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TRADITIONAL MOUNTAINEERING ™
www.TraditionalMountaineering.org ™ and also www.AlpineMountaineering.org ™

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Copyright
Any use of material on this site is prohibited without express written permission from the individual Copyright Holder. However, written permission is likely to be granted for limited non-profit educational use by schools and clubs for material attributed to Robert Speik. Copyright© 1999-2013 by Robert Speik. All Rights Reserved.

Fair Use
FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are posting such material on our website for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, and we believe such use is not an infringement of copyright. We believe this posting constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, such material on this site is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes. However, if you are a copyright owner and you disagree, let us know and we will remove your confirmed content from our web.

For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that may go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

*WARNING*
Please read our WARNING and DISCLAIMER! Traditional alpine mountaineering is a dangerous sport!

WARNING - *DISCLAIMER!*
Mountain climbing has inherent dangers that can in part, be mitigated

What TraditionalMountaineering things we have accomplished
Total unique viewers world-wide maximum seven days: 310,168; server requests (hits) during maximum seven days: 2,171,179! Viewed maximum seven days from 31,174 hosts in >50 countries around the world with 28.23 gigabytes of data transferred! This web has about 17,170 files, 14,593 images, 166,485 hyperlinks including 11,535 external links! Listed first web page in the world by Google's Search on "alpine mountaineering", "map, compass and gps", "light and fast climbing", "Yuppie 911 Devices" and many more!

TraditionalMountaineering.org and Robert Speik have been quoted in "Outside", "Climbing", "Rock and Ice" and "Backpacker" magazines and Accidents in North American Mountaineering, Pomona College Magazine, Palm Springs Life Magazine, Cascades East Magazine, The Bulletin, The Oregonian, Patagonia Dirt Bag Diaries, Wikipedia, The Source, Bend Weekly, Sisters Nugget News, The High Desert Pulse, The (Seattle) Mountaineer, The Cascades Mountaineer, Huel Hauser, NBC, ABC, KPOV and more!

Chairman of the Mountaineering Training Committee of the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club providing Basic and Advanced Mountaineering Training for about 1,000 novices each year, mid 1980s
Instructor in Basic to Advanced Mountaineering Training at Central Oregon Community College, teaching eight related subject classes, mid 1990s. Co-Founder and Charter President of Cascades Mountaineers, a club of up to 300 Members, 1995 to 2001. Access Fund "Sharp End Award" goes to Robert Speik in 2000! Listed under "Great Leaders" by the Sierra Club in 2011. Honored with the 2006 Oregon Section American Alpine Club's "Trad Award" for mentoring mountaineers and climbers! Special Mention in "Accidents in North American Mountaineering" 1998 to 2011!

This Web is working toward compliance with W3C HTML 4.01

Read about the universal HTML language used in this website.

Adobe Acrobat Reader
Adobe Systems is the developer of Portable Document Format (PDF). This software enables documents to be displayed and printed exactly the same on different computers running different software. We find PDF indispensable in distributing many of our documents and forms that require accurate formatting to be useful. Examples of this are our suggested Accident/Incident Report Form, our suggested First Aid Kit and others.

Many new computers come preloaded with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. You can check your version by clicking on Help, About Adobe Acrobat. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat Reader or if you have a version older than 10.0, just follow the instructions after clicking on the Icon below. You need this free program in order to fully enjoy this website.

This Web was created and is maintained using Microsoft FrontPage 2003
Microsoft has ceased to support their popular FrontPage web authoring tool which was designed before CSS became popular. The icon below has been disconnected. However, this simple but sophisticated web authoring program works just fine in Windows 7 and we continue to use it every day.

This Web was created using Adobe Photoshop Elements 8

This Web is optimized for Internet Explorer 10.0 (and earlier versions)
Microsoft makes this latest version of Internet Explorer available free over the internet.

"Compatibility View"
Use Internet Explorer 10.0 for a full experience with this web. Note that IE 10 offers a "compatibility" button to give a somewhat better esthetic rendering of "older websites". But, you won't miss too much if you do not use IE 10 in "compatibility view". Use the Compatibility Button located next to the Address Bar in IE 10 or go to Tools-Compatibility to turn it on and off. See which View you like.

We have worked hard over the past 12 years, to continually transition this web to the fast moving targets of evolving lap top and mini tower computers, LCD monitors with wider screen formats, evolving editing programs (with phased out support for the programs we have learned to love), new Browsers, faster download speeds and even more changes than we can think of at this moment of writing. We took a COCC Extension Class on Microsoft's new Expressions Web program from an instructor who could only insist we start our hundreds of pages over from scratch (with her professional help!). We note that the format for our hundreds of pages of text and photos dating back a decade was set in stone before CSS design flexibility was commonly used by web designers. We have tried to "update" to CSS markup language but find it cumbersome and almost impossible to transition via MS Expression Web. We have given up on all of the latest web editing programs which emphasize construction of commercial web sites of a few pages, and we have returned to MS Front Page 2003 which works perfectly well with the new Windows 7 Operating System! We are sticking with Front Page 2003 (just 10 years old)!

Our web does look slightly better in IE 10, "Compatibility View", but the institutional icon links placed with Microsoft FrontPage on our Home Page do not work in MS Compatibility View! However, the same code on our Links Page, work great! (Hmmmm, that is nuts!) Just click on Tools and de-select Compatibility View or click the Compatibility icon next to the address bar in IE 9. Note: If you are a Programmer, send me a message and offer a pro-bono fix for this odd <p align="right"><div style="float: right; width: 300; height:1000"> problem. (Works on Links fails on Index. Send your comment from "Comments" on the search bar ;-))

Try Google Chrome or any of the several other Browsers, they all link to the logos for The AAC, The Access Fund, etc. on the Index Page and look great too! However, Google Chrome will not play the nifty background sound and special sound effects we have created over ten years because Microsoft's "bgsound" code is not fully compatible with the W3C HTML 4.01 code requirements! (Pretty picky, I think!)

