The mega-classic Ames Ice Hose [II WI5] is in and eating screws the whole way. More photos and video up soon!
Archive Page 2
07
Jan
10
Ames Ice Hose = Pure Pleasure
12/31/09 – The ice and mixed lines in East Vail are in and turns out: they’re still awesome. The Fang isn’t quite in, but here a local hardman sends on the second pitch of the classic Will Gadd testpiece Amphibian [M9/10?].
Just watching the boys on that one was pretty awesome. Here’s Stanley working out the first roof on that second pitch. Oh the steepness!
Moving on to a quick conditions report: Rigid Designator is in, and is hacked out enough to be pretty easy climbing despite actually being rather steep in places. The bottom is funky but easy, and above the protection is finicky and probably the crux of the route. As you can see in a few pictures, The Fang [WI5] is still quite a way from touching down but looks like it might happen. Octopussy [M8] is a short pillar and doesn’t look reachable. Everything in the Belfry is in. Spiral Staircase is WI3. Secret Probation, Frigid Inseminator and all the other usual suspects are in and climbing very reasonably. Pumphouse looks good. Looking across to Booth Creek, the ice looks big and pretty. Even the Secret Circle area looks pretty good, assuming I’m clear on where that is. Further towards Denver the ice in Officer’s Gulch is looking fat too.
My buddy Eric and I stuck to more moderate terrain with the Designator [WI4+], Cupcake Corner[M5 WI4], Esmeralda [M7 WI4] (which felt harder than the last time I did it), Frigid Inseminator [M5 WI5] and Secret Probation [M7 WI4+], all of which were in great shape, although the Inseminator and the Designator had some tricky pro.
The one really curious thing about the outing was the signage on the approach, though! Apparently they must have had some access issues with the Nordic Center because as you hiked out along the ski trails the signs got progressively more serious to the point where it seemed a little ridiculous. I don’t know what happened to prompt it, but some Nordic skiers must have been fired up about boot prints across the ski track because they’re serious! Check it out.
Serious business. Stay on the snowshoe trail or else.
After two weeks’ delay in my arrival in Ouray owing to socializing, a girl and pneumonia* (see Advice Column – Issue #1 below) I’ve finally gotten around to taking the tools down from the rafters and hanging ‘em on some rocks and icicles instead, and it turns out that climbing ice and mixed is more fun than doing pull-ups and running. Things are looking to be in great shape for this time of year. There’s a ton of ice all over the place making for a lot of fine tool-swinging and a few cool thinner pillars and smears. 
The only downside at the moment is that some icicles at the top of mixed routes are pretty delicate (Geoff and I knocked a few man-sized chunks off Jesus Built my Fingercrack) and some bolts on popular routes are still covered. I think we got all of them clear on Seamstress which is in great M8 shape with some friendly ice at the top, but as of yesterday there are still two bolts buried on Tic-Tac and the ice covering the holds definitely puts it in earnest M7 shape. Either way, things are in and ice season in Ouray is here! Get to those pull-ups and sharpen those picks!
On that note, I’m going to be looking to get rid of a pair of Black Diamond Fusion tools if anyone’s interested. They’re in great shape and have a pretty fresh pair of Fusion picks on them. I’d love to get $250 for them, so shoot me an email if you’re interested.
*Chris’s Advice Column, Issue #1 of 1 – Don’t try to follow your uber-athlete roommates when they want to go running for hours upon hours in Oregon November rain. Don’t do it. Even if they say it’s going to be casual, don’t believe it. It will take hours. It will rain and snow. You will be covered in mud and your puny un-VO2-max-tested legs will cramp and get tired, and then they’ll make you have beers and then they and your other friends who don’t give a shit about your tired legs will keep you up all night. If you meet a girl, forget about it. You’re done. You’ll get a cold and you’ll try to act like you didn’t. You’ll go running anyway because you’ve been drinking enough beers that you need to validate yourself by at least mimicking the professional motivation these masochistic friends of yours have, and it might work out, 
oh it might work out for a while, but eventually you’ll slip up. Eventually you’ll go out when you’re already tired, you’ll go out and you’ll get sandbagged by some casual route recommendation and you won’t be wearing enough clothes when it gets cold and you’ll still have an hour to go before you get home and you know what? That 34 degree rain will get into your lungs and say hello and you’ll get pneumonia. That’s right: pneumonia. It’s not just for the old and infirm or inhabitants of the eighteenth century anymore buddy. It’s for you. Yeah. You. You love green phlegm. You love hacking. You hate fun. Yeah you. I bet you like melodrama too. Whiner.
