Rock Climber Research Articles

Voices of Dragons (review)

Reviewed by: Voices of Dragons Kate Quealy-Gainer Vaughn, Carrie . Voices of Dragons. HarperTeen, 2010 [320p]. ISBN 978-0-06-179894-8$16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10 In an alternative world, American humans and the dragons living to the north of them have maintained an uneasy ceasefire since the end of World War II, when the blasts of atomic weapons drew the ancient creatures out of their hidden strongholds. Kay's small Montana town is home to the government agency that guards the U.S./Dragon border, a border that divides a modern world full of cell phones and convenience stores from an ancient one ruled by fire and might. An avid rock climber and risk taker, Kay finds herself on the opposite side of the border after a hiking accident and face to face with an adolescent dragon. Fortunately, the creature is more curious than dangerous, and the two form a fast friendship, meeting in secret so that the dragon can practice his human speech and Kay can hone her newly acquired dragon aviation skills. War soon looms, however, when the leaders of both worlds react impulsively to perceived threats, and Kay and Artegal must bring their friendship front and center if they are to save each other's realms. Vaughn skillfully balances the norms of contemporary life with the archetypes of legend, creating a captivating world where technology and myth meet, but she never allows the setting to overwhelm the emotional journey of its characters. The developing relationship between Kay and Artegal is especially touching, from its awkward [End Page 404] beginning to their shared grief and eventual decision to make the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of their worlds. Though Kay's relationships with her fellow humans are less interesting, the heart of the story lies with Kay and Artegal, and readers will be drawn into their world of fierce friendship and thrilling adventure. Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Out of Place: All My Walks

xi First comes the Cape Cod walk. Past the private beach, past the houses, out to the bluff below the scraggly scrub oaks and toward the cluster of rocks where the cormorants gather. How many times have my feet padded along this sandy path? Hundreds, I think, until I do a little math, and realize the answer is thousands. Thousands of times, then. Occasionally as a child, often as teenager, daily as a young confused man fresh out of college, and then again for six years after the return from Colorado with my new wife. I would like to say I was loyal to the Cape walk when I headed west at thirty, that I pined for it. This would not be true. In Colorado I daily hiked a squiggly red line, heading straight up into the mountains—leading from the room I rented in the blue gingerbread cabin in Eldorado Springs, the hippie / biker / rock climber town where I’d landed—up into the sandstone flatirons that shot up in the sky like a ripple in the land’s carpet after the thousands of miles of flatness called the plains. Swifts carved the sky overhead. I stared at the nearly fluorescent lichen that glowed on the rocks hanging above me, stopped to splash my face with the cold creek water, crushed sage like smelling salts, and inhaled an odor that reminded me this was a whole new place. I had moved west directly from Worcester, Massachusetts, a town that was the opposite of Eldorado in every regard. I’d gone to Worcester with my companion of seven years, so that she could attend medical school, but I was not unfamiliar with the city, having grown up there. We did not move to the town proper, but just outside it, in part so that I could have daily access to the Wachusett Reservoir. There, only a few miles away from the border of that gray dying industrial town, I walked out to the hidden cove where I would pay my daily respects to a certain great blue heron. Cambridge lies an hour to the east of Worcester, but a world away. After Worcester, after six years in Colorado, after six years back on All My Walks out of place xii ecotone Cape Cod, my wife and I moved to Cambridge for a year (which, for what it’s worth, would make my total time spent in that town almost six years). I was there to teach and to wait for the birth of our daughter, but there was plenty of time each afternoon to walk down to the river. “Your beloved Charles,” my wife teased me, mocking my fondness for that snooty and sooty corridor of nature. But it was no joke. I did love the place. Sometimes I would mistakenly roust the black crowned night herons that roosted in the branches of trees on the banks, and they would explode into the air with slapping wings and guttural songs. These days I walk almost every day along the Cape Fear River in a town called Carolina Beach. Within the course of an hour I can pass through swamps, brackish marshes, fringe evergreen forests, and upland meadows. The day before yesterday I heard a rustle in the trees overhead, a sound I remembered from Cape Cod, and looked up to see dozens of cedar waxwings, feasting on the winter berries. We recently passed the six-year mark in North Carolina, and we think we might stay awhile. “To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating .” I repeated this Thoreau quote to Rachel, the woman I would later move to Worcester with, during a walk we took together at the beginning of our relationship. She didn’t like it. It’s not that I mind walking with someone else—my wife and I frequently took the bluff walk together on Cape Cod and later walked along the Charles when she was pregnant—it is just that walking with a companion is something entirely different from a real walk. A real walk, a true walk, is quite the opposite of a social event. It is a chance...

