myself this book by Tannor which *says* it's an introduction to quantum mechanics, but really isn't. It takes a really interesting approach to quantum mechanics. Instead of going through the usual rigmarole of "define the potential, write the Hamiltonian, find and sketch the eigenfunctions," it talks about time-dependent phenomena, which are easily the most interesting bits of quantum mechanics. It talks about femtosecond laser pulses, coherent control, and all sorts of other goodies I know basically nothing about. But I want to post-doc in non-linear spectroscopy, so it's got the double bonus of being super interesting *and* relevant to my life. How many people can say *that*? There sure are a lot of horrible, mean things about being a grad student in this department, but at the end of the day, I'm learning cutting edge science in an ultra-modern laboratory. There's people all around me doing cool stuff. Most of them are smarter than me. What more could you possibly ask for in life?
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Body Heat Loss
Ever heard that "you lose up to three quarters of your body heat through your head, so you'd better put on a hat?" Ever notice, that on your steep alpine approach, that when you take off your hat, you're still bloody hot? I just read an interesting explanation for this "paradox":
http://wildernessmedicinenewsletter.wordpress.com/2007/02/14/heat-loss-through-the-head-and-hypothermia/
This guy took some intrepid volunteers and measured the rate at which they lost heat through various parts of their bodies. They found that there's nothing particularly special about the head; under normal circumstances, you lose about 7% of your body heat through your head. This jives with the "rule of the nines" which says that your head and neck account for about 9% of your total body surface area. The rest of the article is rather unclear, and I leave you to decipher it for yourself; it's hard to tell what people are wearing, how things were measured, etc. Surely, it matters what you're wearing: one can imagine that if you're dressed from neck down in a thick down suit, you're going to be losing more and more body heat through your head, even as the total amount of body heat you lose goes down.
To clarify the situation, I looked around some more. In the British Medical Journal,
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/dec17_2/a2769
Vreeman and Carroll demolish this and many other myths. Apparently, the myth stems from an army study where, as mentioned above, the subjects were wearing survival suits. Well, duh. Indeed, a rigorous study in the Journal of Applied Physiology supports this:
http://jap.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/101/2/669?ijKey=8424233366f33e094555aea4283b303397b32ab4&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha
So, there you are. If you forget your hat, your ears may feel cold, but you won't collapse from hypothermia (necessarily).
In completely unrelated news, I've been training my core strength a bit. According to the US Marine Corps and Army PFT standards, I'm quite a wimp. I don't know how I'd do at running (but I'd probably be terrible). I was regularly doing 7 or 8 minute miles over 5 miles for a while, but then my shins started hurting terribly and I switched to stair climbing instead. Despite the surprisingly mediocre athletics facilities at school here, there's a machine which functions like an escalator, except that you walk up it backwards. It feels very much like hiking but it's stairs, not uneven terrain, so the workout isn't quite as good.
Anyways, I should be able to do 3 pullups, 50 crunches or 65 situps, and 58 pushups (various sources). With pullups, I have no problem. I can easily crank out 10, and I don't think it would be too hard for me to get to 15 or even 20. The crunches and pushups are another story, though. I can do about thirty of each at the moment (after doing them for a few weeks), so clearly, core strength is a bit of a weakness for me. But I'm doing them every day or two, so in a few months, I should be "up to spec." I've noticed that when I climb very steep terrain, I do struggle to keep my feet on, particularly for big, semi-dynamic moves. So it'll be good for my climbing, and good for my overall health, too. My shoulders have been clicking oddly and I've had some elbow tendonitis (on the inside), so I've been doing shoulder presses (raise a weight above your head starting with your arm to the side and your elbow pointed towards the ground) and reverse wrist curls (hold a weight with your arm horizontally and your wrist pointed all the way down, and curling it back up to the neutral position). It seems to be helping.
