I also put up some photos of an (almost) one day ascent of the Torment-Forbidden traverse with Jason earlier in the summer. Why “almost” well while we did get off the route we didn’t quite make it down to the car. Be especially suspicious of partners with large packs, within my lurk bivvi gear and along with it a strange enthusiasm to spend the night out.

The knife on my harness gets used for all sorts of things from cutting ropes to slicing cheese. The Piranha’s blade is actually very short, fine for cutting rap anchors but not much use for anything else. While you can open it one handed the knife’s very small size make this hard to do, especially with gloves on. I certainly wouldn’t want to be building anchors with this while retreating off a winter route.

My real problem with the Piranha is that you have to take it off the biner in order to use it. The knife is designed to be stored on a biner and this keeps the blade locked closed. This means you can end up dropping it, especially if you’re wearing thick gloves. My old knife could be used while still safely clipped to a sling so there’s no chance a dropping it while setting anchors.

If all you do is cragging and want a knife on your rack then the Piranha might fit the bill but for more serious use on large alpine routes and multi day trips I’m sticking with my existing setup. As for the bottle opener, I’ve never met a bottle I couldn’t open somehow.

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 our 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.

Read the full story on KOMO News, Seattle.

Photos will be up later this week…

The minute you do instantly you’re transformed to look just like Conan the Barbarian… but with a weight vest. OK, so now we’re all geared up in our homo-erotic splenditude, what next?

No question, the obvious answer is to continue the messed up destructive relationship with the pullup bar. And why not?!

It could be a lot worst. Ron couldn’t understand my “hell no!” response to some resistance sprints. That’s because them that haven’t done sprints don’t understand that it’s the trainer’s equivalent of a sucker punch. How hard can it be? As Ron discovered, plenty hard.

Technorati Tags: training,CrossFit,pullups

http://twitter.com/AdeMiller

Lots of cool people in the blogosphere use Twitter. Maybe if I use Twitter I’ll become cooler by association. Yeah right… There’s no hope for me until I get my teeth whitened.

I’m really just trying to figure out what the whole lightweight blogging thing is all about. It sort of seems interesting but I can’t quite figure it out… yet.

Now you could take a leisurely hike up Tiger. The new trail is about 2000′ of ascent over 3.25 miles, slightly longer than the old trail. It would probably take around an hour if you maintained a reasonable pace. But where would the fun in that be?

How about doing it as fast as possible? Make it a run not a hike. Leave the heavy pack, the ten essentials and pretty much everyone else behind and get after it. You can throw Naismith’s rule out the window and have some real fun.

Today’s time, from the trail entrance to the rock on the summit, 42:17. You can do better, I’m old and fat. Incidentally that rock is a great spot for drooling and coughing while you wait for your vision to come back. Then you can appreciate the view, which is actually quite impressive.

As the days get longer bigger hikes further up the I-90 corridor become possible. In a few weeks Mount Si will be doable before dark, by mid-summer the Kendall Catwalk and Mount Hyak are good too. Work your way back down the pass as the evenings grow shorter and round the year off with a final trip to Tiger before the dark sets in.

This isn’t a new idea, we’ve been doing it for years. Hike Club aka Hike Til you Puke (HiTUP) is back for another season. Mike, Rob and Martin were also in attendance this week and I’m sure other clubbers will show up soon. Naismith be damned!

Technorati Tags: Puget Sound Hikes,Running,Training,Seattle Hikes

An afternoon snack of herring in canola oil. Good! Way better than coffee and donuts.

CrossFit. Also Good! More fun than running and a better way to burn off the donut I didn’t eat. Fight Gone Bad even better.

Fight Gone Bad and hour after that afternoon snack? Errm… Not quite so good. The herring nearly came back for a rematch after the end of round three. Thankfully I managed to keep it together by hugging one of the jumping boxes.

Still it was better than my last experiment in diet and working out.

“Calibrate your display–just like professionals. Spyder2express calibrates monitors in three easy steps–simply plug it in, specify your display type, and it does the rest, automatically calibrating your monitor or laptop. Check the before-and-after. You’ll see the improvement!”

I was a tad skeptical.

A couple of friends said good things about it and sure enough I thought the before and after comparison showed a significant improvement. If you’re serious enough about your photos to own digital photo editing software like PhotoShop or LightRoom then this is probably worth your money.

Pros:

• It really does improve your monitor picture. The software allows you to see before and after pictures.
• Its very simple to use and only takes about ten minutes per PC/monitor.
• Not that expensive. Fifty plus bucks isn’t much when you consider the cost of your camera and PC combined.
• This is a home user focused product so it doesn’t ask you a lot of complex questions that only a pro could answer. If you’re a professional then it probably doesn’t have all the features you’d want.

Cons:

• It doesn’t hang in front of the monitor very well. I sort of had to gently hold it in place for the few minutes the calibration software took to run. Turns out you can lean a book against it which saves actually holding it there.
• This only calibrates your monitor not your printer. Systems for printer calibration seem to be a lot more expensive. probably better to take a trial and error approach there with some test printing.
• No support for dual monitors.
• Reading the feedback on Amazon suggests their phone support may not be so great.