Biketreks other two stores at Ings/ Grizedale are not too far away and remain very nice stores.

The other way to do it would have been to do a proper recall on every crank ever made with that technique, to ensure that no customer was needlessly harmed by their faulty product in the future. I guess Shitmano worked out that it would cost them too much money to put safety first, and decide to protect the bottom line. Barring in mind we first started noticing this happen almost a decade ago, the importers response was always to claim an isolated incidence… every time. A solid reputation trashed, just like that.

Lets say that the nametag wasn’t there, and a ‘hobnail’ boot was found with a foot in it in the same location on Everest – how many individuals do you think it could be attributed to.. a few dozen? ten? one? roughly, ballpark?

There is an answer to this… but it has a caveat.

…. now look at the tags on Mallory’s clothing found in 99. Same style tags. Though he did teach at Charterhouse previously… Mallory’s shirt bought from a shop on Godalming High street. Local guy…

The rabbit hole is deep surrounding Odells sighting. 100 years worth of conjecture, and 25 years worth of extensive theorising since Mallory’s discovery. One could spend many 100’s of hours researching the combinations of possibilities and come out none the wiser, am aware of all of it, its way way more complicated than that. For anyone interested Michael Tracy on youtube is the go to modern researcher who has most bases covered in his excellent series of in-depth analysis, and the format suits the complication well- opposing views also available. Its well worth a look and less likely to screw up your feed than re-watching a video of ‘tribal leaders first experiencing cheesecake’.

For what its worth I’m a long-standing 3rd step guy….

Granted, in that respect, to discover the unexplored, to forge new ground and do things no-ones done before in history.. is more limited now, and probably to be found in technology or some douche wanting to go to mars. That’s the thing so fascinating about those early 20’s expeditions and the whole mapping exploits that built up to them, the sense of uncovering the terrain as they unpicked their way to the goal. The early photographic archives from the RGS of those exhibitions recently enhanced from the original plates is well worth a look, as they convey that sense of first laying eyes on that region, pristine and much higher snow levels too. Young climbers from around the globe though, have increasingly been paying sherpa teams to haul their asses up the motorway route for the kudos and notoriety, a worrying trend from the last decade. Check out Ryan Mitchells footage from this year, go-pro’ed the whole thing, stunning footage form higher on the mountain, self-funded, 19. But yeah, a palimpsest of the original venture.

What makes you think its any different now? The big difference is the new gen of teenagers doing it is more likely to monetize it with a series of Yourtube vids…

However, to have already been hypoxic enough….

Which is why if a 33 oxygen bottle can be spit out of the glacier also, then to one day find the intact discarded oxygen apparatus frames of M&I and their location would be interesting…

I hadn’t seen this… but had seen’ tribal leaders encountering cheesecake’ before. I don’t know why.

I like their sense of style.

Anyone who has spent much time in the mountains will tell you that there are all manner of things that can take up huge amounts of time.

Am aware. And yet there climbing style had little to do with modern techniques and equipment. We have detailed step by step accounts and timings from Norton and the subsequent traverses made in the 30’s by Smythe etc… so know roughly what to expect for the difficulties encountered no matter which route they actually took… and if Odell saw them on the 3rd then it puts them ruddy close to the summit pyramid…some great drama unfolded, the desire to work out what is in someway an attempt to do justice to their endeavour. More to come I suspect, once it melts out.

When Mallory conversed with his leader Norton in his tent on the North Col before embarking on the fateful attempt, Norton was at that point almost immobile with snow blindness having removed his goggles high on the mountain during his voyage into the couloir the day before. It is therefore highly unlikely that the risks of removing those goggles wouldn’t have been at the forefront of his mind, unless of course the sun had already descended before them. True, we were always a few further clues away from any kind of certainty, and it is all speculation – which is what has made it such an enduring mystery. Yet there is still a balance of probability from the limited facts that are known…

…. as well as hypoxic, having long since run out of O’s. All of the other climbers in the 20’s and 30’s who turned around at or around the Norton couloir made it back to C6 without too much difficulty (coughing up your larynx aside). Mallory’s snow goggles being in his pocket one of the strongest indicators that they descended after dark… and if they spent that much time above 8000 it’s not likely they were just hanging around having a cup of tea admiring the view… there not being any major difficulties beyond the 3rd step, other than being the first to ever have been there.

It’ll probably just be string, or nothing.

