Posts by Ben Crowell
When you're lead climbing, the most common way for the rope to hang naturally, if you don't do anything special, is usually between your legs. Is this OK on rock? On ice? Why or why not? On rock, ...
If it "easily came out of the rock," then it was at best useless and at worst a safety hazard, because of the possibility that someone might naively trust it. Removing it was a public service. ...
Yes, this is perhaps the most important question ever to be asked in this forum, touching as it does not merely upon matters of life and death but on questions of ... beer ... itself! I have hea...
The terms to google on seem to be "turbidity," "total suspended solids," and "total dissolved solids." TSS refers to solids that can be eliminated by a filter, and TDS to solids that are in particl...
Here are some statistics on coyote attacks versus dog attacks in the US, on a per-year basis. (See notes at the end on how I got the numbers.) dog bites: 4.6 million fatal attacks by dogs on huma...
I normally use cheap, lightweight water bottles to carry my water when I'm hiking. However, sometimes I'm with people who use bladders such as a CamelBak, and I offer to go and fill water bottles, ...
Consider using freezer-bag cooking. You boil your water in a pot, then pour it into a freezer bag with your food to cook. Advantages: No dishes to wash. Zero environmental impact. Makes it easier...
The standard mountaineering textbook Freedom of the Hills has a long discussion of fixed lines, and they state simply that you use a mechanical ascender on them. This seems odd to me, since for mos...
There are many types of specialized harnesses, including harnesses for sport, trad, and mountaineering. Personally I use the same harness for trad and mountaineering, and it works fine. For trad c...
The photo below shows my new ATC Nano. Sweet! This is an innovative new belay device that is definitely going to be in my ultralight mountaineering setup from now on. After all, when you're bagging...
Throwing a dead body down a ravine in a rugged mountain area is a morally blameless act, much like throwing your biodegradable orange peel into a bush. Crows and coyotes will rapidly take care of i...
This is not a complete answer but is just my attempt to analyze, after discussion with ShemSeger, the issue of what the Munter does for you as opposed to a Prusik. It seems that there are several d...
I recently gave a belay from above to a group of five people who were all doing the same single-pitch climb and then being lowered off. (In this case the reason for belaying from above was that the...
I used to use a liquid hydrocarbon-fuel stove for backpacking, but I hated it, one of the main reasons being that the stove and/or fuel bottle were always leaking and stinking up my car and pack. M...
One of the fun things about tarping is that every tarp setup is different. For that reason it's hard to make generalizations. Also, it may make a difference what environment you're in. In some plac...
Wikipedia has a simple treatment of this problem, as well as some notes on at least one of the reasons why the simple treatment is only a very rough approximation. Let be the impact force quoted b...
One of the classic applications of polarized sunglasses is to skiing. Light from the sun is unpolarized, but when it is reflected from a surface at a glancing angle, it becomes highly polarized. Wh...
The basic idea of polarizing glasses is not to block all light, it's to block light that undergoes a glancing reflection, such as sunlight coming to your eye off of water or snow from near the hori...
Plantar fasciitis is a degenerative (not inflammatory) repetitive stress injury (RSI). Studies using radioactive tracers have shown that the rate of tissue replacement in connective tissues is ofte...
I'm not super experienced with snow anchors, but basically a snow bollard can be a bomber anchor if the snow is hard -- hard enough that you have to use an ice ax to chop the trench. You can back i...
If you're not walking on very steep slopes, there is basically no special technique to learn. On steep slopes, you can use many of the same foot techniques as with crampons, and in fact many snows...
The graph looks exactly like a bunch of graphs in House and Johnston, Training for the New Alpinism, pp. 334-337, except for the scale on the time axis. The ones in House and Johnston are for moder...
Altitude acclimatization is not just a single change in your body but a long list of different things that are going on. There is a nice chart on p. 326 of House and Johnston, Training for the New ...
Googling seems to show that the conventional wisdom is that it's not a good idea to chain carabiners together: Another thing to avoid is chaining carabiners together to lengthen a connection in...
Two other answers have given methods for measuring this on-site. The trouble is that there's a lot of behavioral and sociological research showing that this doesn't really work. Once you get to the...
