New and Experienced Climbers over 50 #33

djkyote wrote:

Fossil

Please remove your meme with the R word. It may be a joke to you, but those of us that work with  people with special needs find this language demeaning.

Writing in the third person and the R word memes... 

Re SuperTopo and the CMac thing, didn’t he start getting cease and desist letters because people were downloading uncredited photos that didn’t belong to them and he didn’t want to risk exposing his other ventures to litigation?

M M wrote:

Writing in the third person 

Aaaaaaay! "The Fonz" would disagree. :)

Slab climbing in a top secret location.  It took a very talented photographer to make this look exciting.

Within walking distance of my house, found it 20+ years ago but just getting around to cleaning it off.  Need to come back with a rope for the top.

Undoubtedly quite a few others out in those woods, Ward, though probably not many as impressive.

Ward's wife Paula, a week out from breaking her hip--note the crutch.

Note over gripping technique and looking for my next handhold instead of foot!

Keep at it Paula. You are amazing and inspiring!

Alan Rubin wrote:

Undoubtedly quite a few others out in those woods, Ward, though probably not many as impressive.

Ward's wife Paula, a week out from breaking her hip--note the crutch.

OK, so this is actually pretty cool

Hey Fossil, 

Regarding Supertopo: By any chance would you happen to have a copy of this thread:

How the West Was Won

It had stories that both Cosgrove and I wrote about our new route and first free ascent of the West Face of Sentinel Rock in Yosemite, along with a bunch of great pics and a topo by Clint Cummings. When you search “How the West Was Won” it doesn’t come up, since the first 20 posts (with Coz’s and my stories) was deleted. But the rest of it is there, sans photos. 

I found it by searching “Sentinel West Face” and found the link on the 5th page of the search results.

It’s really a shame that all that history went away.

Link to search results

Link to thread

Hopefully Paula heals quickly and fully!

Our local Ice festival and primitive biathlon collide once again. I did two different classes of the biathlon Saturday so that was 4 miles of snow shoe running/ hobbling. Forgot my camera.  then I jumped into ice climbing gear and drove to the ice fest. The greeters were very Vermont this year.. 

 I dont suppose it maters if the ice ax is still full strength with those holes drilled in it because if you use it correctly you will simply float up the mountain.

Ice was really fat but like concrete.. it was -17.9 F that morning..  Really not much fun to solo so I bailed from 100ft up . 

The presentations sat evening were pretty good.  nice slide show by a lady who climbed the north side of  Everest.. lots of dirt on people stealing oxygen and stepping over dying and dead people..

Back to the Biathlon today. ran the course again and did slightly better.. 

legs/body is tired. 

some of the folks participating. 

There is a historical internet record where you can look up most of what was there on a particular date.  I'll see if I can find out the best way to access it.  It may offer a way to get back some of what was lost from SuperTopo.

Jan Mc wrote:

There is a historical internet record where you can look up most of what was there on a particular date.  I'll see if I can find out the best way to access it.  It may offer a way to get back some of what was lost from SuperTopo.

Jan, you might be thinking of the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine”. Unfortunately, CMac and RJ made a decision to block this process, so there are no archives available.

Fossil wrote: “damn I wish I would have found that one.”

Thanks for checking Fossil. There were some nights when that virtual campfire was really roaring. 

fossil wrote:

Here's something for Kris Solem,

Regarding the Bust-o-Buhl above, it's worth a mention that Phil Bircheff carved that and the one behind of Muir in his campsite at Tuttle Creek. Pretty amazing stuff. He's a master. He quarries his own stone too…

Do you have any other photos of his work? Absolutely amazing.

Phil is an amazing talent. He has major sculptures installed in front of buildings, I think mostly in AZ. He won't tell you about that though. He's beyond modest. 

I don't recall exactly how it all came down, but at some event in Josh I bought this bowl Phil had carved as a gift for my wife Barbara, and we got to talking.

Barbara had a picture from Vogue Magazine of a bronze bust of French film director Jean Cocteau, which had been commissioned by his lover Jean Marais, a French artist. She decided to approach Phil about commissioning him to make his version of this piece, and we took him the picture. Here they are, Barbara and Phil, in The Pit at Josh in Phil's studio discussing the work:

A few weeks later the piece was shaping up. Phil roughed it out in clay, then used a jig to replicate the clay model in a piece of gorgeous black marble he'd quarried himself at an undisclosed location 

in Nevada. By that, I mean undisclosed to anyone including us.

The finished piece is amazing. The touch of the stone feels like skin. Unreal. The "Fantasy" style is pure Phil, elfin and wildly expressive. It's a far better piece than the one that inspired it.

This reminds me that I haven't seen Phil since the day I took the pic of him, Muir and Buhl in Tuttle Creek. That was Feb 2018. I hope the number I have for him i still good, I'll be giving it a try tomorrow. 

The display of his bust of Jean Cocteau is an important feature of our house being built in Wyoming. 

Here's a closeup of the Buhl bust:

Didn't Phil do a bust of Batso too?