What sort of core workouts do you do? Keller told me he does some sort of ridiculous circuit which "makes people puke." I'm not really into puking, personally, so I'm not aiming for that at all. But he did tell me it involves all sorts of exotica like clapping pushups. That's just overkill, at least for now. I *would* like to be able to do a front lever and one arm pullup, though. I can do a half-lever (hanging from both arms, body horizontal, with one knee tucked in), in so-so form, for about five seconds if I'm hanging from rings. And I can do a one-arm lockoff with my right arm (left is weaker) for about five seconds, although that is pretty stressful on my shoulder. So I'm making progress, but it's going to be quite a while before I have that kind of strength. But that's part of the fun of training right? It's the dizzying highs of success and improvement, followed by the doldrums of injury, regaining old ground, and plain plateaus. Woo hoo!
http://wildernessmedicinenewsletter.wordpress.com/2007/02/14/heat-loss-through-the-head-and-hypothermia/
This guy took some intrepid volunteers and measured the rate at which they lost heat through various parts of their bodies. They found that there's nothing particularly special about the head; under normal circumstances, you lose about 7% of your body heat through your head. This jives with the "rule of the nines" which says that your head and neck account for about 9% of your total body surface area. The rest of the article is rather unclear, and I leave you to decipher it for yourself; it's hard to tell what people are wearing, how things were measured, etc. Surely, it matters what you're wearing: one can imagine that if you're dressed from neck down in a thick down suit, you're going to be losing more and more body heat through your head, even as the total amount of body heat you lose goes down.
To clarify the situation, I looked around some more. In the British Medical Journal,
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/dec17_2/a2769
Vreeman and Carroll demolish this and many other myths. Apparently, the myth stems from an army study where, as mentioned above, the subjects were wearing survival suits. Well, duh. Indeed, a rigorous study in the Journal of Applied Physiology supports this:
http://jap.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/101/2/669?ijKey=8424233366f33e094555aea4283b303397b32ab4&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha
So, there you are. If you forget your hat, your ears may feel cold, but you won't collapse from hypothermia (necessarily).
In completely unrelated news, I've been training my core strength a bit. According to the US Marine Corps and Army PFT standards, I'm quite a wimp. I don't know how I'd do at running (but I'd probably be terrible). I was regularly doing 7 or 8 minute miles over 5 miles for a while, but then my shins started hurting terribly and I switched to stair climbing instead. Despite the surprisingly mediocre athletics facilities at school here, there's a machine which functions like an escalator, except that you walk up it backwards. It feels very much like hiking but it's stairs, not uneven terrain, so the workout isn't quite as good.
Anyways, I should be able to do 3 pullups, 50 crunches or 65 situps, and 58 pushups (various sources). With pullups, I have no problem. I can easily crank out 10, and I don't think it would be too hard for me to get to 15 or even 20. The crunches and pushups are another story, though. I can do about thirty of each at the moment (after doing them for a few weeks), so clearly, core strength is a bit of a weakness for me. But I'm doing them every day or two, so in a few months, I should be "up to spec." I've noticed that when I climb very steep terrain, I do struggle to keep my feet on, particularly for big, semi-dynamic moves. So it'll be good for my climbing, and good for my overall health, too. My shoulders have been clicking oddly and I've had some elbow tendonitis (on the inside), so I've been doing shoulder presses (raise a weight above your head starting with your arm to the side and your elbow pointed towards the ground) and reverse wrist curls (hold a weight with your arm horizontally and your wrist pointed all the way down, and curling it back up to the neutral position). It seems to be helping.
What sort of core workouts do you do? Keller told me he does some sort of ridiculous circuit which "makes people puke." I'm not really into puking, personally, so I'm not aiming for that at all. But he did tell me it involves all sorts of exotica like clapping pushups. That's just overkill, at least for now. I *would* like to be able to do a front lever and one arm pullup, though. I can do a half-lever (hanging from both arms, body horizontal, with one knee tucked in), in so-so form, for about five seconds if I'm hanging from rings. And I can do a one-arm lockoff with my right arm (left is weaker) for about five seconds, although that is pretty stressful on my shoulder. So I'm making progress, but it's going to be quite a while before I have that kind of strength. But that's part of the fun of training right? It's the dizzying highs of success and improvement, followed by the doldrums of injury, regaining old ground, and plain plateaus. Woo hoo!
