CascadeClimber.com

Climbing is dangerous! Every year many climbers are broken, maimed, and killed. Don't be so foolish as to trust your life to what you see here. I'm not a guide and neither is this web site. If you don't know what you are doing or where you are going, please take a course or hire a guide!

The Volcanoes
Rock and Alpine
Scrambles/Hikes
Ice Climbing
Links
Chronological Index
Humor and BS
Web Cams

 

Leading the top pitch of Drury Falls in January, 2003. Photo by Dave Burdick.
he purpose of this site is to document my climbing activities for future reference (mine and yours), and to give me something to look at when my job or the weather is getting me down. It isn't to spray about how great a climber I am (I'm not) or to be a guidebook (see blue disclaimer above). Don't take this site or me too seriously.

What you'll find here is a essentially a web-based climbing journal, with some additional commentary about how and why I climb, and humorous climbing anecdotes that I come across. Whenever possible, I credit the author if it is not me.

You'll find no ads, no sponsors, no sales pitches, except for things I truly believe in: I won't tell you that you can climb any route in the world in a single push with a stove and 371 packets of Gu.

The site isn't complete: It has blank pages, unwritten trip reports, typos, bad links, etc. I have a giant tub of pictures waiting to be scanned. Enjoy what's here and let me know if you find an onerous error.

The easiest way to navigate through the Trip Reports is on the Chronological page.

If you are looking for a bulletin board, I recommend mtncommunity.org and CascadeClimbers.com.

Enjoy...

A little Edward Abbey anyone? Here goes:

As we descended toward the river, the country opened up, wide and wild, with nowhere any sight of man but the dirt trail road before us. We liked that. Why? ('Why?' is always a good question.) Why not? (Always a good answer.) But why? One must attempt to answer the question- someone always raises it, accusing us of "disliking people."

iaomc noorinfo.com

Well then, it's not from simple misanthropy. Speaking generally, for myself, I like people. Speaking particularly, I like some people, dislike others. Like everyone else who hasn't been reduced to moronism by our commercial Boy Scout ethic, I like my friends, dislike my enemies, and regard strangers with a tolerant indifference. But why, the questioner insists, why do people like like you pretend to love uninhabited country so much? Why this cult of wilderness? Why the surly hatred of progress and development, the churlish resistance to all popular improvement.

Very well, a fair question, but it's been asked and answered a thousand times already; enough books to drive a man stark naked mad have dealt with the question. There are many answers, all good, each sufficient. Peace is often mentioned; beauty; spiritual refreshment, whatever that means; re-creation for the soul, whatever that is; escape; novelty, the delight of something different; truth and understanding and wisdom- commendable virtues in any man, anytime; ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir, the answers to questions that we have not yet even learned to ask, a connection to the origin of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present- all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead degrading question as "Why wilderness?"

To which, nevertheless, I shall append one further answer anyway: Because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.

Edward Abbey
from the essay "How It Was", in the book "Beyond the Wall"

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This page was last edited on Sunday, November 28, 2004

Unless otherwise credited, all photos on this site are copyright CascadeClimber.com, 1999-2007
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