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mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 22, 2018 - 09:19am PT
And some Un-advertising here on the ST masthead.

http://www.clarksusa.com/us/c/mens-unstructured
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 22, 2018 - 09:38am PT
All the rocks I've hauled home and up to my room are now released.

I took them down to the dumpster yesterday along with lots of of National Geographics and old books.

Gonna go look for packing boxes today and try to dismantle the top bunk of the bed.

This bunk is not even five years old and I won't need it where I'm going. I'd let it go for $150 if anyone wants it, but you might want to get a new mattress.

Drop a line if you are interested, or my phone number's at the OP, if you didn't know.
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 22, 2018 - 02:50pm PT
Marlow!!

[Click to View YouTube Video]
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 22, 2018 - 04:34pm PT
Flip Flop!!

CONRAD KAIN
By Earle Birney

I
Conrad Kain was a mountain man.
He hardened his hips on the Raxalpe herding goats as a boy
And hooped his heart for endurance in high Austrian stonequarries.
The casual Herren gave Kronen to be hauled up his mountains
But not enough for the miner’s widow, his mother, or meagrefaced brothers.
For them he poached, and plodded the wintered plains for work,
Finding little of that, and firewarmth less, except with the poor.
Conrad heard of a land where a man might labor all year,
And save to be tourist himself in Bergen as towering as Europe’s,
A tourist for more than a feastday, perhaps for a princely fortnight,
In Alpen empty of landlords and alive with fabulous game,
In ranges unowned and billowing over a thousand Austrias.
Conrad crossed in the steerage, and stared at the world of Canada.

II
Saskatchewan taught him how frostbite scalds on the lonely trapline,
And the driven days of a farmhand under the eaves of turf and dung,
Marooned on a buoy unhailed in a hoar Atlantic of prairie,
There was the farmer’s fattening daughter, a quarter-section for dowry,
But also flatness, and men who work without mirth or music.
He remembered sunset on fells, and the slant and slew of their forests.
Conrad Kain was a mountain man, and he moseyed off to the Rockies.

III
In Banff there was much that even a Bauer from Nasswald might learn;
From an Indian ten-year-old how a paddle should twist in the palm;
From packers the devious diamond-hitch and roping pintos like Herren,
Bearsteak and sourdough and tepees, and loping lightly on snowshoes.
For the immigrant workman such lore was a lever to lift up freedom;
Fumbling with transit and levels in forty degrees below zero
Was a debt to a fairy godmotherland to be pencilled down in a diary.

IV
Even the mountains had western ways and harsh whims to be humored.
The Devil’s Club has thorns and the wolverine is a trapthief;
More stabbing than cold in the night is the June mosquito, and soundest
The sleep above timberline; soft flakes may fall and fall in the Selkirks
Till the lone trapper is meshed and no man comes to his cabin.
But Kain was a fellow for living and when his flour was finished
He burrowed in drifts for the frozen flesh of marten skinned before snowfall,
Made himself soup and stood on his feet and snowshoed out.

V
Becoming Canuck was more than learning, was carrying lore to others,
Bringing the skill of the ski to the worshipful younglings of Banff,
Packing an older wisdom into the peaks with his iceaxe,
Tales the pile-dwellers knew, primate and sly as their wit,
Tales till the billy boiled under the rainrapped boughs,
Or under the stars by Mystic Lake while he puffed old tea in his Meerschaum,
Easing the memory roving to regions where somehow the robins were wiser
And the rocks were seamed with the sagas of men back through a thousand
centuries.

VI
Conrad Kain was a simple man and nothing much to stare at.
He never ran for election nor retired on the labor of others.
He never went to a college to collect the thoughts he should think.
Some say he never grew up quite, some think he was psychopathic,
The way he sidled from strangers and cities, and mooned about mountains;
Yet he learned to win the men of the West and to master their peaks
By his animal patience and grace and the craft of his ancestors.

