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.

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?

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...

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...

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.

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?

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!