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December 19, 2019
Hi Folks,
WHEW, it's damn cold and the wind is howling. I mean REALLY HOWLING! Honestly, it woke me up shaking the house at 2 AM! It was +5 here at Cathedral Ledge & -3 in Crawford Notch with 30-40 mph gusts at 10am this morning. At one point I couldn't even open my car door against the wind - BRUTAL... When I started to walk into the North End to check out the pillars the wind was blowing so hard that you could hear limbs cracking and falling off the trees! It made me pretty nervous so I decided to take pics from the road. Color me safe... [wry grin] Needless to say I'm very happy to see that the ice is coming back so well, and I gotta think we will be in great shape by the weekend.
That said, as cold as it was today I was very surprised to actually see a couple of folks on Standard Route at Frankenstein this morning, tho there's no way I would have been out there in those conditions. With the wind chill it had to be in the very negative teens. I watched them both constantly shaking their hands to warm them up and at one point one of them looked as if they were hiding behind the pillar on the right in the cave to get out of the wind. Unsurprising... I saw that a couple of friends did Monkey Wrench & Cleft this morning and it looked good. Apparently Marc Chauvin and client did pitch 1 of Standard to Cathedral as well. The pics I saw looked, shall we say, entertaining.
So we are back into winter full-bore. Still not a lot of snow here in the Valley and that's fine by me. But the ice season is here & that's a YUGE plus.
As I was putting the pictures together this afternoon I realized just how much I have to do at times to get them ready to post. Sure, I could just toss 'em up, but I'm sure that's not you all would want me to do. Today the whole process was particularly time consuming due to brutal cold taking them (-3 in the Notch), blowing snow (30-40ph gusts) and constantly changing light. Sure, some shots are always great right off, but some I have to play with a lot in Photoshop to get them useful. Just so you have a sense of what goes into editing & processing the 50+ pictures I post every week, here are 3 examples...
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/dracula_before_after.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/MtWillard_before_after.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/NumberedGullies_before_after.jpg
I have to do all of this editing manually and it can be very time consuming. Not to mention driving up and taking the pictures, writing the Report, posting everything on FaceBook and NEClimbs and formatting and sending it out in email form. It's probably 6 hours every week.
So I truly hope you find this weekly White Mountain Report and NEClimbs.com web site are enough to warrant making a small donation to support what I do. As always, absolutely any amount is welcome, so please take a minute to and go ON LINE and make your donation via PayPal. And you don't actually NEED a PayPal account, you can use almost any credit card. Just click the link below:
http://www.neclimbs.com/index.php?PageName=donation_fundraiser
Of course you can also contribute via check or money order if you like. Make it out to NEClimbs and send it right here:
NEClimbs
92 Bow Lane
North Conway, NH 03860
The time and expenses of the running and maintaining NEClimbs.com and putting out The White Mountain Report continue all year. PLEASE REMEMBER, it's your contribution that makes this newsletter and the NEClimbs web site viable. You can see many of the Reports on NEClimbs.com web site, I've archived them from as far back as September of 1999! To get a sense of the popularity of the site, current traffic as of October 2019 on NEClimbs.com is about 127,447 UNIQUE site visits a day, generating roughly 1,900,000 monthly "HITS". The White Mountain Report newsletter also goes out to over 1,200 subscribers weekly! If you're one of those, please consider making a donation to the site.
Thank you once again for all of your support...
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/StandardRoute_climber_1.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/StandardRoute_climber_2.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/CathedralLedge.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/Diagonal.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/Repentance_Remission.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/Unicorn.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/Frankenstein.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/AngelCakes.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/Shoestring.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/MtWillard.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/MtWillard_UpperTier.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/LeftHandMonkeyWrench.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/Whitehorse-EchoRoof.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/Whitehorse-slabs.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/SnotRocket.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/northEnd-pillars.jpg
Rode the Marshall on Tuesday just as it started to snow and it was quite beautiful out there on the trails. Tho nothing was actually packed down, in general Lucille's, Lager's and Shumway were all quite rideable, tho I do have studded tires on the fat tire bike. ;-) That said, the area surrounding the Christmas tree was covered with ice and there was an icy patch about halfway down middle Shumway. I didn't do any of the rock "stunts" I usually do and was somewhat cautious.
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/Bike_1.jpg
http://www.neclimbs.com/wmr_pix/20191219/Bike_2.jpg
Up on one of the Mount Washington Valley's finest crags and want to know what that climb you're looking at is? Or maybe you're on your way up from Boston and want to check out the Ice Report for your upcoming weekend plans. Or more likely, you're at work just want to daydream about your next adventure. Well if you have a smart phone handy, you can get to NEClimbs from anywhere you have cell service. While it doesn't offer every single feature of the site and it's not an "app", in mobile form, it does do a whole lot and is very useful. Here is the live link to the mobile version of NEClimbs:
http://www.neclimbs.com/mobile
Check it out and if you have issues on your specific phone, please feel free to let me know.
Join us and LIKE us on Facebook. I'll try and post interesting pix every Thursday and the latest Ice Report in the season, tho certainly not the whole Report. Here's where you can check it out:
http://www.facebook.com/NEClimbs/
Remember - climb hard, ride the steep stuff, stay safe and above all BE NICE,
Al Hospers
The White Mountain Report
North Conway, New Hampshire
| Boulder /n./ place close to the ground to practice falling. When climbers aren't climbing, they like to sharpen their skills by bouldering on large rocks located in places frequented by impressionable tourists. Because bouldering is done without protection, the rule is never to climb higher than you'd like to fall. That is why so many climbers stand around discussing boulder problems instead of climbing them. |
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