03
Dec
09
Half Dome; Relevant to Nothing
While convalescing from a cold and pouring over some hard drives, I found this photo from a bunch of years back of my buddy Joey up on the Regular NW Face of Half Dome [VI 5.10 C1] and remembered how much I liked it – the photo and the climb. It was one of our great jackassed ideas: We had three days off in April and we drove halfway down after work the first day, finished the drive and hiked to the base the next day, climbed the wall and descended through snow in tennies to the base the next, drove home the next and were back at work the day after. Anyone want to climb Half Dome? Anyone? Yeah, you’re right. It’s probably a bit cold right now. Maybe next year.
As it turns out, ski season is, in fact, here in Oregon. 
I had my suspicions based on last week’s excursions, and in our seemingly endless quest to become better snow scientists, myself, Pete and Gabe made time on yesterday’s tour to make some turns and both the turns and the tests confirm: Yup – It’s time for skiing. 1.5m+ snowpacks, 40-50cms of fluffy new powder on N and E aspects, little by way of reactive slab activity* and plenty of creamy untracked pow, as I believe they call it in the ‘Rado – sounds like ski season to me. Our photographic haul was pretty weak owing to the fact that the only cameras we had with us were iPhones, but even a cell phone camera can tell you that those are powder turns. ¡Viva Noviembre!
*We did find a large reactive slab on steep northerly aspects. If this sort of thing means anything to you, in Ball Butte Bowl on a northeast-facing 40° slope, we found a hard slab 81cms deep which reacted to compression tests at CTH25 @ 81cm (from the ground) SP, ECTP24 @ 84cm. We did not ski this aspect.
more about “MVI_3020 on Flickr – Photo Sharing!“, posted with vodpod
As Pete and I are both keen to take our AIARE Level III’s this year and it’s been a little too cold for rock climbing (with the exception of a quick run up Free Lunch [II 5.10R]) we’ve been out digging pits, and to our surprise last Thursday there were some turns to be had as well! And it’s still snowing!
A few days ago, before I woke up and decided it was time to get back to Oregon to get into some cold rain and snow, my buddy Geoff Unger and I went out to climb a pretty worthwhile line called Zenyatta Entrada, on the Tower of Babel in Arches National Park. The line is a grade IV, and goes through six or seven pitches at 5.4 C3. It’s certainly a handsome tower. 
Despite its good looks, that we did this climb was a bit of an oddity for both of us. I used to be an aid climber once, but I’m not really anymore. Geoff used to go aid climbing sometimes too, but he doesn’t really do it anymore either. We talked about that fact, and we both acknowledged that at some point, which was years ago for both of us, we just decided that aid climbing wasn’t really fun anymore and we both gave it up. You can only get scared so many times hanging your ass out over a few thousand feet of air and RURPs before it stops really seeming like a good idea. Unless you’re of a certain deranged mindset, that is, in which case you embrace it wholeheartedly and go out and do stuff like this, which is awesome, but not my idea of a good time.
So how come we went aid climbing last week? I don’t know – same reason you always go aid climbing, I guess: You go because you want to get up something pretty and aiding is what needs to happen to get it done. At least that’s my reason, I think. You see, what I wanted to climb was the Titan, the biggest, meanest-looking tower in the infamous Fisher Towers, but I wanted to do it by the Finger of Fate route, which is the easiest way up and by all reports isn’t really that bad (for the Fishers), which would thus afford me all the pleasures of aid climbing (i.e. wild summit) but without too much of the displeasures (i.e. being shit-scared). But Geoff had already done that. As an alternative, he suggested we climb the Sundevil Chimneys, which is still fairly reasonable, supposedly, but which is a little more of a major undertaking going at [VI 5.9+ C3R]. I somehow agreed to this, but after a rest day following the Gooney Bird (see below), for some reason we just didn’t want to pull the trigger. I think it probably had everything to do with not wanting to get up early and not wanting to go hiking.
