But the real bonus was Shane and the Slalom Committee getting an ‘Agricultural Release’ of  water from Wellington Damn which creates a wonderful, short narrow and technical WW course a few km downstream.  A  2 day training camp and comp was quickly organized and we all loved it.  Demelza capsized about a dozen times and rolled up each time!  Kira did her first roll in anger and Tark  and Liam showed great guts in getting back on the horse after some nasty swims.  We still can’t work out how Tark was the only person to get airborne!  A big thanks to Zlatan and Richard for putting the wires up on Friday, and to the other judges and helpers

Here is a Google map showing the exact location of the start of the course – its the obvious parking and chute on the bottom right.

Kira was keen to climb on, so I led up the fantastic ‘Memorial Crack’.  Climbing as good as it gets.  Then we had a 15 minute hike up the woods to the base of the ‘Squamish Buttress’ slab.  These easy pitches were harder and better than I remembered (we just managed to link them into 1 with a 60m rope).  More walking and scrambling and we could see ‘The Buttress’ above us.  The normal finish is a short 5.9 crack and then a no nonsense pitch of 5.10c.  But the genius of ‘Buttface’ is that you can avoid the last two pitches — instead head left through a small cave and  boulder on up  to a  bolted  wall.  Its 5.9, but a bit different to the rest of the climbing.  You have to pull on some side-pulls with not much for the feet, heading up left.  There is a bolt or two just where you need them.  Then you walk left along a ramp to a two bolt belay (pictured)The 2nd pitch heads back right to a chimney.  It looks really hard from below (can we be lost?), but if you put your back to the rock some amazing foot-holds appear and its ok, then some good cams, and a monster jug .  Its now raining quite hard and we are expecting to scramble off, BUT this final scramble is actually loose and hard to protect — I actually thought it was dangerous, and given that there are bolts on the route, I think one here would be good.

We Enjoy the summit glow for a while before the traditional getting slightly lost on the tourist trail descent, and grabbing our bikes from the camp to ride back to the car (about 11 hours and 15 roped pitches all up).  Thanks  to Sonny and the guys who did the work establishing this route.  You can read about that here.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Kurt Vonnegut

Yesterday I was in my first bike race for 24 years, the Squamish “Test of Metal”.  I think its a great race, not because its long (67km of hilly single track mountain biking), or technical (some ‘black’), or hard (it starts with a vicious 300m climb), but because of the spirit of the competitors and volunteers.  People are really good about letting you past, or asking if they can overtake on the narrow sections.  They stop and help each other.  It feels like the whole town is involved somehow -  handing out food, or doing first aid, or racing.  My favourite part was ‘Roller Coaster’, you are aware of hundreds of people cheering you on, but can’t actually look up from the twisty trail!  The biggest rush was making some of the bridges on ‘The Plunge’.  The hardest part was the top of ‘Bonk Hill’, which mercifully had a food station at the top.  I can’t believe how much fruit, cake, gel, and sport drink I consumed at the 5 feed stations!  The most embarrasing part was overtaking a lady on ‘Endo’ not realising that I was potentially pushing her close to a cliff-edge (sorry!). I nearly cried twice, not in pain but joy, once going past the Smoke Bluffs which reminds me strongly of the time with the whole family last year, and the other was at the start.  The enitre 1000 people observed a minute of silence, and listen to a beautiful solo rendition of ‘O Canada’ by a young girl.  No flags, fights, or flashy patriotism, just 1000 people on bikes proud of the country they have, and intent on enjoying it.

When the song ended the racing seemed to just begin (a couple of minutes later for me seeded to do 4.5 hours) While riding I saw sally, Tessa Amy, Dave, Kira, Mike, Peanut, John Helig and Adam, all cheering me on like they meant it -  thank guys.  And thanks to all the people I have never met who volunteered to hand out food, and be there if I had a real crash.  During the race I caught up Dave S, and Brian on the hill, but Dave got past me at the top feed station, and I never saw him again!  My time was 4 hours 11 minutes (450th out of 1100 odd  registered from the results), which is about an hour quicker than I was expecting.  It rained all friday night, so the trail was very muddy.  If I do it again I’m going to take clear glasses, as I had to stop many times to get mud out of the eyes.  I am also going to seed myself higher up, and go harder up the first hill to try and avoid some of the bunching up.  Finally thanks to some other riders who dragged me around some training trails recently: Maureen, Scott, Kira, Demelza and Tarquin, and a huge thanks to Dave and Karen for putting Kira and I up.