VII
He was first to look from Mt. Louis, that bomb-burst of stone by Forty-Mile
Creek,
The trunks of the Purcells, towering unclimbed from their Pliocene roots,
He passaged, naming for others, and many a spire unknown
Once, when he cornered a goat on a cornice, an acre of snow cracked off,
Bore him fighting over a cliff and buried him fathoms;
He dug himself free, and the goat, and dubbed his own gashes with spruce
gum.
At the lead of a file on Balfour a whip of lightning flicked them,
Straightening their hair and strumming their axes like cellos;
From their hands he struck the steel and raced them safe to a cave.
Once after storms had pinned his party to tents in the trees,
The wind waned in the night and the peaks shone by the new-washed stars;
Conrad crept from his sleepingbag and steered alone for the mightiest,
Threaded his way through crevasses by thunderbolts flashed from the
cloud-rack,
Felt with his axe the edges of falls till he planted his feet on the summit.
Returning he leapt the last snowbridge breaking beneath him, limped at dawn
Into camp, with a yodel, glad to be whole and gripping the turf in the valley

VIII
Conrad’s name grew tall with the Rockies. There were tales in the East
Of a bashful guide who had roped a bear from his den on the Athabaska,
Who smoked his tea and chewed his tobacco and talked of birds like a poet,
And of rocks like a patient professor. They paid his way back to Europe,
Sent the quarryman back as a hunter for science into the Urals.

IX
He was drawn to the Alps and his mother’s tomb, and he tuned his ear
Once more to cuckoos and the clinking of goatbells over the cosy valleys.
But lonelier vistas fanned in his heart, where feats are more fateful than
airing.
In Nasswald the best of guides was a batman still to landlords.
Conrad packed his Chamonix hat and shipped for the shining cones of
New Zealand.
He conquered Cook and lived to cull, from the grist of a slide, the bodies
Of men who had talked a safer route; then he mocked the mountain’s fame
By a grand traverse of its peaks with one wiry determined female of sixty.

X
Yet the redribbed valleys and rushing rivers of Yoho ran in his veins,
The sudden splash of marigolds over the soft new grass
By banks of snow in the green March forests of Spillimacheen,—
The bell of a cayuse falling and fading through candlestick firs
Under the blue-hung glacier cirques. And always there grew in his heart
The hugeness of Yu-hai-has-kun, highest of all the giants of Canada,
The monster unconquered and murderous, icerobed and stormcrowned
Robson.

XI
Twice he had failed; more than twice he had climbed the neighbouring forts
To reconnoitre anew. This upturned realm of rock and neve
Kept its own weather, had sudden frosts and winds, and thaws as sudden,
To con for his diary, along with the tracks and times of recurrent cascades,
Of icefall and avalanche. Trained like a Baldhead to read through airy miles
The angle and span of a ledge, the strength of a snowbridge, he spun his
campaign,
Waited his weather and comrades,—then challenged Mt. Robson.

XII
He struck straight up the hanging glacier, high up a hundred Niagaras,
Hewed steps in the frozen torrents almost as fast as the boots of McCarthy
And Foster could follow, the spun snow and the iceflakes freezing on lashes.
He looked at the poker face of the peak, read in its cloudmask
A frost that might root for an hour the lethal rocks, read his own cards,—
His companions’ quickness and courage—then raced up the chute of an
avalanche.
They climbed like cats with ears tensed and voice mute lest a call
Unseal tumultuous death. Then over an uprobed snowdeep
And under icebridges dun and splintered, outflanking the glacier’s forehead
Into the final cloistered bergschrund swiftly they cut,
Roping on glazing rockwall, and out into wind arrowed with ice.
Then up the endless sharpening shoulder, till a couloir terraced
By snowbutts baulked them, a fortress garnish with sixty-foot feathers of
rime.
Chipping finger and toe-hold by turn they tugged ever upward,
Balanced in glimmering emptiness, betting for life with a bootnail,
A bend of a thumb, and a rope frozen rigid and colder than cable,
Till over an overhang glaring with icicled teeth they fought to the top.

XIII
There was time but for Bergheil and handshake, a glance through a gash in
the cloud-rug
At the trespassed terrors below, a Tiefblick of dwarfed Mt. Resplendent,
And cobalt lakes that browned at the toy fringes of islands.
Then to face the descent, already the sun far sloping,
And cold seizing their limbs. While his snowblind comrades clung
To the slick rope, Conrad sought for a safer way back,
Drew them over traverses devious and daring, down
Four thousand icy feet to the first safe ledge.
There with jokes he spurred them from coma all through the frigid wind
and the night.
And at dawn he led them foot-torn and faint over the last glittering glacier,
The last of the rotted rocks, back to the blessed lake,
To the firm flattening trail, and sleep, and to fame enduring
In all who remember mountains, back from the first manning of Robson,
Of a premier peak of the globe, a pinnacle worthy its conqueror.

