Oregon winter wilderness kicking humanity's tail this month

[bull]

"A rescue team assembled Sunday night to launch a search at dawn today -- just as another winter storm arrives -- for three climbers missing since Friday on Mount Hood."
http://www.oregonlive.com/search/index.ssf?/base/metro_east_news/1165820160116740.xml?oregonian?lctop&coll=7


"The plight of Kim, a 35-year-old senior editor for a high-tech media company in San Francisco [CNET], transfixed the country after his wife and two young daughters were found Monday on a narrow road, high above the creek, where they had been stuck in snow for nine days with little food or supplies."
http://www.oregonlive.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news/1165467334304590.xml?oregonian?lctop&coll=7

[Charger_Fan]

IMO, those climbers are complete idiots & deserve what they get for going on that kind of climb in DECEMBER!! The very fact that they're endangering the lives of the rescuers trying to find their sorry asses during hellish temperatures, winds & blizzards, makes it 10 times worse.
The news says they're experienced climbers...soooo...if they're so experienced, why are they climbing to 11,000 feet in DECEMBER!?!? Go commune with nature at the mountain top during JULY, you friggin' dorks!


That Kim family deal is just sad. I'm glad the remainder of the family was found alive.

[bull]

I tend to agree with you. And from what I've heard you can rent radio or satellite location transmitters for $5 a day at Timberline Lodge. That's pretty cheap insurance considering the alternative.

Lots of excitement here lately. Here's some more frags due to Ma nature here this week:

"Oregon's fiercest storm in more than a decade knocked down trees, closed roads and wiped out power to 350,000 homes and businesses Thursday night, leaving people to scramble for everything from a gas station to a laptop connection.

A Seaside couple were killed in a fire caused by candles used to light their home, and the U.S. Coast Guard was searching for three sailors after finding their boat on a Lincoln City beach.

Wind gusts topped 100 mph along the Oregon coast and 50 mph in Portland late Thursday. Portland General Electric dealt with power failures affecting 250,000, nearly one-third of the company's customers."

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1166254146194220.xml&coll=7

[472 R/T SE]

I don't know if you remember the LARGE firs up on the ridge @ our house bull, but the streets are hardly noticeable right now with limbs and small branches.  One house up on the hill's roof is completely covered in branches.  I told my wife when she got home Thursday that that was the worse I've seen those big firs sway in the wind since we moved here.
Our power blinked a few times but we never lost it for any amount of time.  I use to think because we were so close to the hospital that's why we never loose power, but I read where they were running on generators.  Our power is underground but there's poles feeding it.


I imagine my old workplace is busier than alll heck picking trees up.  Insurance money...we used to lick our chops on those jobs.

Wicked storm combine that with wet ground = a mess.  I hope you and yours are AOK.

[bull]

Thanks Mike, we're all good here. In fact it's been business as usual in East County since we get so much wind anyway. In fact it was calmer than usual here during the wind storm because it was blowing the other direction for a change.

I know about the trees. Back in '96 during the floods I lived in Sherwood near the Tualatin River and we had four of them come down on a fence behind our house one night when the wind was bad. That night I decided to chain the tree in front of our little single wide house to the front-end loader of a tractor to keep it from blowing over onto the front door because I saw the saturated ground around the tree roots actually bulging with every wind gust. During that time the river took a three-mile shortcut and flooded the valley we lived above and one road in was completely covered with water for about 1/4 mile.

[Shakey]

Hope all of you folks on the West coast fared well during that storm last night.  The Canadian news covered what happened in BC and touched on our cousins to the South.

[bull]

They just found one of the climbers dead: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061218/ap_on_re_us/missing_climbers