New and Experienced Climbers over 50 #40

Daniel Shively wrote:

We have our auto insurance through AAA. They offered us the lowest rates for comparable coverage here in California. Fortunately, we haven’t made any claims or needed roadside assistance, so I can’t vouch for their service. They have been easy to communicate with though and adjusted our rates when changes were applicable. 

Interesting! We dumped AAA a few months ago for Progressive, as their insurance price for a new vehicle (identical coverage) was going to be literally 2.5 times more. AAA refused to negotiate. I also switched to Good Sam roadside protection and dropped AAA for the 1st time in close to 50 years.

Terry E wrote:

Interesting! We dumped AAA a few months ago for Progressive, as their insurance price for a new vehicle (identical coverage) was going to be literally 2.5 times more. AAA refused to negotiate. I also switched to Good Sam roadside protection and dropped AAA for the 1st time in close to 50 years.

Interesting indeed. We were with Progressive and our rates were rapidly rising yearly and they refused to negotiate citing rising costs due to uninsured drivers. I wonder how region specific rates are and if the specific representative has leeway in negotiating rates. 

Terry E wrote:

I also switched to Good Sam roadside protection and dropped AAA for the 1st time in close to 50 years.

Been with State Farm for vehicle for many years- get a homeowners discount because of combined coverage, but given that my homeowners policy has (literally) quadrupled in the last few years, even if the vehicle policy is competitive, they are getting me good with the HO policy.

Likewise, had this AAA membership close to 50 years. My newer car has a roadside assistance policy that goes along with it...tempted to just go with that, and drop AAA (esp since the less-than-impressive experience I had with them last year). Have you used the Good Sam program yet? Cost?

AAA used to be really good but I now have my doubts. Wait time seems like forever. I did ask a local tow guy if he was AAA and he said hell no. They don't pay enough. That pretty much answers the question for why response time is so long. Next year I think I will investigate what my other options are. Including simply asking my insurance company how much their towing coverage is and if using their towing coverage affects my rate. 

Daniel Shively wrote:

Interesting indeed. We were with Progressive and our rates were rapidly rising yearly and they refused to negotiate citing rising costs due to uninsured drivers. I wonder how region specific rates are and if the specific representative has leeway in negotiating rates. 

Wow! So weird!

We used to have an excellent AAA agent, who unfortunately passed on. The AAA agents we spoke with recently seemed incompetent. We ended up going with Progressive as we have several friends in the Bay Area who have gotten very high rates with AAA and much less with Progressive. Might be area specific.

We have AAA and have been very happy with it.  I needed a new battery a few weeks ago and they came to my house in under a 1/2 hour wait time and efficiently installed a new one--had a nice chat with the road service guy as well!!! Now being retired, we are trying to get as much as we can out of our current cars, so having AAA backup is reassuring.

I usually have a fleet of old rigs and triple A has been really good over the years with several years when I used All 4 of my premium tows. It's just in the last few years that response time has gotten really slow. It's possible it's an NEK thing?  The last time I used them the guy came All the way from NH. Seems like none of the local tow trucks are triple A. The explanation I got from several drivers is they don't pay enough. 

T Duffy wrote:

John, decades ago I read a biography or autobiography about you (I forget which.) If I remember correctly you were given a Ford car with "For John Gill" engraved somewhere in it. Did this happen or did I dream it up? If it did what were the circumstances that lead to this?  Thanks

1970-71 I had pretty much finished my grad work and elected to stay on another year at CSU. At that time there was a Bell Lab in north Denver, and they had contacted the math department to hire someone to drive down once or twice a week to talk with senior engineers about the math they might be forgetting. I had very little to do, having breezed through my research. The stately old chemistry building next to the math building was controlled by the math faculty after the chemists had moved out, and it was necessary for there to be a math presence there, so I was asked to serve that purpose. I would drive in to campus about noon and greet the chemistry secretary, who was still there, and settle in the lovely oak-lined conference room with my typewriter, typing up my research, one page a day. Once or twice a week, in the afternoons I would drive down to Bell labs. At the end of that job I needed a new car to take my family down the southern Colorado, where I had been hired by the department chair of a small college. I visited the Ford dealer in Ft Collins, and arranged for Ford to build me a very simple, no frills station wagon. When it arrived the salesmen were excited and showed me the car, It had a beautiful bronze plaque attached to the glove compartment with engraved, "Made for John Gill".

A year or so later Jim Holloway visited me and we drove out to several of my bouldering areas. He was very impressed with the plaque. Incidentally, Jim made the largest leap in difficulty in the history of modern bouldering. 