Simultaneous bilateral Achilles tendon ruptures associated with statin medication despite regular rock climbing exercise

Introduction Ruptures of the Achilles tendon are common however simultaneous ruptures occur less frequently. Eccentric loading exercise programmes have been used to successfully treat Achilles tendinopathy. Case report We report a case of simultaneous bilateral Achilles tendon rupture in a patient predisposed to rupture due to longstanding raised serum lipoprotein and recently introduced therapeutic statin medication. The patient was also a keen rock climber and had regularly undertaken loading exercise. Conclusion This case illustrates that the therapeutic effect of mixed loading exercises for the Achilles tendon may not be adequate to overcome the predisposition to rupture caused by hyperlipidaemia and statin medication.

Re: Scapholunate interosseous ligament rupture in an elite rock climber

Re: Scapholunate interosseous ligament rupture in an elite rock climber

Chronic Wrist Pain - Rock Climbing

HISTROTY: 32yo female rock climber with a history of increasing left wrist pain. As a teen ager she had FOOSH injury to her right wrist while rock climbing and had xrays of both wrists demonstrating “bony abnormalities” needing a “cast.” Since, she has had pain while rock climbing. She never taped or braced. Currently, pain located dorsolateral/medial at the wrist and worse with hyperdorsiflexion such as pushing off and opening doors. No swelling or redness. No mechanical symptoms. No numbness or tingling. Elbow, shoulders and neck negative. Tried ibuprofen as needed but no physical therapy or bracing. History of patellar subluxation. PHYSICAL EXAMINATION: Inspection - no bony deformities, effusions or erythema. Symmetric active range of motion in all planes. Left wrist tender with terminal ulnar deviation. Palpation no nodules or masses but at the dorsal and volar ulnar aspects elicits some tenderness. Clicking at the ulnar aspect occurs with passive radial to ulnar deviation reported as uncomfortable. TFCC loading and table lift off test produces tenderness. Watson's scaphoid shift does not produce clicking or pain. Anatomic snuffbox palpation is negative. Tinel's is negative. Radial and ulnar pulses and sensation is intact and symmetric. Finger opposition strength is full. Hyper extension and abduction indicates laxity. DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSIS: TFCC tear. Carpal stress fracture. Scaphoid fracture non-union. Carpal instability. Distal radioulnar junction instability. TEST AND RESULTS: Plain film radiographs show lunotriquetral carpal coaltion. No scapholunate widening. MR Arthrography shows partial tears of ulnar attachment of TFCC without positive ulnar variance. Volar radioulnar ligament disruption with dorsal distal radioulnar joint subluxation. Lunotriquetral coalition, ulnar impaction. FINAL WORKING DIAGNOSIS: TFCC tear. DRUJ instability with dorsal subluxation. Lunotriquetral coalition. Ulnar impaction. Hyperlaxity. TREATMENT AND OUTCOMES: High dose NSAIDS and bracing. Cast immobilization deferred. Relative rest from rock climbing. At 4 months, intermittent pain with hyper dorsiflexion left greater than right. Refer to hand PT. At 6 months, improvement with relative rest but some symptoms with ADL's. Ortho Hand. Wrist taping for rock climbing.