I know it sounds lazy, but secretly (or not so secretly, really) every mountain guide I know actually doesn’t like getting up early, and as a rule, we really seem to hate hiking. A lot of the time we just consent to do it because it’s necessary. That is to say, you gotta get up early and walk sometimes if you want to climb stuff, and that’s okay. The climbs are worth it. So it goes. But if you can put the climb next to the road, a twenty minute drive from the house, from the espresso pot and warm bed, and then even put it a five minute walk from the truck, and you can make it a day route, and warm enough to do in a t-shirt, I’m betting most guides would be pretty into it. Despite the obvious contradictions inherent in our choice of vocation, we’re really reasonable people. We’re just like you, you know. We like being comfortable, we’re just willing to stretch it sometimes. But, the point is, that we saw a way out of having to drive to the Fishers and do a two-day effort on the Sundevil by just switching our objective to Zenyatta and getting scared without nearly so much effort. So we went. We woke up late, which in this case was six in the morning, we made eggs, we drank coffee, and we drove twenty minutes. We carried our packs for five, and we started climbing. I drew the first two pitches. I’d never aided much on sandstone and not at all on rock this soft.
It’s worth taking a moment here for an aside. The route is called Zenyatta Entrada, which is a play on The Police’s 1980 album, Zenyatta Mondatta. I don’t actually know what that means (Wikipedia didn’t say), but it must have been popular with aid climbers since there’s also a line on El Cap of the same name. In this case, the Entrada part refers to the rock. In the Utah desert there are five major rock types: Cutler, Entrada, Moenkopi, Navajo and Wingate. Wingate is generally regarded as the best and comprises the Castle Valley towers and Indian Creek’s famed splitters. The Fishers are Cutler, which I’m told is actually pretty good once you get through all the mud that’s usually covering it. It tends to yield some fairly ridiculous climbs, however. The Tower of Babel is Entrada. In his new select guidebook to the area, Classic Desert Climbs, Fred Knapp, longtime desert afficionado, offers a few brief thoughts on each rock type. He describes the Entrada as such:
E is for earache and Entrada. All of Arches National Park is Entrada. Entrada is personally my least favorite. By friend Bret, however , seems to think that it’s OK. I’m beginning to think it is an acquired taste and I have developed a theory of how one acquires this taste: After climbing vast numbers of sandy, sugary Entrada routes, enough sand makes it into the brain and begins to cut away at all the important fibers (as it does to the core of a climbing rope). Eventually the climber loses all ability to identify quality rock. To prevent this happening to me I shower frequently and use Q-tips after every climb. 
Think of Entrada as being a step down in quality from moist brown sugar. Occasionally a nice varnish makes for good rock, but more often than not the real advantage is being able to drill bolt holes with a toothbrush and a plastic hammer.
I’m going to go ahead and say that we must have found one of those routes blessed with a decent varnish, but it was soft in spots, and I wouldn’t have wanted to do much free climbing on it. Anyway, I led the first pitch and the second, short-fixing P2 to save time. Geoff got to lead P3 and P4, which were more thin C2+ cracks with a few odd moves and a little pendulum.
Aiding cleanly on old nailing routes always seems to offer up a plethora of odd tricks, and of course this route was no exception. On granite, where I’ve done most of my aid climbing, that usually involves hand placing thin crack pro, such as birdbeaks or sawed-off angles in order to avoid taking the hammer out. A lot of times it also involves trusting strings of fixed gear, often manky old copperheads and such, or doing a lot of hooking and cam hooking. In the desert, however, it seems to involve putting gear into huge beaten-out pods where repeated ascents using big angles and bongs and stacks of pins have left bizzare scars in the rock. On the thin cracks, since cam hooks would only break the rock, one instead uses small Loweballs. Having never used those before, that part was pretty interesting. One recurring theme was the large tricam precariously placed in a scar. That looked like this. 
Anyway, some fiddly bits aside, it turned out to be a fun climb. I got to lead the crux, an interesting C3 corner/roof which involved some creative hooking, a lot of small offset aliens, a number of brassies and offset nuts, a few loweballs, some really jengis tricams in some pods, a bit of me winging, and finally some more bathooking and drilled angles.
Overall, a good time was had by all, and we topped out in the light, which was somewhat to our surprise since we had refused to get up early. We only turned our headlamps on for the last rappel, we did not get our ropes stuck (aid climbs are generally steep and blank, which is at least good in terms of pulling your ropes) and we made it back to the truck for a beer and to town in time for dinner. A most reasonable outing after all, which made both of us think that in terms of type 2 fun, maybe aid climbing isn’t all that bad after all. And, since it’s south facing, maybe we should have a run at the Sundevil later in the month as I head out to Ouray. Yeah. So I guess I’ll be doing a little aid climbing again. I have the feeling The Titan might retire me for a while again though. We’ll just have to see. I’ll be sure to bring the tricams.