Been a while since I checked in. I’ll just leave this here. Gonna have to keep an eye out for this one.

https://www.oldmanlightning.com/the-movie

Victor K wrote:

Been a while since I checked in. I’ll just leave this here. Gonna have to keep an eye out for this one.

https://www.oldmanlightning.com/the-movie

Victor, I communicated with the Verm last February, asking about Midnight Lightning. His reply was "After four season-ending injuries four years in a row I called it quits ". He is living in Kentucky and is engaged to a lady who lives on a beautiful horse ranch. He may do some climbing there when he is fully healed. 

Still not quite enough snow to be psyched for skiing but got in a brisk and beautiful 37 mile ride today. It looks like Pine Creek and the Buttermilk country are melting out so hopefully able to get out climbing soon. 

We followed these for about 2 miles one rainy day.  Notice that there isn't even any water settled into them. About the size of my closed fist.

I've see 5 lions in the wild I think.  Only one of them was scary where he was seeing me at the same time.  That one was about 6 miles into the back country but thankfully the North Fork of the Kings River was between us.  He did consider whether it was worth the effort to cross over.  I considered whether I could out swim him down thru the rapids if he tried.

This guy just showed up, fuil grown gentleman, very sweet. Grey and white. We called him Mr Tom. 

Then, he just disappeared again. 

The slab plate is my son's work, a pottery class we did together, back when he was quite young and saving up to buy an excavator. A thumb excavator. Full sized. 

 Oh, and yes, there's a LOT of clay in my soil, lol!

Hey, post up that Maine coon cat, Al!

John Gill wrote:

Victor, I communicated with the Verm last February, asking about Midnight Lightning. His reply was "After four season-ending injuries four years in a row I called it quits ". He is living in Kentucky and is engaged to a lady who lives on a beautiful horse ranch. He may do some climbing there when he is fully healed. 

I still look forward to the movie.  I met Verm bouldering in Hueco Tanks in the 90’s, he was quite the character.  I admire him for sticking to his ground up ethics, but getting all broken down is a consequence of so many bad falls.  I guess that I am a “cheater,” but using top rope rehearsal on highballs has allowed me to keep bouldering fairly hard at 65 without (so far) major injury.

John Gill wrote:

“A year or so later Jim Holloway visited me and we drove out to several of my bouldering areas. He was very impressed with the plaque. Incidentally, Jim made the largest leap in difficulty in the history of modern bouldering.”

Loved the custom car story! Love all the anecdotes… especially the 19th century accomplishments.

As to Jim Holloway, I have some memories that I’m not sure are all mine or have been influenced by seeing old photos. Anyway… it was a rainy May(?) of 1977 in Camp 4 and on a dry day I happened across a small bouldering group that included a rail thin and very tall Jim H (didn’t know who he was until later) dressed in white painter paints with a white painter’s cap perched backwards on his head.

Now here is what I remember seeing that maybe John or others might confirm about Holloway’s strength and flexibility… they were working this very short (one move?) mantel problem. Jim walks up to the sloping mantel, places his hands palm down on the granite with his fingers pointed in toward his body and his elbows out in front almost touching… then he proceeds to simply do a press until he could lock out his arms straight and step up. Don’t you have to be double jointed or something to get your elbows to touch this way??? And then the tricep strength to press up! Or is my memory clouded by the years?

That same month we were sitting at a picnic table in Camp 4 when this short, sort of nondescript, older (in my eyes!) dude walks by. My buddy says, “Hey, that’s Yvon Chouinard.” I had no idea. He just looked like some lost tourist to me.

Another thing I had no clue about… I think it was that previous winter that the pot plane crashed in the lake and Valley climbers were inexplicably getting rich all of a sudden. I had no idea about this either until years after.

I wish I had known then what I know now about climbing history and about how fleeting life is… I would have liked to have paid more attention to what was going on and to have engaged those earlier pioneers in conversation—much like Lori has been able to connect with past and current climbing pioneers… but I was just a clueless kid then.

Oh… that same spring I caught the ride from Boulder to the Valley in an old VW bus with a small group of hippy climbers. I think my portion of the gas was like $10 or something. I also think they were high most of the time as we struggled at 20mph up the hills and maxed out at 60 per on the descents… heading west and off to glory! Who were those climbers I now wonder??? Were they climbers I had read about or would read about in the magazines? Or just normies like me? No idea and no clue, being very young and focused pretty much on just myself…

Kristian Solem wrote:

5.13 face in Josh? I'm just curious which route. Those things don't get a lot of ascents, it's good to hear about someone getting after it...

The route my friend was working on is called darkness at noon at Smith. He’s been back a number of times to try again.  Meanwhile, he’s back here in Josh this weekend, picking off the hardest routes he can find.,,ones that I never even heard of. 

But your question got me wondering about 5.13 climbs here in Josh. Aside from two or three famous routes I’m not sure what all there is so it might be a fun project to go look at them all.  

