Notes from My Climbing Diary
The pages linked to below represent a collection of notes and
recollections from my days of climbing.
These climbs pre-date digital cameras;
I had a number of slides scanned professionally but scanned most myself.
See
below
for technical details.
In preparing these accounts I am struck by how much I have forgotten,
how few pictures were taken and how beautiful the Cascades are.
After taking up my academic career,
I found that climbing is not like riding a bicycle:
one cannot return to climbing at a high standard after a long absence
and climb safely.
Furthermore,
I lost contact with people I had climbed with and trusted;
finding and developing trust in new partners would have required more
effort than I could spare from my career.
Now I get my thrills by reading about climbing.
Completed Accounts:
Random Stories
(How Many Pull-ups?)
(The Difference Between Stupid and Crazy)
(I Meet Jim Whittaker)
(Ice Climbing "Ringer”)
Still in Preparation:
Some Notes About the Pictures
My collection is a mixture of pictures taken by me and the people I
climbed with.
Almost all of us took slides
(positives)
rather than negatives since we could then project them up to large sizes
for group viewing.
It was common for us to get together periodically to show each other the
slides we had taken and make lists of the copies we would like from each
other.
Most of the pictures that include me were taken by someone else.
On rare occasions I did hand someone my camera and have them take a
picture of me,
but we generally relied on our swapping sessions to get pictures of
ourselves.
Most of the pictures I took used a
Canon FT QL
body with a small zoom lens and a large zoom lens.
I don't recall the ranges of the lenses,
other that one of them included 50mm and the other went up to 200mm.
I sometimes used a
2x tele-converter
to increase the magnification of telephoto shots.
Very little was automatic on this camera;
focus and
F-stop
were done manually,
but one could let the camera set the exposure time.
Most of the people I climbed with preferred
35mm
Kodachrome
film with an
ASA
of 25 because the light in the mountains is usually intense.
However,
I used the more sensitive ASA 64 film because many of the climbs
started at very early hours when the light was poor.
Besides,
I could always increase the F-stop of the lens to limit the light,
and the larger the F-stop,
the better the
depth of field,
which allowed me to take pictures with people in the foreground and
scenery in the background with both in reasonable focus.
A 35mm slide is approximately 1.375 inches by 0.9 inches.
When scanned and digitized at high resolution,
the result is an approximately 3,600 by 2,400
pixel
(8.5 mega-pixel)
JPEG
picture stored in an 8MB file.
Since most people's computer monitors are about 1,200 by 800 pixels,
I create smaller copies of the pictures for the web pages so they fit on
the screen and use less storage space.