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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Seashell in the frozen sand today:
I've never seen the Atlantic more calm.
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MH2
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 3, 2009 - 07:04pm PT
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I've never done a sea cliff climb, what about all the bird sh#t?
Thanks for the surf picture - soothing yet energizing, too. It is a cousin of a family of pictures I really like, where there is some everyday ordinary peaceful scene in the foreground, in this case the boat, and something a little crazy in the distance, in this case the wave.
As to bird sh#t, there is a little on the traverse I do. If I find or get a good picture, it will show up here, don't worry.
To get sea cliffs covered in bird sh#t, which do exist, you need sea birds that nest on the cliffs, lots of them. The British sea cliff afficionados also tell us about the gannet, a bird that defends its nest by up-chucking mackerel eye-ball soup on anything approaching from below.
I haven't been on scene for that or for a "sea-bird defecating from the top-most pinnacle", another British sea cliff thing, but I have had a grebe launch explosively into flight from a dark crevice over my head, and it put the pigeon experience to shame.
Also, on the traverse I like so much, or maybe its just the convenience, I was once innocently zooming along across territory intimately familiar, when my hand came down on something icky. On closer look it seemed to be something a sea gull had tried to digest and failed. Perhaps a starfish stomach. It had the lowest coefficient of friction I've ever encountered, waaay below teflon, ice, and snot. Combined. Just getting it on my fingers would make me fall down, even in the middle of Nebraska.
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TLloyd-Davies
Social climber
Santa Clara, ca
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Well, it really is hard to beat California weather. Even Northern California
Pebble Wrestlers
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Been going for lots of walks by the shining sea with our dog lately. Yesterday:
It's been brisk along the Gulf of Maine.
But I can remember warmer times along a different sea last year.
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MH2
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 5, 2009 - 11:30am PT
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Wonderful pictures. They stimulate and leave room for the imagination.
California, again, I presume, from the Life Magazine photo collection:
actress Carloe Landis climbing on the rocks near the ocean at the beach
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MH2
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 25, 2009 - 01:18pm PT
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down to the sea again
evening sun Jan 02
big wave Jan 08
fog Jan 16 (and several days before and after)
traverse Jan 19 (grim)
above it all Jan 15
guarding its secret Jan 15
indoors Jan 15
above the clouds again Jan 17
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 25, 2009 - 01:29pm PT
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January 15th looks familiar!
We should start a thread about nonplussed gym counter people... no one ever asks "You're from California? what are you doing here?"
Maybe it's just very common. It was fun pulling on plastic and meeting some of the Vancouver afficionados, MH2 being one. But we didn't encounter any Ladybugs, as far as I know. But it does give me an idea...
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MH2
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 25, 2009 - 01:45pm PT
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January 15th looks familiar
I guess they have fog in San Francisco, too?
down to the sea in shoes
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 25, 2009 - 01:50pm PT
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...fog? you mean summer...
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Jan 25, 2009 - 05:30pm PT
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Around this time of year, I think more about oceans. But not the British or Canadian ones.
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MH2
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 26, 2009 - 03:24am PT
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^^^^^^ a rosy cheerful picture with not much chance for the subject to look self-conscious
Around this time of year, I think more about oceans. But not the British or Canadian ones.
A while ago I was googling for "frozen seas" to find who had said that writing breaks the frozen seas within (Kafka, not Dostoevsky (or vice versa)), and Mars showed up. I'd scavenged a bunch of Mars photos for a project and one of them had looked a lot like pack ice with a dirt coating.
So what oceans do you think more about, this time of year?
Tami, it is a Grouse raven. Thanks for mentioning the guy on the stairs. I saw him at the gym this afternoon and my first thought was, "Do I know him?" Until I remembered taking the picture.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Jan 26, 2009 - 10:29am PT
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So what oceans do you think more about, this time of year?
Blue tropical ones with hundred-plus viz, dark walls falling into the deep, reef squid
or big manta rays flapping their wings just out of reach.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Jan 26, 2009 - 12:23pm PT
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I'd scavenged a bunch of Mars photos for a project
What project had you scavenging Mars photos?
I know someone who filled all the floors and table space in his basement with the
highest-quality large prints of Magellan radar imagery from Venus. And this had
to do with oceans.
His theory was that current orthodoxy is wrong. Venusian scientists conventionally
interpret thousands of roughly circular depressions covering the surface of Venus
as being signs of endogenous processes -- mantle upwellings or downwellings, of a
type seen nowhere else in the known universe. They argue thus because some of
those circular depressions don't have the same form as impact craters, which do
account for the circular depressions found on other planets and moons.
Here's where the shining sea comes in. My friend's theory is that the Venusian
landforms that don't look exactly like craters really are craters after all -- but
ones from meteorites striking the seas of an earlier Venus.
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Mighty Hiker
Social climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Jan 26, 2009 - 01:01pm PT
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Back to planet earth, the ladybug detector is twitching and trembling. What creature is it in the upper right hand corner of the photo that MH2 posted on January 25th? Is it the elusive, shy West Vancouver winter ladybug?
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MH2
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 26, 2009 - 05:13pm PT
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Is it the elusive, shy West Vancouver winter ladybug?
Alas, no. By the miracle of photography it is a brassy summer leftover, recorded in the log as Ladybug #3.
Back to outer space.
Is there a more proper term than 'Venusian scientists', like selenogist for those who study Lunar geology?
I took a geology class taught by Tim Mutch. He wrote a book about the Moon, then transferred his attention to Mars. He also climbed at the Gunks in the 50s and has a first ascent or two with Jim McCarthy. He told me that Mars had a kind of terrain, called chaotic, that had no close counterpart elsewhere. That was back in 70/71.
Tim Mutch was director of the team that designed and built the first camera that was landed on Mars.
My Mars project was just a brief re-surfacing of youthful fascination with the Red Planet, but with updated images, in two parts: The Best of Times/My Luv is like a Red Red Rose/Nicky Spence and The Worst of Times/The Eternal/Joy Division.
Much better really to think about the deep blue oceans with
life in them.
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tolman_paul
Trad climber
Anchorage, AK
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Jan 26, 2009 - 05:53pm PT
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Looking at the Chugach Mountains from Montague Island
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Jan 26, 2009 - 06:47pm PT
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Is there a more proper term than 'Venusian scientists', like selenogist for those
who study Lunar geology?
A word exists, cytherology, but it hasn't gained any traction. "Planetary geology"
might seem like a wrong term, but it's widely understood.
Or "Venusian plumology" is a vaguely pejorative term for the orthodox school of thought
on this topic.
Whatever you call it, the field sits in darkness without much new data, compared with
sexier Mars or the Jupiter/Saturn moons.
I was reading an article today about which would be more exciting (deserves the next
space probe), Jupiter's Europa or Saturn's Titan. And in keeping with this thread
topic, the attractions of both are their seas.
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MH2
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 26, 2009 - 11:49pm PT
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THE CHUGACH!
Thanks for that. A nicely mysterious view of them, too.
I had a roomie in Chicago who moved to Anchorage. Or wanted to. I think he had to get through law school in Florida, first. He planned on doing Law of the Sea, a big issue back in the 70s and perhaps still.
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