——

I had to take my 2016 Lexus to the dealership on Friday and they sent me home with a brand new Lexus GX as a loaner. I was so angry and frustrated when I returned that car and I thought about the qualities that make Climbers a little different.  First of all, for no reason that I could tell, the damn car starts dinging the second I turned it on. Why? Backing out of the driveway is a technological feat. There is no “rearview mirror“ in these modern cars, it’s now a “rear view camera”.  It literally looks like a video game running the whole time and very disorienting.

The car does not trust the driver to stop itself so as I would approach a red light, or another car, or a curve in the road, it starts applying the brakes way ahead of time. I thought I was having engine failure.

If you put your drink down in a holder in the center console, when you pick your drink up again, the door closes automatically behind you. Try to put your drink back down, good luck finding that holder.

And yet, with all the high-tech innovation, they cannot figure out how to build a seat where you cannot drop your cell phone (or loose change or taco) between the seat and console. Because there is no place to put a cell phone of modern size you lay it somewhere and the first time you take a sharp turn the cell phone slides off and down into that chasm. How hard would that be to fix?  Millions of dollars in R&D and yet they can’t find a better place for a cell phone.

So I dropped the loaner off yesterday and when the service guy said, how did you like it I said I HATED IT.
can we clip some wires or disable all this techie stuff? Nope… It’s all integrated into the car and you’re stuck with it. So I asked him what he had that similar to an old Jeep – – and where I won’t be so embarrassed that it’s a complete wreck on the inside from all the dirt and gravel and climbing stuff. I’d be happy with a stick shift. 

When my car starts dinging because I have not fastened my seatbelt, it brings out the rage in me and I will drive without the seatbelt and listen to dinging until it finally stops-THEN I will fasten the seatbelt.  (Tony says the new cars never stop.) . That’s where I was going with this – – I think there is some rebellion in Climbers and this is proof.

100% on the car tech rant. I bought a newer Outback several years ago (my third such model over 35 years), and have been irritated by the 'technology' in it. Too many 'nanny car' features (as I call them), including braking when you speed up to pass a car. And the electronic tailgate is just plain dumb- it only opens electronically...there is no mechanical operation option, and it is slow, and has weird behaviors where it stops working altogether. Just let me open the damn door!

Perhaps most ridiculously, if you leave the tailgate open, the 'tailgate open' message appears on the dash, drawing 4 amps off the battery- this will drain it completely in a very short time. There is no workaround to this issue (the dealer knows it's a problem)- you can't disable it in the firmware of the car. There are several modifications owners have done to avoid this including installing a switch in the tailgate (dumb) and a little thing called a 'Hatch Catch' that a guy made on a 3D printer and sells on Etsy. Outback roots are in adventuring...like car camping, for starters...where you commonly camp with the tailgate open. WTF, engineers?

I'd give anything for a car that combines some of the power and efficiency improvements that have occurred over the years, minus the majority of all of the electronic technology. This stuff only adds to the irritation of using the car, and is ridiculously expensive to repair (which happens too commonly). I often wonder if some car manufacturer will eventually recognize this, and build a simpler option- there must be a market out there for it.

I get it with the bells and whistles they are putting on cars these days. We have a fairly new Honda Fit (Honda Jazz over here) and I don´t know the half of what all the buttons and dials can do.

 Having said that, here are the modern things I have come (some quickly, some slowly) to personally appreciate...

--One button to start as long as you have the key with you.

--Back up camera and warning beeps are great for the tight European parking spots. (My only accidents in the past decades happened by backing up my Toyota Tacoma into unseen rigid objects,)

--Audio (and visual, in side mirror) warning when using the turn signal and someone is in my blind spot.

--Cruise control.

--Multiple USB ports for charging.

--Seats you can heat.

--Windshield wiper setting that moves the wipers at a rate appropriate for the amount of rain. Ours seem to work pretty well.

--Headlights that automatically adjust based on environmental condicions--daylight, night, fog, a tunnel, oncoming traffic, etc. Again, ours work well enough that we just keep the lights on the AUTO setting.

--The hybrid drive (getting about 51mpg... our next and probably last vehicle in our lives will likely be all electric)

--The car has a NAV system, but I tend to just use my cell phone and Google maps.

But, yeah, a lot of the rest--especially the many layered pages on the control and nav panels, I could do without, or at least they could be simplified.

I am VERY glad my car doesn´t have the above mentioned PITA tailgate switch or anything like it.

Re the bells & whistles, they can be annoying but they do have their utility. Twice my wife’s RAV saved us from a catastrophic rear end collision when the collision avoidance system engaged on rural I-25 at night. Both times were cruising at 80 mph when we came upon someone crawling at 45 or less without any lights on. The radar sensed them long before we saw the rolling obstruction. And, my wife’s sister was woken up on the freeway by the lane departure warning on her Prius. It’s a trade-off, but it’s a net positive.