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Late Night Groceries
Feeling rested and wakeful after an evening nap, I went to the Porter Shaws around 11 pm to stock up on some edibles. It's incredibly busy there during weekend afternoons, so this is a good strategy. I've become an aggressive and reasonably skilled Boston driver, but it still amps up my blood pressure when I'm sitting there patiently, ticker on, and someone zips in. If you confront them afterwards, people always play dumb. I think I'm not menacing enough (read: scary and beefy enough) to warrant an actual apology. In any case, I remarked to the cashier that all the customers I had seen were either mumbling into cell phones, strangely disheveled men drinking out of suspicious looking tall cans with incredibly inappropriate puffy winter jackets, or overly amorous couples. "Yes," he replied. "There aren't too many normal people out at this hour." Ouch. But I found some lime-flavored tortilla chips finally. And I'm not too sad...like Dumbledore, I'm happy to see there's still a little love left in this world...
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Ah, Americans...
Three things amused me about Americans today:
1) This story about US Senators and their musical-chairs/claw my way method of choosing offices:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1887870,00.html
2) The fact that a judge in Pennsylvania got into trouble when he sent a 14 year old kid to jail for year because he stole a bag of chips. The fact that he was taking kickbacks from the owner of the jail probably did not help his case.
3) This comment about the tremendous capital costs of nuclear reactors: "France has 104 kinds of cheese, but only one kind of nuclear reactor. America has only one kind of cheese, but 104 kinds of nuclear reactor." It's too bad, because if nuclear power plants didn't cost an arm and a leg to build, they'd be a pretty good power source. Even people who have them in their backyards are coming around. Sadly, though, huge cost overruns, confusion about where the waste will go, labor and expertise shortages, and the huge lead time to actually building a plant mean that they're probably not going to be a solution to our energy problems. Of wind, "clean" coal (whatever that is), solar, energy conservation, and praying for mysterious aliens to come and solve our problems (like they did for the Mayans and Egyptians, or so I'm told), I think you can guess which one is the cheapest.
You know, I was reading something about economic forecasts recently. I can't remember *which* dour-sounding finance minister prognosticated that, sadly, economic growth just wasn't looking too sharp this year, but predictably, bonehead commenters on the CBC.ca forums found a way to make an insightful comment or two. One idiot in particular commented that if we didn't have such a materialistic society, that if we disabused ourselves of the notion that economic growth must be positive, and if we returned to "humane values," whatever they are, we'd be better off. Obviously, I think he's out to lunch. First of all, populations are growing. Economics may have been my worst grade in undergrad, but it seems to me that if we don't have positive economic growth, then that means we have to feed more people with less. Well, whether you believe that or not, you can still argue about materialism--my second point. What's the proposed solution here? That we put away all of our cars, TVs, computers, supermarkets, etc., and go live in the woods? I hate to break this to you, but the woods would get crowded pretty quickly, and you might not like living there. A few hundred years ago, people didn't have all these things, there were a lot less of them in general, died of horrible diseases much earlier, and in my opinion, were a lot worse off. Turning back the clock is not the answer! Now, maybe we can cut back a little on how many cars we have, increase the amount of public transportation we use, and so forth. I'm all right with that. But the idea that materialism is this immoral gluttonous sin is very puritanical, I think.
Finally, the call to "humane values" sounds a lot like saying "if only Johnny were nicer to Bobby, we'd all be better off." It's nonsense. If I pretended I'm a game theorist (I'm definitely not), then I'd say that if everyone cooperated all the time, then the incentive for a lone individual to cheat would go way up--things would be moving away from equilibrium. I read a fascinating story in Scientific American recently about new thinking about altruists and cheaters. As I mentioned, if a group has to find a way to keep the number of cheaters limited, or the defectors will overwhelm the resources of the group. So how do the altruists keep the selfish cheaters out? It turns out that, actually, cheaters have quite an incentive to punish other cheaters (no matter how hypocritical that sounds). If you're the only cheater in a group, then it's in your best interest to make sure no one else becomes a cheater. As a corollary, altruists actually have an interest in allowing a small number of hypocritical cheaters to exist. Of course, no model is perfect, and this one is no exception. What, for example, happens when the small group of cheaters gets out of control? A mob protection racket can soon escalate into an extortion racket. One answer may be to look at the bigger picture: it's not just individuals competing, but also groups competing; more altruistic groups may fare better than ones rife with cheaters. These ideas don't seem to be mainstream yet, but I find them interesting nonetheless.
http://econ.ucalgary.ca/node/351
On a more climbing-related note, I'm doing slightly less worse in the bouldering gym now. (That was horrible English, but having never taken an English class in university, I have a legitimate excuse.) I'm a little of afraid of going back to Rumney because I'd flail all over, but fortunately, it's kind of cold and definitely very wet at the moment, so I have a month or two to ease back into things.