… or summit rocks.

Dna tests just a formality. We forget from a modern perspective just how few climbers ventured into that area pre-war, in their layers of wool, tweed jackets and hobnail boots. Most of them made it back to C6. There’s only a few possibilities for bodies with that clothing type, who they were, and where they are is well documented. The sherpa deaths in the 20’s were on the other side of the North Col, it sure isn’t Maurice Wilson (no stiletto’s) and there’s no reason for any climbers subsequently to be wearing SI’s socks from a few decades prior anyway…

The bigger question is will they find the rest of him, and what’s in his pockets… that will be one of the finds of the century.

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I always thought they must have made it anyway.

Its him. Only a handful of people traversed far enough horizontally to be on a fall line above the Rongbuk in the era of hobnail boots.

There’s quite a few people on this thread claiming that an XC hardtail is almost as fast a a gravel or road bike on the road, but unless you’re all slow riders, that’s rubbish

I beg to differ on this one… but it comes with  caveat of, it depends. An xc hardtail as it comes stock for off-road won’t be that fast, but stick something like a Thunderburt 2.1 out back minimal RaRa out front (common XCO type spec), use a sensible 90’s style bar width and maybe centre bar ends if you want. Most average specs will be too heavy, but a superlight chi-chi build can easily be 19lbs these days even with a 100mm suss fork, or lighter with carbon rigid, as light or lighter than a lot of gravel bikes. Am not a slow rider by any means and when I first started riding a bike like this (am older and slower now) keeping pace or overtaking full-on TeamSky kit style road bikerists while on the way to flip the script on some singletrack was just part of the training regime, same goes for e-bikerists. A gravel bike might be a tad faster still, but on the boring bits it doesn’t need to be faster – and as soon as you hit the fun stuff a hardtail is way more fun… most of the offroad up my end would be naff on a gravel bike. Think more like the sort of dropbar 29er builds they’re using at rougher US gravel races now, something more like a classic Norba xc racer geometry, not LLS – and we can see that there’s not much speed lost to big tyres and minimal suspension… just choose the bar style most comfortable with, but yeah drops will be a few percentage points faster if you need that on the boring bits. Spinning out a 34-10 is a non-issue when riding for fun, racing on smooth gravel may require more… but smooth US gravel looks a lot smoother than most of the ‘roads’ around here…

Fear not. They do this, perfectly normal, its a feature. Just slide it back on the axle, ratchets teeth together, sandwiched between the springs with wider ends facing the bearings. It would be an ideal opportunity to clean everything, but best to only relube with the dtswiss grease specially made for this – its especially non-sticky type to ensure proper ratchet springing – but yours looks fairly free of grime anyway so I wouldn’t bother.  Usually the small seal on the end of the endcap beneath the cassette end holds it in place to prevent accidental pop-off the axle… I often pull the whole cassette/ driver off just like this to clean as its easier than wrenching off the cassette…

A good gravel suspension fork would help a lot, in combination with lowering your tyre pressure in the supplest tyre you can find, run tubeless… I run 20psi on a 48mm wide 29er tyre at 175lbs for relief for a hand injury, it works. Make sure you’re happy with the service intervals on a gravel suss fork, mileage dependant… if not, a Lauf fork also does a lot to minimise vibration for zero maintenance.  A Gradient has a relatively short headtube for a given size, make sure you’re not too low with weight distribution too much on the hands.. you can always fit the drop bar type with a built-in rise if you’ve maxed out the steerer.

A racey 29er hardtail can be surprisingly fast with negligible speed difference to a gravel bike with the right setup – the current trend seems to be gravitating towards a drop barred 29er anyway. A narrow 90’s width flat bar may be slightly slower on the road but much better for the off, but mostly personal preference…

You’ve done well with stanchions… am on my 4th within same time frame. It is expensive when it needs doing, and daft when one could almost buy a new latest sid ultimate for the servicing cost… something that’s tempting to do even with the added hub swap and headset faffage… but then one glance at the filament wound carbon on my shaft and I remember sometimes its good to be different. I now try to do a routine alcohol flush and fresh oil bath every 5o+hours or so to try and make it survive as long as possible, really easy to do… don’t fancy taking it apart any further than that though.