A more complete set of photos is up on the Zenfolio site.
In the same trip and with various partners I also had the pleasure of breaking myself in on desert towers with the Tea Party [II 5.10+ Kinda Necky] on the Gooney Bird (looks cool, right?), Jah Man [II 5.10] on Sister Superior, Entry Fee [5.8R] on Lizard Rock, the Kor-Ingalls [III 5.9+] on Castleton Tower, and the Corkscrew Summit [II 5.10+] on Ancient Arts in the Fisher towers, all of which were better than the last desert tower I climbed this summer here in Oregon, the West Chimney of Shiprock, a not-so-delightful 5.7X.
I can’t help myself but throw this up here. Indian Creek is amazing. As I recently lost my camera, my photographic haul of my desert adventures is depressingly weak, but here’s one at least, and in a way it sums it all up. No, it’s not my favourite route I did in the Creek. No, it’s not the hardest or the best, but it is S-P-L-I-T-T-E-R. Man is it splitter. And it’s only 5.10. Luxury Liner, or as it’s more commonly known, Supercrack of the Desert. Man. That’s good. I think my favorite leads from the trip have to be Fingers in a Lightsocket [5.11+], Layaway Plan [5.11+] and Puma [5.12-], but I don’t have any pictures of those. Only memories and a few gobies…
30
Oct
09
Loving Life in Moab
If anyone’s ever told you that Moab was a fine place, that desert towers were awesome, that Indian Creek might the prettiest place in the world to climb in the fall, that cottonwoods glow yellow in the sun and that splitter cracks do abound in Southern Utah, they weren’t lying. All these things are true. And if nobody’s ever told you these things, I’m telling you them now. Moab is a fine place, climbing desert towers is awesome, Indian Creek is unreal, and splitters do abound. All true.
After spending a month in Red Rocks around my AMGA Rock Guide Exam, I’ve had some time to beat up some gear and find out what works and what doesn’t. Here’s my two cents on a few pieces I brought along and still like.
CiloGear 30L WorkSack $125, www.cilogear.com - 
Okay, so you’re a climber, right? That probably means you have a lot of gear. Actually, it definitely means you’ve got a lot of gear. You’ve got a quiver of everything, right? You haven’t got a pepper grinder or a clean towel, but you’ve got five pairs of boots (is it warm? cold? wet? hard? icy?), five pairs of rock shoes (is it thin? edgy? steep? crack? long? alpine? will I be wearing socks?), a selection of tools, crampons, skis, jackets, pants, gloves and accessories for just about everything we do in the mountains, but I find one of the things I have the most of is packs, and I’ll bet it’s about the same for a lot climbers out there. We have packs that range from tiny to huge, from the fanny pack to the haulbag, and from the fast and light to the decidedly heavy. Okay, but you’re a rock climber too sometimes, right? Right. And that means most of the time you couldn’t really care less what kind of pack you throw your kit in to get you to the crag, assuming of course that its big enough for your rack, the rope, some shoes, food and water, the six pack and maybe (depending if you’re a sport or a trad climber), a place to clip your flip-flops or your helmet on the outside. We don’t really care what pack does the job most of the time as we’re just carrying our kit for the duration of the hike in, which is usually sub hour-long, then ditching our packs at the base of the crag and going rock climbing. No problem. All we’re doing with the pack is walking. But what happens when that’s not the case? What happens when our pack needs start to more accurately reflect our needs when we’re out alpine climbing? What if we’re going to walk to the route, but it might take a while, and it might involve some scrambling or some bushwhacking, and what if we’re not only not going to have the luxury of carrying that six pack or changing into flips, but we’re actually going to have to climb with our packs, and climb hard at that? Whether you’re on an exam or not, if you’re heading out for a long one in the canyons, chances are that you’re probably going to be looking at exactly this situation. Epinephrine? Yep. Black Orpheus? Yep. Hot Flash? Yep. On at least half the classics around Red Rocks and everywhere else where the routes are long, you’re probably not going to be coming back to your pack at the end of the day, you’re going to be carrying it up and over with you, and so you, or at least I, want it to be a few things. I want it to be light. I’m not sendy enough to want the ultra-heavyweight champion of backpacks hanging off me when I’m trying to bear down on some delicate crux or some desperado overhang. I want it to be streamlined and simple. Again, I don’t give a hoot about a water bottle holder or a crampon pocket or a cushy hipbelt when they’re stuck on a flake and I’m trying not to tear them off as I haul my kit through a chimney or trying to find my headlamp as I top out at dusk. Lastly, and I know this one might sound obvious, but yet it seems to elude a lot of pack manufacturers, I want it to be just big enough to get all of my stuff