1) This story about US Senators and their musical-chairs/claw my way method of choosing offices:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1887870,00.html
2) The fact that a judge in Pennsylvania got into trouble when he sent a 14 year old kid to jail for year because he stole a bag of chips. The fact that he was taking kickbacks from the owner of the jail probably did not help his case.
3) This comment about the tremendous capital costs of nuclear reactors: "France has 104 kinds of cheese, but only one kind of nuclear reactor. America has only one kind of cheese, but 104 kinds of nuclear reactor." It's too bad, because if nuclear power plants didn't cost an arm and a leg to build, they'd be a pretty good power source. Even people who have them in their backyards are coming around. Sadly, though, huge cost overruns, confusion about where the waste will go, labor and expertise shortages, and the huge lead time to actually building a plant mean that they're probably not going to be a solution to our energy problems. Of wind, "clean" coal (whatever that is), solar, energy conservation, and praying for mysterious aliens to come and solve our problems (like they did for the Mayans and Egyptians, or so I'm told), I think you can guess which one is the cheapest.
You know, I was reading something about economic forecasts recently. I can't remember *which* dour-sounding finance minister prognosticated that, sadly, economic growth just wasn't looking too sharp this year, but predictably, bonehead commenters on the CBC.ca forums found a way to make an insightful comment or two. One idiot in particular commented that if we didn't have such a materialistic society, that if we disabused ourselves of the notion that economic growth must be positive, and if we returned to "humane values," whatever they are, we'd be better off. Obviously, I think he's out to lunch. First of all, populations are growing. Economics may have been my worst grade in undergrad, but it seems to me that if we don't have positive economic growth, then that means we have to feed more people with less. Well, whether you believe that or not, you can still argue about materialism--my second point. What's the proposed solution here? That we put away all of our cars, TVs, computers, supermarkets, etc., and go live in the woods? I hate to break this to you, but the woods would get crowded pretty quickly, and you might not like living there. A few hundred years ago, people didn't have all these things, there were a lot less of them in general, died of horrible diseases much earlier, and in my opinion, were a lot worse off. Turning back the clock is not the answer! Now, maybe we can cut back a little on how many cars we have, increase the amount of public transportation we use, and so forth. I'm all right with that. But the idea that materialism is this immoral gluttonous sin is very puritanical, I think.
Finally, the call to "humane values" sounds a lot like saying "if only Johnny were nicer to Bobby, we'd all be better off." It's nonsense. If I pretended I'm a game theorist (I'm definitely not), then I'd say that if everyone cooperated all the time, then the incentive for a lone individual to cheat would go way up--things would be moving away from equilibrium. I read a fascinating story in Scientific American recently about new thinking about altruists and cheaters. As I mentioned, if a group has to find a way to keep the number of cheaters limited, or the defectors will overwhelm the resources of the group. So how do the altruists keep the selfish cheaters out? It turns out that, actually, cheaters have quite an incentive to punish other cheaters (no matter how hypocritical that sounds). If you're the only cheater in a group, then it's in your best interest to make sure no one else becomes a cheater. As a corollary, altruists actually have an interest in allowing a small number of hypocritical cheaters to exist. Of course, no model is perfect, and this one is no exception. What, for example, happens when the small group of cheaters gets out of control? A mob protection racket can soon escalate into an extortion racket. One answer may be to look at the bigger picture: it's not just individuals competing, but also groups competing; more altruistic groups may fare better than ones rife with cheaters. These ideas don't seem to be mainstream yet, but I find them interesting nonetheless.
http://econ.ucalgary.ca/node/351
On a more climbing-related note, I'm doing slightly less worse in the bouldering gym now. (That was horrible English, but having never taken an English class in university, I have a legitimate excuse.) I'm a little of afraid of going back to Rumney because I'd flail all over, but fortunately, it's kind of cold and definitely very wet at the moment, so I have a month or two to ease back into things.
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