"Wide screen monitors"
Our web was designed from the beginning, twelve years ago, "stage left, center stage and stage right". This format works great with small to wide screen monitors! Just lucky, I guess!

Make Internet Explorer 10.0. your default browser
This web works well in any major Browser! However, we read that nearly everyone with a Windows computer today uses MS Internet Explorer, so we continue to design our web with Microsoft. (Besides, you will hear our sound effects!) To make IE 10 your default browser, click Tools>Internet Options. Select the Programs tab. Click the box next to "Internet Explorer should check to see whether it is the default browser." Reboot the computer. You will receive this prompt: "Internet Explorer is not currently your default browser. Do you wish to make it the default?" Click Yes. (Download the free IE 10.0. program first of course.)

Download Internet Explorer 10.0. for free!

Have you checked your "text size" lately?
In Internet Explorer, click View in the top toolbar, click Text Size, and chose "Larger". (The wrong text size may spoil the fine esthetic qualities we have designed into your personal web experience!) Some Browsers offer a Zoom function which may do the same thing - or may not. Just experiment! I use "Larger" and my wife uses "Medium" on the slightly smaller screen she preferred. Try holding down the Ctrl key and touching the + or - key. Experiment with our text size on your monitor!

Have you tried changing your screen resolution from the older default 800x600 to 1024X768?
Go to your Windows desktop, right click, click Properties in the pop up window, select the Settings Tab and adjust the slider to the larger screen area. Click OK. The screen will black out for a moment and the new setting will appear. (Watch out! You may be asked to decide to OK again or it will revert to your old setting - act fast or try it again.) For older monitors, try the new screen resolution setting for a while for all your applications. You have a lot more "real estate" on your screen at 1024x768. You will like it! Newer computers will automatically adjust to fit your wide screen.

Your new computer may optimize the screen resolution for your new monitor. Our new Dell desktops did this
Many readers have gone from huge heavy glass tubes to very wide flat screen monitors. So far, our web still looks great on our own new 20 and 22 inch flat screen monitors!

Adjust your sound!
For more fun, adjust your sound. Several of our photo essays are accompanied by music that we found appropriate to the scenes. Lots of the pages open with sound effects that may bring a smile or surprise. (If our sound bugs folks around you, just turn it down.) We are surprised that competitors of Microsoft have produced Browsers, such as Google Chrome, that do not recognize the mark-up language statement "bgsound" and therefore do not render the sound effects in this website. To state this again: Google Chrome will not recognize the MS code for our background sound effects because the Microsoft code is not approved by W3C HTML 4.01. Pretty damn picky, I say! So, no clever sound effects with Google Chrome!

Download Internet Explorer 10.0. (above) and you will hear some amusing and surprising "bgsound" effects!

Site search and internet search are provided by Google
Google provides the remarkable ability to search inside our site. Also, you can select page titles from our lists of contents on our Home Page and see our Page and other related pages on the internet. Just go to our Search Page clicked from the navigation bar at the top of each page.

We were among the first Webmeisters to recognize the global importance of Google searches! Too bad we did not liquidate everything and buy the stock! Oh dear! However, our original inside the site search page has become outdated. OUR HISTORIC SITE SEARCH PAGE TOOL HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED BY GOOGLE! We can not disconnect and remove our historic Search Page, but we can re-direct you to use the Google Tool Bar, which is of course better, than our original "search inside our site" page connection. With the Google Tool Bar, you can just search any phrase or select the page title from the lists on our contents pages (News, Photos, Questions, Experiences, Books, Links, etc.) The selected text will pop up on the Google Tool Bar and you can see our pages (usually ranked at the top) and others that may be similar.

You can download Google's Tool Bar for your Browser!
You can enable optional functions such as their free pop-up blocker, form fill, and more. The Google Bar has a gage that shows the search importance ranking of specific pages and we are so pleased that many of our pages are "first in the world on the search list" for many common search phrases and the Page reader requests are very high.

Highlighted text in any document automatically appears in the Google Tool Bar search box! Click on the Google logo below for a connection to the FREE Google Tool Bar download page. Google is doing amazing things now - things that "never crossed our minds!"

Internet service provided by Coinet
TraditionalMountaineering appreciates the support provided by Central Oregon Internet in Bend Oregon.

Coinet is hosting our very large and active website at a site in Salt Lake City, now a major internet hub, providing essentially unlimited bandwidth and blazing 100 megabit speed. If you have broadband, you will notice how fast our larger documents and graphics load on your page.

Broadband service is provided by BendBroadband
TraditionalMountaineering appreciates the fast professional support provided by BendBroadband:

TraditionalMountaineering supports the following organizations:
We support groups that support mountain climbing. We urge you to lend your efforts and give your donation dollars to:
The American Alpine Club, The Access Fund, American Mountain Guides Association and American Safe Climbing Association.

Donate to help defray the expenses of this web:
Make a small donation to TraditionalMountaineering.org to help us continue to provide free information and instruction. Click on the PayPal link below to make a $10 donation.

Pacific Power Blue Sky Wind Energy powers this Website:
We purchase new wind energy in 100 kilowatt-hour blocks for $1.95 each. Investing in just one Blue Sky Block for $1.95 per month for one year provides the same benefits as not driving a vehicle for nearly three months!

TraditionalMountaineering.org pledges 2% of Net Income for the Environment.