Southwest Climbing

Yesterday I returned from two weeks of climbing in Colorado, Nevada, California, and Oregon.

I have posted a number of photos here.

Reflections on the Newtown Shooting

Firstly, why these things happen and what to do about them.

As someone who has been at the receiving end of a school's misconstrued response to a perceived threat of violence, I can say with confidence that the people who are going on about the importance of reporting threats are full of shit. For every threat that is carried out, there are 100 that are jokes and another for which there was no warning sign at all. And unless you are going to jail those making the threats or surround schools with police officers, what is this going to prevent? I never had any intension of committing an act of violence at my school, but even if I had, being suspended would not have stopped me from illegally acquiring a firearm and going there the next day. 

This is the sort of time when everyone starts making a point of how they could never even imagine committing an act of violence like what Adam Lanza did. I find this puzzling, mostly because I cannot say the same thing with any degree of honesty. I think the urge to kill each other is an ingrained part of us, a part that our society has chosen to suppress far more than most. I just laugh when people talk about our "culture of gun violence," we who have completely convinced ourselves of our government's monopoly on the legitimate use of force. We don't have tribal warfare, we don't go on campaign every summer, we don’t even have major, nation-mobilizing wars every generation, and instead every so often someone snaps and murders a few dozen people. Even if I'm right it's not a bad trade-off really.

Historically speaking, weapon control laws are tighter now than they ever have been before. Our society preaches a stronger message of non-violence than any that has been preached since about 30 AD. School-yard bullying has never been tolerated less. There are more resources for the mentally ill and socially ostracized than have ever existed before. Yet last week a quiet young man walked into a school and shot twenty children with an assault rifle. Those in authority need to consider the possibility that not only do they not understand what is happening, but that their methods of dealing with it are patently ineffective.

Our culture's attitude toward violence is somewhat like the Victorian era's attitude toward sexuality, we seem to think that if we stop people from doing it as much as possible it will go away. I like this analogy because it implies that our current morals will be soon overthrown. Most people probably don’t for exactly the same reason, but as you consider with horror what that would look like, remember that the Victorians would have felt exactly the same way about the 1960s (revolutions always look terrifying when they are against you).

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe with even more gun control laws and even more non-violence education we'll hit the magic spot where these things actually stop happening, but I doubt it. One thing I can say for sure though, is that the people who proudly profess to being unable to understand why someone would do something like this should not be making the decisions about how to go forward.

Secondly, For Adam Lanza

I have never seen you

But I know every feature of your face

I have never spoken with you

But I know your plea as if it was my own

I have never met you

But I know exactly who you are

And I know who else has seen you and spoken with you and known you

He is a mad and a vicious thing and he has no name

Satan is his bastard son

And Beelzebub his pet

Melkor and Iago were fashioned from his shadow

But him, he has no name

Call him rage, call him hatred

Call him the soul of the demonic

But he has no name

He is the terror that he who loves himself flees from

And he is the final refuge found in the deepest pit of despair

This I know by the works of your hands

I know the voice you heard

The deep calling to come and live forever

In the halls of the damned

To drink from the icy fountain 

And never know pain again

But I have also read the list

Those twenty names calling out after you

Screaming mutely their beauteous horror

And there I hear what he did not tell you

What he did not tell me, but that I guessed from the turn of his lie

That war, that murder and destruction

Is our way

Neither aberration nor tragedy

By your act you wish to set yourself apart

To commit a crime for all eternity

But you have done nothing so great

Their blood cannot hallow you

You cannot make yourself into a demon

And you have died a very human child

Like me

Like them

With all the immortality of a hurricane.

The Tooth

Made a failed attempt on The Tooth this weekend.
Also verified that at least one of the Alpental ice routes are not in.

Practice, Application, and More Practice

Cougar Mountain Drytooling

Mount Thielsen

My camera died about an hour into the trip, so additional photos can be found in Ryan's trip report

Index Town Wall - Aid Climbing

Craging and Not Craging

Frenchman Coulee (Vantage) - Oct. 21st

Just a typical day on the Sunshine Wall (seriously, this is what it's been like every time I've been here) 

The view west toward the Colombia River Gorge, every now and again the air force thinks its fun to fly fighter jets really low through it.

The first gully 

The main route to the Near End

Several walls I've never climbed on and where I think the fabled Vantage ice route comes in now and again.

Failed Attempt on North Ingalls Peak - Nov. 10-11

Mt. Stuart 

Ingalls lake

North and East Ingalls Peaks 

The beginning of the difficulties, I do not have any photos from higher up, as I was distracted alternately climbing, belaying, and being really, really cold (often two out of three).

In short: we bailed on the second pitch. It turns out that positively sloped slab/crack climbing is really hard under five inches of powder, even if the route is only 5.4 in the summer.

Ethnology (Mk2)

I don't write much poetry anymore, but it's that time of the year again, and this is a re-working anyway.

Circles within circles

(read it any direction you want)

Eagle and serpent

(circles in the air, circles in the earth)

Quetzalcoatl consuming his tail

(feathers on Jormungandr)

What day is it and

What hour

What month of the year and what season

All turns – all lives and dies and lives again

But are we dead or alive

Do we walk in spring or autumn

And is it dawn or dusk

Where do we stand in the ancient celestial calendar

(at the edge of the earth the seas cascade down and we stand at the brink and seem to fall forever, for the water is rising up)

Dante saw a sepulcher and Sturluson a wolf

(heretics and Fenrir)

In his father’s death each fashioned the turning of the epoch

(every evening is a microcosm of the end of the world)

But the child of the lion saw mountains beyond mountains

(and there’s no end in sight)

What are we saying and

Are we screaming or do we stand mute

Who has the voice and the power and the glory

Envy it or spit upon it

If it cannot be cast into the consuming flames

I or you – the man or the woman

Have I bound a rag across your face and

Are these words of dominion I speak

(there is an inborn tyranny here that I did not ask for and I do not want, yet if I loose my grip will I take flight)

The camel eats itself and lives forever

(the lion will bite his heel and he will crush its head)

And the child grows ever to the man

(look at your hand and watch it wither)

The call of the ram’s horn echoing again and again and again

(circles within circles)

More Poetic Than Arbitrary

For the past month or so I've been writing a treatise on destination, return, and achievement in mountaineering, the first part, of two, can be read here.