Today was the SPC Howe Sound ‘Toonie’ race and I got to paddle Daves fast new surf-ski.  Loads of fun, but colder and flatter than I am used to!

Tomorrow

Here is our Alice Lake base camp

And our car loaded up with the toys at Dave’s house

And Kira riding to school (on a trail she helped build in winter).  We saw a black bear on the cliff just after I took this photo!

Tark would prefer the new BMX track though…

Mt Haycock

We still had time for a quick game of nighttime/daytime

The responses are interesting:  I got 5 yes, 1 no-reply, 2 considering.

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I have a facebook page, but I don’t access it all that often.  Other people seem to be on it all the time.  It is very easy to use, you can post lots of pics up on it, and you can keep up to date with what other people are doing whenever you want.

The main reservation is that people misuse it like it’s nickname ‘stalkbook’ suggests.  But this is avoided by either not putting anything on there that you wouldn’t want everyone to know!  It is a way of people looking other people up and seeing there life, but you can keep picture galleries ‘private’ which limits who gets access to it to the people you are friends with, and I’m sure you can limit it even further by actually picking who you’d like to be able to see things but I haven’t searched the settings that thoroughly.

I don’t have access to it at work like my email, which is a really good thing because it can be the worlds biggest time waster the amount of stuff, games, things post, what and who to look up etc…

So I say go for it, it’s really easy to use and just keep whatever you put on there simple and things that you don’t mind everyone looking at!  Not too hard really!

Plus you get invitations to things through it and I find this happens a lot more with people like xxxx and his age group, and you won’t get invited via the usual methods…  not because they dont want you to come, it’s just that they assume everyone has a facebook page!

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Yep suck it up and “enjoy” gen me . Lookn forward to seeing you in the hood again mate al good here

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Really useful for keeping in touch with people, especially those who lose their phones and change numbers regularly. People definately overuse it, but that comes down to self discipline.

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Yeah I do use it, it’s probably the main way I keep in touch with people these days. It’s just a few old fossils who still use email

Not sure whether I’d call it “useful”, other than that you can see what people are doing (or want you to see) with fairly minimal effort. Plus I get updates from other stuff like bands, music, authors, software, Android, Perth festival etc so you can keep up to date on that kind of stuff in one place.

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Yeah get on it. It’s free and I’ve pulled quite a few roots through it plus it’s the best way to keep up with what everyone’s up to if it annoys you then don’t sign on as much.

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I did have a facebook page, but the only people that wanted to be my friends were people I once went to high school with and so I killed the page. Whilst had it I mentioned to xxxxx and as I shut mine down she started and still uses hers.

The ‘nickname’ Stalkbook is excellent as I recently read a novel about a serial rapist who used twitter and facebook and really appreciated his next victims telling him where they were going to be at certain times etc.

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Facebook – hmmm….

xxxx has an account, and gossips endlessly – some of it good i’m sure, but lots of chatty bollocks to people she sees all the time anyway..

Have banned kids from it so far, partly safety, but really – i would rather they did not spend their childhood angst-ing over online comms, but get outside doing stuff – they occasionally use xxxx a/c.

Me?  keep thinking i should, mostly from the perspective of “I’m an internet software developer, I should be familiar with all these kinds of things” but no i’ve avoided it.

I’m not really that curious about it – pretty sure i get it.
I already struggle to get 8 billable hours done, without opening up yet another socket.
Maybe i’m just an anti-social git, or maybe i don’t want to sink into a quagmire of endless trivia.

I can see the benefit of widespread personal directory and comms, but as a natural paranoic commie sceptic – we get most of that with email and thats more democratic.

</rant>

one more tip that seems popular around our friends with teen kids – ensure that mum is subscribed as a facebook friend in a way that can see all messages.