‘You have to let go to hold on’: a rock climber's reflective process through resonance

Resonance is a process that empowers people to design their life in a way that allows them to feel the way they want to feel. In this holistic process, individuals identify how they want to feel, prepare to experience these feelings, recognize obstacles that prevent them, and reconnect with desired feelings when they are disengaged from the process. Reflection, a conscious and intentional exploration process leading to a better understanding of complex ideas, is an inherent constituent of resonance. It allows individuals to enhance their self‐awareness, which they use to design their resonance process and life. This article illustrates an athlete's reflective process and how it was fuelled by the facilitator of the resonance‐based intervention in which he took part. It also outlines many realizations and the personal progress that resulted from the athlete's experience with resonance.

Vertebral Fracture in a Rock Climber – Neurological Sequelae?

Vertebral Fracture in a Rock Climber – Neurological Sequelae?

Troubled Intimacies: A Life in the Interior West by David Axelrod, and Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone by John Daniel

b o o k R e v ie w s 2 2 7 Troubled Intimacies: A Life in the Interior West. By David Axelrod. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004. 186 pages, $18.95. Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone. By John Daniel. Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005. 352 pages, $26.00. Reviewed by Kathleen Boardman University of Nevada, Reno Some years ago, two young men went west and became poets. In the mid1960s , John Daniel traveled from Washington, DC, to Reed College in Port­ land. After dropping out, he stayed on the West Coast, experiencing life as a draft-resister, logger, railway clerk, and rock climber— eventually settling into a place (western Oregon) and vocation (writing) that suited him. In 1980, David Axelrod left rural Ohio, home of his family for generations, in order to enter the University of Montana’s creative writing program. In Montana and, eight years later, in northeastern Oregon’s Grande Ronde Valley, he wrote, planted gardens, taught English, kept bees, gathered wild fruit, and observed the impact of human carelessness upon the natural environment. In their latest prose works, Axelrod and Daniel explore the nature of soli­ tude, reflect on their lives and the complexities of human attachment, and evoke the natural world in superbly crafted sentences. Each combines the perspective of the non-native outsider with an intense, intimate knowledge of the natural environment in his part of Oregon. Both urge more sanity and self-discipline in humans’ interactions with that environment. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to place the two books on a shelf under the label “Nature Writing: Oregon.” Not only do they transcend that category, but they are also quite dif­ ferent from one another in purpose, tone, and form. Troubled Intimacies: A Life in the Interior West is a collection of fourteen personal essays, some previously published. These are essays in the classic sense: Axelrod interweaves everyday observations of bees, nests, and blackberry-pick­ ing with his reading, philosophical reflection, and impassioned argument. He draws on experiences in Montana and Oregon to illuminate topics of impor­ tance in environmental literature: the definition of wilderness, the healing of environmental violence, the problematic legacy of Romanticism, and the re­ formation of community in a mobile and fragmented society. In “Going Wild,” a brief introduction to key themes of the collection, Axelrod says, “Wilderness is not a status we grant the landscape. It is earth’s only way of being as it chooses. What it chooses to be is alive, and if cut to the quick, to knit itself again into a whole” (6). Axelrod finds this self-renewing wildness in abandoned orchards and kitchen gardens, not in visions of self-sufficient solitude in a pristine Eden. He blames Romanticism for the “impossible, loathsome longing for a ‘virgin’ world” (5), a habit of mind that paradoxically results in strip mining, clear 2 2 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 6 cutting, careless hunting, and obscenely large “McMansions” whose picture windows vie for “unspoiled” views. In “Sane as the Mind That Makes a Nest” and “Notes on the Erotic Life of the Household,” Axelrod excoriates art that encourages the Romantic attitude: from “nominally realistic” paintings of wild animals, which he terms “a hideous form of nostalgia” to the “Egotistical Sublime” of early nineteenth-century German painter Caspar David Friedrich (whose name Axelrod anglicizes to Casper Frederick) (106, 107, 83). Axelrod scrutinizes his own life as well, criticizing himself in “Habits of Mind” for insisting on living one winter in an isolated house above the Big Blackfoot River, then leaving his wife and child behind each afternoon and evening while he took a perilous cliff trail to and from work. “For me,” Axelrod writes, “the cliff kept an unwanted world at a distance, so that I could pretend to inhabit an infinitely lovely and harsh kingdom of my own,” while, for his wife, the same cliff suggested exile and potential disaster (31). Axelrod describes other kinds of western exile—being regarded as an “interloper” by the locals...