inside so that the scrub oak isn’t trying to tear holes in my jacket (and the Euros aren’t laughing at my junkshow) on the way in, but be small and compressible enough to be reasonable on my back when I’m climbing. Sounds simple right? Try finding it. Sure, your IceSac might be your kindred spirit in the alpine, but do you really feel strong enough to want 50 liters of Cordura on your back while you’re fiddling in some tricky wire on pitch 12? Sure, your Bullet pack might be the shiz when your tennies and your extra liter of water are sitting at the base of the route or when your hike in didn’t involve having your gear being pulled to pieces by defensive plant life, but really, how comfy is that two hour hike in with your harness on and that rope tied around your shoulder? Not that great in either case, right? Okay – so neither a 50 nor 16L pack seems to be the answer, one too big and heavy, the other just not quite big enough. Enter the CiloGear 30L Worksack. (Here’s how pumped I am about it.) Before I proceed, I’ll admit right now that my opinion is biased. I’ve been enjoying an affair with my 40B Worksack for over a year now, I live and work in Oregon where the packs are produced, I like the fact that they’re handmade in Portland, my geographical proximity gives me access to pestering the boys at CiloGear whenever I feel the need, and we’re friends. BUT, I will also say that our relationship started with my trying out the packs, and if I didn’t like them, I’d say so. Okay. So with that disclaimer out of the way, here’s what I like about the pack: It solves my long rock climb problem. All of those things I just said I was looking for in a climbing pack, it does. If you’re unfamiliar with Cilo’s designs in general, they’re all built specifically with the climber in mind, and that’s all the company does – build climbing packs. When I first headed over to Cilo HQ to meet Graham Williams, the owner and brain behind the operations, and to pick up a couple packs, I was advised to have a bit of time on my hands in case we got to talking, and we did in fact do that. About an hour and a half later, I left with a greater understanding of materials, fit, function, the “radical wedge design,” anatomy, pack construction, pack theory, packing theory, military engineering, fabric development, sourcing, supplying, cutting, sewing, marketing and just about everything else you could possibly connect with the production of a climbing pack. I think it would probably be fair to describe Graham in complimentary terms as a mad scientist of backpacks. Climbing packs, it seems, are what he’s thinking about, almost nonstop and to such an extent that I take a great comfort in knowing that the guy who made my pack put some (understatement) thought into it. Anyway, the idea with all of CiloGear’s packs is that they’re supposed to be light, strong, and purpose built. Through an ingenious (if admittedly sometimes a little complicated) system of floating straps and attachment points, all of Cilo’s packs are built to accommodate and comfortably carry big loads when they’re full, and to compress down to make a sleek little pack for the climb when high volume isn’t desirable. Thus, I’ve found that in my 30L, I’m able to get 2 or 3 liters of water, a stuffsack of food for the day, a 60m x 9.2mm rope, a harness with biners and belay device etc., a pair of climbing shoes, a small first aid kit, a climbing knife, a headlamp, a jacket, and thanks to the huge expansion sleeve (see “radical wedge design”) on top – my helmet. All inside the pack. With the addition of the internal “ninja pocket” to hold the small things, I’ve dispensed with the lid. I’ve also removed the hip belt and found the pack carries just fine without it. And, when I’m guiding, I’m also able to fit the rack and the rope in there, only occasionally having to put my helmet on the outside, depending on how much other junk I’m carrying. Most of the time though, everything I want to go climb a long route is in there, and my back and my ego enjoy this fact considerably. I have the pack rigged with two compression straps on each side, and when I’m kitted out to climb, I strap the pack down at the bottom and down at the top and it carries beautifully. Hauls alright through chimneys too (it’s got two haul points). Mine has a few holes in it by now, but I’ve been using last year’s V3, which was made out of 210d SilNylon Cordura and which has been replaced by the V4, constructed throughout the body with 210d Dyneema Ripstop and a new sleeve material, which should solve any complaints that may have arisen with the older model. Stripped down to just the pack with its removable foam bivy pad as suspension and rigged with only two compression straps, my bag weighs in at only 22oz or 1.38lbs (625g). Even fully loaded with hip belt and lid, the pack still only tops out at 1.84 lbs, or 835g. Look around and you’ll find comparable packs start to look heavy, and they certainly don’t play the game as well as this one. Oh, and everything that makes this such a great pack for long rock climbs? They work in the alpine too.
