pimping the Mountaineers

I gave myself a Mountaineers membership, and have signed up for Snowshoe Lite[sic] (because the non-lite is only in Everett this year) and Winter Camping (snow caves!) courses, and am thinking of Alpine Scramble (which is off-trail climbing involving ice-axe but not obligatory rope, nor crevasses). The tamely-named Basic Climbing course (involving the rope, and the crevasses) I think I'll save for another year.

You should consider these too, so I'll have friends who want to go sleep in snow caves.

Also, if anyone else is maybe shopping for snowshoes, this Winter Trails event this Saturday at Snoqualmie Pass sounds like a way to try out different kinds.

Seattle old-timers may remember the first quarter-shrinker

Bill Beaty’s fascinating account of what is believed to be the first "Quarter Shrinker"

Dale Travous is a sculptor who once had a big studio space in downtown Seattle, and was making Tesla coils (and later a big Tesla Magnifier.) He traded some equipment for some big caps around 1990 or so. I think they were 150 kV, maybe 10 uF, six of them. He was charging them up and using them to destroy pieces of wire, and I told him about an article I'd seen in the 1970s about an "optical shutter" made from a coil of copper rod wound around a soup can with the ends removed.
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Around 1994 or 1995 Dale Travous had some pieces in an art exhibit at Seattle COCA gallery. One was a series of about twenty progressively shrunken quarters mounted in a row on a piece of white Plexiglas. At the same time he stopped shrinking coins and instead was using the cap bank attached to a steel "watergun", a short stubby cannon which could explode a cc of water and drive a plastic slug through a 12" block of clay. Big fun. Later he entered the cap bank in the "science fair" put on by THE STRANGER adult newspaper. It was a room-freshener. He was vaporizing cherries, strawberries, etc. An immense blast like a shotgun going off, and then the room smells nice.