Réparation des ruptures de poulie chez le grimpeur

Twelve high-level rock climbers were operated on for flexor tendon pulley rupture. Circumstances of pulley rupture and contributing factors are studied; postoperative improvement is evaluated by rock climber level increase, compared to the initial level. Average age was 28 years and there were nine males and three females; all of them were high-level rock climbers, succeeding at least in 7a climbing ways before the accident. The surgical procedure was to replace the deficient pulley using an extensor retinaculum graft. The non-dominant hand was the most frequently involved, and especially A2 pulley of the fourth finger. Diagnosis was easy and clinically established. Medical or functional treatments never allowed climbers to reach their former level. The only efficient treatment was surgical, whatever the time elapsed between injury and surgery. After this surgical procedure, five of the twelve patients improved their results, five recovered their former level and two decreased. The results are analysed and compared to other surgical procedures. Surgical repair of rupture of flexor tendon pulley during sport is the only efficient treatment allowing the rock climber to recover and improve its performance.

Traumatic latissimus dorsi tendon rupture

J Shoulder Elbow Surg 2002;11:642-4

Temperance river

Trail walk up the Temperance. Rhyolite gorges, cedars, sunshine. Noises. Fourteen-year-old in the river, caught between rocks. Father distraught. Send back to the car for ropes, tie pieces together. Rock climber shows up, knows the river. Makes a loop, body size. Drops it toward the kid, edges out over the gorge. Twenty feet down.

The growth cone gets a grip

![][1] Restrained beads light up migrating cells. Like a rock climber, a neuronal growth cone senses its substrate to identify the route that will provide the best grip. For the growth cone, this involves probing with adhesion molecules that direct cytoskeletal reorganization and

54-Year-Old Man With Dyspnea, Cough, and Hypoxemia

A 54-year-oldman has developed gradual onset of dyspnea and nonproductive cough overthe past 6 months. He was an avid rock climber and long-distancerunner; now, he is unable to perform either of these activities. He wasfirst referred to a cardiologist, who found the results of thefollowing tests to be normal: ECG, exercise stress test, and cardiaccatheterization. His medical history is nonrevealing. He has not smokedfor the past 10 years.

The effect of circumferential taping on flexor tendon pulley failure in rock climbers.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether circumferential taping of the base of the finger increases the A2 pulley's load to failure in a model simulating a rock climber's grip. Nine pairs of fresh-frozen cadaveric hands, 20 to 47 years of age, were rigidly mounted in a specialized jig that maintained the finger in the climber's "crimp" position. Two of the four fingers of each hand were reinforced over the A2 pulley with three wraps of cloth adhesive tape. The flexor digitorum profundus and superficialis tendons were distracted until pulley or tendon failure. Overall, A2 pulley strength was greater in male specimens than in female specimens, and the A2 pulley of the small finger was the weakest tested. The A2 pulley failed simultaneously with the A3 and A4 pulleys in 55% of the tests. In the remaining trials, a single pulley failed initially followed by the remainder of the sheath. Of the 72 fingers studied, complete data were available for comparison of 22 pairs of fingers. No statistically significant difference in load to A2 pulley failure was noted between the taped and untaped finger pairs. Based on our findings we do not support taping the base of the fingers as a prophylactic measure against flexor tendon sheath injury in the climbing athlete.