XIV
Maybe his victories were virtueless, empty as Polar voyagings,
No more real than the peerings of Herschel, or the wreaths of the runners in
Pindar.
His muscles were clamped in the follies of boys and his mind was incurably
curious;
So he climbed as another would read and because he was reared to the game.
He is dead and his conquests faded, for he failed to carve them from flesh;
He seized his land for no sovereign, and left it uncivilized still.
He was reckless only in rescuing comrades, and this was his proudest record:
That on stormiest edge or through deepest abyss he led no man to his hurt.
A glory perverse? And whose is not, in the far vision of Time?
The glow of our rocks is richer by the life of an Austrian goatherd,
Of Conrad Kain the Mountain man, of Conrad Kain the Canadian.

Republished from National Home Monthly December, 1949, with the kind permission of Mr. Birney.

Reproduced in the Canadian Alpine Journal, 1951, pgs 97-100
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 22, 2018 - 08:38pm PT
Having spoken to the Rev a bit ago, he says that he feels much better than he did before he began his chemotherapy. He's a bit stronger and he sounds very good over the phone.

Hope it gets even better, my friend.
feralfae

Boulder climber
Almost solving the metaphysical mystery
Mar 22, 2018 - 08:56pm PT
Oh, good for Rev!
Thank you for sharing the good news, Mouse.

It's raining here, on all this snow, with snowing and rain probably through Sunday.
But you know it will freeze at night.

Mouse, I hope it is pleasant, comfortable, and an easy time while you are sorting, simplifying, and preparing to move. I hope you have more than enough help, and then of course a proper celebration when the move is made. Best wishes.

Now it is time for me to brush my teeth.
F*F
zBrown

Ice climber
Mar 22, 2018 - 08:59pm PT
I never signed on with FB.

feralfae

Boulder climber
Almost solving the metaphysical mystery
Mar 22, 2018 - 09:19pm PT
zB, that's because you are smarter than the average communicator.
FB appears to be having some issues, due to its own over-reaching.
But I also think that we must assume that anything we say, write, telephone, or otherwise communicate, perhaps with the exception of carrier pigeons and semaphore, is in the public domain.

So I figure the best we can do about it is just write good words as much as our general temperament allows. :) Teach Peace through Photons. I just made the up. :)
F*F

and no one has read my plea for an exceptional name change at the profile level. Sigh.
I must go brush my teeth now.
GoodNight Flames. Good Night Taco.
F*F
neebee

Social climber
calif/texas
Mar 22, 2018 - 09:37pm PT
hey there say, ... feralfae... hang in there, help may still come, as to name-change... i don't know... happygrrl somehow changed hers...

i will ask her about it...

and say, this is for all those
walking through the hwys and by-ways, of the flames, on their
way to various climbs:


[Click to View YouTube Video]
zBrown

Ice climber
Mar 22, 2018 - 09:46pm PT
Well Lenore Goldberg never joined up either






Briefly, ST tries to sell you stuff, FB SELLS YOUR STUFF



mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 22, 2018 - 11:58pm PT
George Szell sells magic fire to the multitude--Cleveland Symphony
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CxaCtJAY58

Cleveland S.O./Szell -- Wagner/Seigfried's Funeral
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uka8ykFDw2U
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 23, 2018 - 07:17am PT
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/03/22/bye-facebook-hello-instagram-users-make-beeline-facebook-owned-social-network/433361002/

Some 800 million people log in to Instagram at least once a month, 500 million of them every day.

Thinking of switching to Instagram from FB? Think twice, it's owned by li'l Z, too. Price: One billion bucks in 2012.

mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 23, 2018 - 02:05pm PT
The sunset hour last night...weather clearing off.
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 23, 2018 - 05:55pm PT
http://takimag.com/article/invasion_of_the_anti_tourists_joe_bob_briggs/print#axzz5AceihKoT
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 23, 2018 - 06:05pm PT
I been sellin' stuff today. Sold the bunkbed for a hundred to the same folks who bought ol' Red.