Except that a lefty has a significant torsional force on the suspension component

Except that they don’t. One would think they do, but have seen physical forces diagrams that surprisingly demonstrate that this is not the case from the way that forces are loaded through the tapered axle. The multiple long roller bearing design between the sliding components is functionally far more resistant to out of plane twisting and bending than any stanchion on a pair of bushings will ever be, even with half the supply of legs.

Does one look at how the wheels are attached to a car and think it doesn’t make any sense, or how aviation undercarriage works, or maybe they should take down the London Eye as it also makes no sense? A solidly made strut with stub mounted axle makes fine engineering sense. The surprise comes with the associated running costs, in a way the servicing and parts costs suffer from the designs lack of ubiquity.

a 1.5-tonne tank

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but some of these behemoths are already topping the 2.5 tonne mark. It wont be long before the fully electric bloated WinkPanzers will be knocking on 3 tonnes. Why anyone should be able to drive one of these – with the added danger of its mass on other road users- on a standard license is beyond me.

I’d like to see drivers with attitudes like those shown be forced to hand in their driving license, as they have no right to own one with such levels of complacency and irresponsibility. The video is a good advert for compulsory re-testing and re-education every decade to retain the privilege of being in charge of a dangerous vehicle on the road.

At last, a bike that looks like a ‘proper’ mtb, and not the usual modern monstrosity. Would buy on pleasing looks alone.

Eat less dead animals. Its gross anyway.

As Bula hatted child of the golden days of early mtb – while a contemporary lens may see the way we rode as ATB, we still rode massive mountains and proper sketch terrain with a nonchalant disregard to the sanctity of our bones. This type of bike is still my favourite type of bike, the sort of bike that is good to ride anywhere and everywhere. In my mind the Atb is closer to the heart of Mtb – if the picture of a modern Mtb has a motor on it, then I’m not an Mtb’er anymore.

Contact hours is a weird one and probably very subject dependant. For me at masters level I only had one to one tutorials for a grand total of maybe 4 hours a term, and you do get to the end of it and wonder quite where the tuition fees have gone. A couple of working days worth of quality 1-1 max. And yet at the same time – at that level – if one’s work was not entirely self directed then the student probably shouldn’t have been there, most of the things learnt I taught myself… and in roundabout ways one wonders if with the right attitude the same could equally be achieved outside of the institutional system… and no, this was not a subject that anyone would ever learn anything about in the workplace. Even 25 years ago, three quarters of the intake were foreign students paying vastly more tuition fess (I hear 4/5 times more nowadays not uncommon). As a fun fact, if it weren’t for the foreign students paying extortionate fees for the institutions kudos then many courses wouldn’t be financially viable to educate their domestic intake, so to that extent then the system is very broken and has been for a while.

Check out ‘Hardtail Party’ on Yourtube. Dude puts modern hardtails through their paces, and knows his stuff. Hardtails rule.

I’d start by providing the facility for alternative transport, financially incentivise it – then for those that need to enter the park in their outsize lifestyle mobile I’d implement a fixed charge for entering the National Park just like they’ve done in many US nat parks for over half a century. The funds can be used to repair the infrastructure that the increase in quantity and size of vehicles has noticeably nerfed in recent years. Do that or alternatively add a tourist surcharge to all hotels, camping, airbnbs’, just like many other worldwide hotspots already do and likewise use the funds to improve the infrastructure.

What the Lakes needs in general is a series of huge carparks at the periphery, on some underused fields, where tourists can leave their big lifestyle vans and oversized SUV’s and proceed onwards into the park either by bike/ bus/ or tiny discreet electric cars…. would transform the place. Parking charges at the regular spots are already out of hand and charges like above must certainly affect business, 30 mins free isn’t enough to concertedly stroke fancy product -better parking in general would allow businesses to keep their customers parking free… and keep their customers.

It was way back in the mists of time, maybe more than 25 years ago when Litespeed ran a bunch of magazine (remember them) ads for their Ti road frames claiming they’d be the last frame you’d need to buy, last a lifetime etc… which coincided with the period when they experimented with some headtube shaping that many customers found cracked and failed and yet also many found were refused warranty repair… which created a lot of rap beef at the time and opened the eyes to many of the reality of lifetime claims. These days it would take a measure of naivety to think that just because somethings covered by a lifetime warranty that the product is in any way going to last a lifetime, it just means when it breaks they ‘might’ replace it. As has been said many times before, good Ti tube joining is a labour intensive process – man hours cost a lot of money these days, if you cut corners then integrity suffers. The best Ti builders charge for this and shouldn’t offer to many concerns. so just choose the pricing level you want to come in at vs risk… and for budget Ti maybe go for steel instead.