Incredible talent.

fossil wrote:

Here's something for Kris Solem,

Regarding the Bust-o-Buhl above, it's worth a mention that Phil Bircheff carved that and the one behind of Muir in his campsite at Tuttle Creek. Pretty amazing stuff. He's a master. He quarries his own stone too…

Do you have any other photos of his work? Absolutely amazing.

Here's some stuff I dug up for Alan Rubin

Jim Swallow tetons 1965 as Rich Goldstone explains

"submitting to a course of carbohydrate replenishment therapy"

and here...

here Rich explains,

"Here's a shot of Jim leading the crux roof on the North Face of Disappointment Peak (graded 5.8 as I recall, but softer than a baby's bum, as were all Teton grades at the time.) What you can't tell in the picture is that everything is soaking wet from a melting snowfield higher up. Note that the protection Jim arranged consists entirely of threaded runners in true old-school British style."

Both Photos by Rich Goldstone

A couple of Pete Cleveland pictures

Tommy Deutchler

Rich Belcher photo by prunes

Alan if you know who prunes and steve s are I have a bunch of devils lakes pics by both.

Bob Gaines,

Bob you have now twice in the last few days pointed out threads that make me go, damn I wish I would have found that one. My computer skills are at a solid 5.2 level, so when I was gathering I was pretty much operating off of memory of what I had read and liked and I suspect other gatherers were operating in similar fashion. Consequently, a lot of good stuff slipped through the cracks. Some things no matter how good the original post was, just like here, did not get many eyes looking at it in the first place (I think your lost arrow link had only 35 replies),so it easily drifted into obscurity. It truly was a rush mission to save what we did before things got mostly vaporized. If you want to know the minimum of what I have. This link is to 2.2 but I have everything listed at the top 0.0 to 3.0.

http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=3023709&msg=3023709#msg3023709

Thanks Fossil. For those who may be interested and who weren't on Supertopo or didn't follow obscure threads there, I'll fill in a bit of 'deep background'.

Jim Swallow ( top 2 pictures) was a British doctor and climber who spent a year (1964-5?) at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and climbed at Devil's Lake. He was a very experienced climber ( he had been the doctor on the expedition that made the FA of Nuptse near Everest and summitted along with a young Chris Bonington), so had a great deal to teach us young DL climbers. He introduced us to the use of nuts for protection ( then actual machine nuts reamed out and threaded on slings). As far as I know this was one of the earliest examples ( simultaneous with John Reppy and Sam Streibert in CT) of the use of protection nuts in the US. I don't know what his 'doctor persona' was like, but amongst climbers he had a classic British 'hard man' presentation, typically using four-letter words as virtual punctuation.

Pete Cleveland, another doctor, was in the '60s/70s one of the best, but very much largely under the radar, climbers in the country ( or anywhere)--with FAs that were at the time cutting edge in both difficultly ( up to hard 12/13) and, often, boldness, but since they were in relatively out-of-the-limelight locales, such as Devil's Lake and the SD Needles, were little known to the general 'climbing public'. One of his 'most notorious' FAs was that of the original route up Superpin in the Needles in 1967. This 5.11 X route ( with still only a handful, at most, of repeats) was effectively unprotected, to the extent that his 'belayer' was so disturbed by the situation and his uselessness, that he just dropped the rope and walked away so that he didn't have to watch!!!!

The final cluster of pictures are of members of the DLFA ( Devil's Lake Fuk-ness Association), another group of cutting edge climbers ( and wild men), from a bit later in the '70s/80s. They were after my time at the Lake, so I didn't know them personally, but am aware that they made many very hard and often very serious leads. I am pretty sure that 'Steve S.' is Steve Sangdahl. I'm not remembering who 'Prunes' is, but possibly Tom Deutchler RIP.

Enough nostalgic Devil's Lake trivia for now.

Incredible sculptures by Phil Bircheff!!!!

Alan Rubin wrote:

Enough nostalgic Devil's Lake trivia for now.

Incredible sculptures by Phil Bircheff!!!!

I didn't start climbing until after I moved out of the Midwest, so I don't know as much about Devil's Lake climbing as I should. Would love to hear more!

Gary Thomas wrote:

I didn't start climbing until after I moved out of the Midwest, so I don't know as much about Devil's Lake climbing as I should. Would love to hear more!

There was an excellent thread about Devil's Lake on Supertopo ('the Taco')--I believe that the pictures Fossil posted above came from that thread. That is why many of us who were part of the 'Taco campfire', are so sad that it was shut down. Much of the written portion of the threads is ( or, at least, was) available on the Supertopo archive, but without any photos or material derived from 'third party sources', and likely otherwise reduced as well, as Bob mentions. Too bad, a very important resource that is now largely lost.

We had a power outage at our house this morning, so I figured what better time to get out in the snow. What a beautiful morning! What I didn’t expect was to see the footprint of local critters and I have no idea who they are. Do we have any paw experts here?

This one is about 8” with stride 3-4 feet. It has me worried.

A very confused coyote?
Whoever this is, it’s probably cute.

stay away from this one. She bites!

I am strongly contemplating hiking to the top of this canyon , just to see it in the snow. 

suddenly,  a heavy fog dropped in, and there is no trail in view. So I’m following my own footsteps back. Nick might be proud! (?)