I just signed over the pink slip on ol' Red to Vern and Dawn when I realized she had grandkids here in Merced. I asked could she use a bunk set and she jumped on it.

One less worry.

hooblie

climber
from out where the anecdotes roam
Mar 23, 2018 - 08:08pm PT
and if you need help completing the dismemberment of a certain upholstered chair
into pieces small enough to launch out the window, as you know, i got the chops

oops, redundant music pick removed. try this one:

[Click to View YouTube Video]

new life: http://youtu.be/z2qsECm6J2U
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 24, 2018 - 01:59am PT
Tad, I'd be honored to get you all turned around in the Valley. My guiding is not worth much any longer, since I haven't been to the place but two days in the last two years...shortened Facelifts.

But that sounds good. I have a tent, but probably won't bother as it's just an overnighter. Legally, you're not supposed to sleep in campers in the parking for Yellow Pine, so you might want a ground pad & tarp, which is what I'll do. I have a petition in for a site. We should decide whose name it will go under. I cede the honor if you're driving.

hooblie, the sad-sack recliner is probably leaving Middle Earth today. I found out from Shelly, the night manager, that there'll be folks in the office downstairs today to help folks like me out with packing, etc. They'll provide boxes, people to help pack them, and even a moving van. (Can you believe it that a corporation is so concerned about it's renters? It's tough, I know.)

So the old foldo is going to get tossed today, it seems. And I'll have a lot of stuff DONE and READY.

I'm glad to see that you've decided to come to the memorial, too, Richard. I can't say whether Mathis will want to attend the gig, but that would be great if he feels up to it. I'll make sure he's aware of the date.

Yeah, it's the middle of the night, but I have had several hours of sack time. I walked to the Grocery Outlet this evening just before sundown. I intended only to walk to the Asian market up a block and a half on Main, but THEY'VE CLOSED!!

So I trucked all the way down to the GO and the EBT card was refused, as it was reported (by me) lost or stolen and they have not sent a replacement (two weeks now). I hadn't tried using the card since my phone conversation with the Food Stamps rep (a for-real chowderhead), and was half expecting it might work, but it didn't, which means the card is still in the mail. (I hope it's in the mail!)

So anyhow, I bought a little food and came home and ate and watched the end of The Hired Hand, a pretty decent "new age" western from 1971 starring Peter Fonda and Warren Oates. Fonda's first directing experience (very good acting) and a pretty inventive soundtrack by Langhorne.
3.5 stars out of 4. The pace was just a step too slow...you figured things out in advance, whereas surprised viewers are happy viewers. On Youtube.
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 24, 2018 - 02:23am PT
There is little violent crime in Venice, a serenely beautiful floating city of mystery and magic, history and decay. But the evil that does occasionally rear its head is the jurisdiction of Guido Brunetti, the suave, urbane vice-commissario of police and a genius at detection. Now all of his admirable abilities must come into play in the deadly affair of Maestro Helmut Wellauer, a world-renowned conductor who died painfully from cyanide poisoning during an intermission at La Fenice.

It's odd that you picked "Caruso" to post, hooblie.

I'm re-reading this mystery I read several years ago.

The whole Brunetti series is a treat and a window into the lives of Venetians by a lady who's lived among them for a long time teaching English.

I swapped this at the VA Clinic for a book I just finished.* I checked and this Brunetti series is available on DVD for purchase...in German, subtitled in English!
hooblie

climber
from out where the anecdotes roam
Mar 24, 2018 - 02:33am PT
well, i discovered that i had posted caruso on the jazz page two days ago, and the flames is a first run outfit if i ever saw one, so check out the replacement pick, no charge!
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 24, 2018 - 05:13am PT
We do reprises here, buddy. But originality and honesty are prime ingredients of the fare hereabouts. I'm blessed with friends who appreciate that.

This is not a Glen Denny photo. I seriously wonder if Glen has ever climbed at Tahquitz. Does anyone know?Rhythm is probably the hardest word to spell for 9 out of 10 of us. And it's something not everyone has in spades.

Sep 26, 2017, zBrown posted this one. We'll run it again cuz it's on topic, as much as anything on this thread can be, nawmean?[Click to View YouTube Video]Can't touch this.

DMT, you back from TX yet?
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