I had a litespeed hardtail which was probably the nicest all-round frame to own and ride as it felt so solid and indestructible, didn’t break it despite having an accident so hard it fully spanked the rider, frame just had a scratch- the one frame I’ve really regretted selling, and only because the wheels grew too small.

On the other hand I’ve cracked 3 carbon road frames around the BB from the now severely depleted wattage cottage and 1 carbon mtb chainstay just from the bike falling over on a wooden bridge….

Would have ‘good’ Ti again no hesitation, or steel.

Its easy to manage this. Divorce. Why waste time with someone actively invested in keeping one unhappy.

Every Specialized saddle (and most similarly shaped examples) I’ve ever tried does the opposite of relieving sit bone pressure, usually by design it is focusing the weight on the sit bones in preference to distributing the load over the surface area – this is intended to relieve pressure on the soft tissue where you don’t want it. It takes a while for the sit bones to adapt and toughen up if switching over from a conventional saddle, and even if returning from time off the bike. The advantage being that if the tissue toughens up to the point you don’t notice it, and you have no pressure elsewhere then you might be approaching some sort of saddle nirvana. For some people though that sitbone pressure never goes away and its an indication that this type is not for you and you probably need the type that evenly distributes pressure. Its hard to separate the marketing baloney from the very subjective reality – I bought into the Power saddle on recommendations of it being touted most ergonomically superior design in production, in practice for me it fell somewhere between straddling a horse (too wide) and after a few hours a torture instrument…. whereas the similar Phenom in the range is about the most comfortable shape found.

Also….stretch the hamstrings – a lot. Most cyclists have chronically tight hamstrings, which doesn’t help with pressure on the sit bones area.

No you’re not being paranoid… the top bolt should never be above the line of the top of the steerer. At 4nm you shouldn’t have crushed the carbon steerer if the protector bung was in place properly, but not advisable to ride it at that height. Sounds like the LBS cut the steerer too short, or maybe they pinched the fork off a smaller size with shorter headtube – either way, if a rider needs a certain height its not acceptable to be made to ride lower through no fault of their own…

Anyway what I meant to say was ‘buy just before it approaches the bottom of its depreciation curve’, assuming that something worth 35k second hand retains a baseline of value well above 0 well into the future, lets say plateaus at 10-15k… or even starts to climb again if properly niche/ desirable. A 7 seat volvo though nice, isn’t really that kind of car- up my end its what every other biddie drives to the shops, badly. Offer him 15k for his convenience or be done with it, 35k second hand could get you into something properly nice. You can get an Aston Vantage with 30k on the clock for £35k, Aston or Volvo shopping car, hard choice…

Buy it when it’s worthless?

No, good desirable cars will retain a decent baseline of value, which if its properly desirable and not just needless luxury it may even increase that baseline. The smart money’s on letting someone else take the daft part of the depreciation curve out of it for you. Its been a while since simply being ‘new’ was synonymous with better, unless one has a particular penchant for vehicles that can be stolen off the driveway in 20 seconds flat without a key for example….

In a world where a Kia Frottage is considered a luxury vehicle, I seriously wouldn’t bother. Am old enough to remember when luxury was a Bentley. Buy something well made at the point it just reaches the bottom of its depreciation curve. Only run what you can afford to fix or replace without it causing a crisis, anything else is a mugs game.

Modern Tv’s may be be amazing but its compensated by 97.6% of anything on TV being rubbish, and maybe on average a handful of films worth watching a year… and one or two streamable series max….

Have rim brakes disappeared on the road? Not up my end. My year 2014 bike is perfect, light/ stiff/ responsive/ comfortable, doesn’t need extra braking… theres something cooler about older road bikes, modern bikes just seem a bit try-hard in comparison. It seems the road bike has gone through the biggest change in the last decade, more so them the mtb which is more of an evolution… but then I had mtb’s 20 years ago that I preferred riding/owning than my modern mtb. An old retro bike that was perfect in its day is still nice to ride now, the roads are mostly still the same, maybe rougher- if you’re not racing then the .37percent aero gain doesn’t matter so much.

….oh, and I never looked at a cable in multi decades of riding and thought that the riding experience would be better if it could only disappear…