Overuse injuries in the elite rock climber

Closed rupture of the flexor tendon sheath has been known to occur in the elite rock climbing population. However, only one study has investigated the prevalence of this entity. To examine an elite climbing group in this country for the prevalence of pulley rupture and report on other commonly occurring injuries in the hand and elbow. 42 elite rock climbers competing at the U.S. national championships were evaluated by an injury survey and concentrated examination of the hand and elbow. Manual testing for clinical bowstringing was done for each finger, by the same examiner. 11 subjects (26%) had evidence of flexor pulley rupture or attenuation, as manifested by clinical bowstringing. Injury to the PIP collateral ligament had occurred in 17 subjects (40%). Other commonly occurring injury syndromes are described. Our results and others suggest that closed traumatic pulley rupture occurs with significant frequency in this population. In addition, all subjects with this injury continued to climb at a high standard and reported no functional disability.

Late repair of simultaneous bilateral distal biceps brachii tendon avulsion with fascia lata graft.

A 50 year old rock climber sustained a bilateral rupture of the distal biceps brachii tendons. He retained some flexion power in both arms but minimal supination, being weaker on...

Experimental and theoretical simulations of climbing falls

A modern rock climber attempting difficult routes will expect to take a number of falls. Typically the falls will be from the same point on the climb, for example at a particularly difficult series of moves, therefore the same part of the climbing rope will be damaged by each fall. Since the consequences of rope failure are serious, it is important that the climber should be aware of the number of falls the rope can withstand. The work described in this paper was carried out to understand the mechanics of climbing falls so as to enable predictions to be made of the tension developed in the rope. Once the value for this tension is known, an estimation can be made of the life of the rope measured as the number of falls to failure. A theoretical simulation of climbing falls has been developed which includes the nonlinearity of the rope behaviour and friction where the rope runs through `karabiners,' the metal clips used to anchor the climbers to the rock. The results of the simulation have been compared to experimentally measured rope tensions. The number of falls to failure has been measured experimentally for various lengths of fall and fall factors (the ratio of the length of fall to the length of rope). Failure of the rope invariably occurs where the rope runs over the most heavily loaded karabiner; therefore, the karabiner edge radius has also been varied. The experimental data have been used to derive a failure curve for the rope that may be combined with the theoretical simulation to predict the number of falls to failure.

Colour Doppler ultrasound in the diagnosis, management and follow-up of a digital flexor pulley injury

We present the case of a rock climber with a rupture of the A3 flexor sheath pulley. The diagnosis was confirmed with Colour Doppler Imaging (CDI) and with B-mode ultrasound imaging, and the surgical repair was evaluated in the same way. Vertical displacement of the flexor tendon meant that using CDI measurements of the longitudinal movements was not possible. However, using computer analysis of digitized B-mode images from texture patterns identified in the tendons, the vertical and longitudinal components of movement during flexion were calculated. The repair of the pulley was shown to produce tendon movement ratios nearer those off the control digit of the opposite hand.

Lyman Spitzer, Jr. (1914–1997)

ABSTRACTLyman Spitzer, Jr., the Bruce Medalist of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for 1973, died on 1997 March 31. An intrepid leader, he founded the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and was Principal Investigator on NASA's Copernicus Orbiting Astronomical Observatory. He established the theoretical foundations for the modern study of the interstellar medium and contributed to the theory of evolution of stellar clusters. His 1955 monograph, The Physics of Fully Ionized Gases (2d ed., 1962), his Diffuse Matter in Space (1968), and his Physical Processes in the Interstellar Medium (1978) all became the standard references in their fields. The success of the Hubble Space Telescope is due in large part to his foresight and leadership in pursuing this project. An avid rock climber, Spitzer ascended many peaks around the world. His scientific achievements enriched astronomy for decades to come.

Health Policy Watch: Rappelling on the Slippery Slope: Negotiating Public Policy for Physician-Assisted Death

The rock climber and the law share in a common etymological allusion when each reaches a steep, high, and hard place. The climber “appeals” to the mountain by inching down on a rope and the law's “rappel” is similarly a route to more comfortable footing. Each step in this common process is germane to the eventual resolution, for it is to be found in the rappel process itself and in the meaning of each appeal.