La Sportiva Exum Pro $95, www.sportiva.com - 
For the last few seasons, my approach shoe of choice has been La Sportiva’s Exum Ridge, and over the course of three pairs of them, I’ve liked them quite a bit. When Sportiva decided to switch them up this summer and release the updated Exum Pro in their place, I was a little curious about what changes they might have made. Before I get into what those are, let me just briefly outline my thoughts on approach shoes. It seems to me that there are a lot of demands we put on our approach shoes; we all want them to hike well, be comfy as sneakers for the way in with enough tread and support to handle miles and miles of cross country abuse, on and off trail, and to perform in wet and dry conditions with equal aplomb. Some of us even want to be able to strap aluminum crampons on them for those approaches that cross snow but don’t demand a boot. At the same time, we also want them to be sensitive and sticky enough to scramble well and even climb rock up to 5.8 or 5.9, and we also want them to do all of these things and be light when they’re clipped to our harness or in our pack. We also want them to be inexpensive, and to top it all off, we want them to be durable too. Expecting one shoe to be all these things has always seemed a bit of a stretch to me, and so it makes sense, as in all things, to have a quiver of tennies for different occasions. But what if you don’t want a quiver? What if you only want one? Well, then you’ve got a question to ask about whether you plan on climbing more or hiking more in your approach shoes, or, if you’re coming to Red Rocks, you’re probably like me and plan on doing both. In comes the Exum Pro, a shoe that, in my opinion, does a great job of doing everything you want an approach shoe to do. No, it’s not as light or as sendy as, say, the Five Ten Daescent, nor is it as burly as the Camp Four, but with a pair weighing in at 14.3 oz it’s light enough for most occasions, and with a real heel and a Frixion XF Dot Rubber / Trail Tread Hybrid sole underfoot, it’s both grippy and sticky enough for most purposes. It’s a shoe that can hike the hour and a half in every day, send the scramble and the 5.4 approach pitch, and then weigh less than a pound in my pack until it’s time to slip em on again for the last few 5.easy pitches and the descent. My problems with the last model were that they wore out quickly, both in terms of the rubber underfoot, and in high use areas on the upper, specifically the outside ball of the foot area. After a month in Red Rocks (aka The-Land-of-Shoe-Eating-Sandpaper-Rocks), I can say that the new rubber formulation underfoot is definitely a little less sticky when its really pushed, but it also seems to be way more durable. Despite my day-in day-out abuse, my shoes show far less wear than the previous model would have under similar circumstances. In the update, Sportiva also reinforced the area around the ball of the foot with something they call UreTech, where previously it was simply mesh. I will admit that I have torn the stitching off that area already, but it seems to be holding up far far better than the mesh would have. I suspect also that the stitching’s failings will not actually effect the shoe’s longevity as I still have to wear through some pretty burly material, and with the sole set to last a while too, we’ll just have to wait and see. It also seems worth mentioning that this model seems to fit just a tiny bit snugger than the last one, though it still has a shape that’s more accommodating to a wider foot than most approach rigs I’ve tried. As is my habit, I removed the standard insole and replaced it with a pair from Superfeet, which I can’t recommend enough. All in all, I say yes, and with a pricetag under $100, it’s not that hard to say.
A few other gear thoughts: The Outdoor Research Marvel Jacket 
is perfect for Red Rocks or anytime you think it might get a little chilly and a little windy in the shade, but it’s probably not going to rain. My Marvel had just the right balance of warmth and wind-resistance to be the only set of sleeves I’d bring along most days. The jacket is not on offer from OR this season, but you can find one for a bargain online or pick up the Anomaly Jacket for $99 at www.outdoorresearch.com which I suspect is its replacement. I also loved how light my pack was on those long days when it was filled with a featherweight rack of Black Diamond C4s and C3s, all racked on shiny, light, 28g Oz carabiners (www.bdel.com). Combined with skinny Dynex slings, it was amazing to see just how light our racks could get these days. I’m sold.
The only negative bit of gear reviewing I have is that while the product is absolutely delicious,the actual bottle of Eau de Vie de Pomme $39.95 from Oregon’s own Clear Creek Distillery is simply not durable enough to survive my forgetting its presence in my duffel bag, and while it survived the trip from Bend to Vegas, it was unable to make it to family vacation in Death Valley. A damn shame. The spirit never made it to my father, and now I have to do laundry.
C’est la guerre.
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