Alpine Climbing

My pictures from the Bugaboos are now online in the picture gallery.

There isn’t a full write up yet but the short story is…

Simeon and I drove to Roger’s pass and had bad weather for an attempt on Mount Sir Donald. Went and had a look at getting into the north end of the Selkirks but were defeated by a very closed logging road.

Carried on driving, driving, driving to Golden for lunch and then into the Bugaboos where we climbed; the Kain route on Bugaboo Spire and the West ridge of Pigeon Spire to warm up. Then after a weather enforced rest day, during which we hiked out to the car for beer, we managed the NE Buttress on Bugaboo and the Kraus-McCarthy route on Snowpatch. We also climbed a route on the Crescent Towers on out rest day.

The weather looked like it was going to break so we spent the last couple of days in Penticton doing a little bit of cragging on the Skaha Bluffs. It was very hot but we managed to stick to the shade and get a few nice routes done before heading back home.

If you subscribed to my Stories blog the content has been merged into my Alpine Climbing blog. It still lives in a separate “Stories” category. I’ve also added a new page of photography gear I’d recommend.

Hopefully that’s pretty much it in terms of site upgrades and I can get back to writing new content, like the review of the MSR Reactor I promised to write.

New look for the web site, largely so I could drive the whole thing off WordPress and not have to think about it too much. Hopefully this will mean more content from now on…

So I put together a web search engine based on Google’s custom search that should give better results for climbing related searches. For example if you search for “Omega” the first results returned will be fore the Omega Pacific climbing gear company not Omega watches.

http://www.ademiller.com/search

Let me know if you think it’s working. I’m still testing it out.

So it’s a wet Friday night and I finally got around to some site updating. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while and I finally got around to some of it. I now have pages for gear and books I’ve been using for a long while and really like. These are short lists because I’m not trying to sell stuff for the sake of selling stuff.

Recommended alpine climbing gear
Recommended reading

Enjoy. Hopefully I’ll have some new pictures up soon. It’s going to be 50F at Index on Sunday so cragging might be back on the agenda.

So I’m writing this from my private island recently purchased off the profits made from adding Google ads to my web site. No sooner had a put them up the money started just rolling in and by lunchtime I could afford half of Bolivia but I held off for a small island just off Maui.

OK, so not quite. Hopefully the ads aren’t so annoying that you’ll stop reading and they might just pay for my hosting costs. Maybe not but it did kill a few hours I would only have spent working for the man.

On a different, even more humorous note… For those of you interested in decipering some of those unique English phrases, as used in the UK, you might want to check out my new BritSpeak series, a guide to understatement, on my other blog.

The World Map now works in the latest version of FireFox (2.0.0.6). It’s been bugging me for a while and presumably the 22% of people who read my site with FireFox have noticed too.

This also served to remind me that cross browser scripting is about as much fun as a trip to the dentist.

More updates to the Peru gallery. I’ve added pictures of our climb of Pisco Oeste and a somewhat less successful visit to the Ishinca area. That’s pretty much all the pictures online now.

Over the winter I might try and get some of my slides from trips to Bolivia and Ecuador back in the 90s scanned. One of the interesting things about this trip was seeing how much South America has changed in the last decade.

I’ve uploaded the first of my pictures from Peru and created a gallery for South America. This is the first installment, mainly Huaraz and some of the hiking trips we did around the city. I’ll be adding the rest within the week.

I added a few more pictures to the Leavenworth gallery after another trip there with Al and Jason. What with that and a second improptu ascent of Heart of Gold / Prime Rib with Robert when the weather on Mount Stuart refused to cooperate I’m spending a lot of time on Leavenworth granite these days.

I’ve also updated the Favorites gallery with a bunch of pictures I picked out to have printed. This brings the total to over five hundred pictures in the climbing gallery.