This is my first post on alpinist.com, not that that matters. Anyways, I wanted to post two pictures from a recent trip to the San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado, where a group I was with climbed Wetterhorn Peak, one of the 54 14ers in the state. Hopefully these are considered alpinism/mountaineering pics... if not, I hope you enjoy them anyways! Thanks for taking a look.

I attempted a winter attempt on the East Rib with a 9 member US/Canadian team in December 1987. Most of the climbing was done by me, Ken Reville and our Sherpa Pemba. We reached about 23,000' on the East Rib and were turned back by a big storm. At the same time a large Japanese party was climbing the Bonnington Route. The two who made the main summit perished on their descent.

As a leader of our community and well informed about the effect of global warming, i feel it is my duty to spread awareness of this issue to all concerned authorities, environmentalists, local community and all our mountaineering friends. The natural treasures are for all of us...

I, in keeping with my anonymous internet persona of constant, indignant rage, took this as a glaring example of nanny-state meddling and risk averse "progressive" loony-tunes protecting me from myself.

Public attention in these sports generally focuses on tragedies and as such are highly emotive and sensationalized. Dramatic accounts of accidents and hardships often lead to fierce debates on the merits and ethics of these sports.

Yes, that's right. Ladders. Now, this may blur the line for a climbing website, but I did find it by googling "climbing", so I feel moderately vindicated. Following, is my slightly longer rant that will theoretically tie us back to the actual act of climbing mountains or rocks or small rocks or whatever else it is that we do..

"Mike Robertson (45) of Wareham, Dorset, the deep-water soloist, photographer and recent Banff award-winning author of Deep Water was arrested on Monday whilst climbing the Eiffel Tower in Paris. "Mike was protesting against Total's - the French oil company, based in Paris - continued involvement in Burma..."

"The sky was stunningly blue and clear and there was no wind; you only get a few days like this each summer on Antarctica's highest mountains. Where we expected to encounter snow between the bands of rock we found hard, clear "water ice" similar to that on the frozen waterfalls we had climbed in Europe and North America. As its name would suggest, such ice is formed directly from water, usually running water. It is not the compacted snow or hard blue glacial ice that is almost everywhere else in Antarctica."

Oh yeah? Really? As if I didn't have enough to be concerned about, now I learn that a chemical secreted by ants can cause rappel slings to fail. Great.

In 2005, a two-man Spanish team took seven days to climb the route in alpine style. Our aim was to repeat the route in alpine style and confirm that Pakistan is a great destination for these kinds of ascents.

On summit day we thought we could simply climb to the ridge and follow it to the glacier, which would lead to some easy rock towards the summit. How wrong we were.

We'd both wanted to do it. We lay there on the ground, shivering in the night air as much from fear as from the cold.

Mark Twight apparently was also experiencing hallucinations (or just a bad memory) as he appears to have confused two passages from Snow in the Kingdom.

A recent perusal of Mark Twight's self aggrandizing (not to mention downright brilliant) "Kiss or Kill" brought me to the following passage, in which Twight references partner Barry Blanchard's out of body experience on the mountain: "I assumed it was a benign hypoxic hallucination, remembering a story in which Ed Webster saw a taco truck pull up next to him on the South Summit."

"They should have signs and stuff and trash cans outside," said Pham, who climbs regularly in the safety of a San Francisco gym. "I don't think they even clean your rocks off for you out there."

This is the first time I've see Alpinist late to post news. An outstanding climb was done by Tomaz over a week ago.

The climb starts upon the saddle of "The Worlds Sva" which is a obvious feature easily seen from Highway E6, about 2km north from the ferry. The dihedral system is the most spectacular part of the wall. Approach from the road took us about half an hour.

Friday 13 July It takes an entire day for Hal and Virgil to traverse 8m in an attempt to find a line of weakness the overhanging section on the big wall. Virgil Places a bolt by hand in order to retreat from this position and leave a solid anchor to ascend to the next day. Bernard, Ben and Markus climb a short icefall to the East of base camp.

I'm recently a Wyoming Girl, but having spent a few years in the unshorn-leg-hair land of Oregon, this still feels like it hits close to home. The following is excerpted from a larger piece that appeared in the Northwest Mountaineering Journal about last December's well publicized—or completely over-hyped—series of fatalities on Mt. Hood.

On July 22nd we reckoned the approach to the base of the South face and assessed the real magnitude of the challenge. The wall only grew taller and more vertical as we came closer. We roped up in the middle of the glacier to cross some crevasses, checked out the start of the climb and came back to camp to sleep for a few hours before the start of what would prove to be the most demanding adventure of our lives.