Well, I am heading up to Dawson Creek, and I am anxious about whether I will be able to ice climb up North. Does anyone know of ice climbs in and around Dawson Creek, MacKenzie, Powder King, and Chetwynd? Please tell me I am not going to be living in Ice Climbing purgatory for the next three years!!!

Nope, you're not going to be in ice climbing purgatory! There is actually some very good climbing out that way. No crowds either. To get you started check out the following sites www.accprincegeorge.ca and www.northernbcice.wetpaint.com

Just a warning I think I may have picked up a malware virus from the website www.northernbcice.wetpaint.com

It is called antivirus soft and is super annoying.

It plagues the host with annoying pop-ups that tell you your machine is infected and then tries to sell you software to remove it.

I got the first pop-up after I was on that site and attempting to open the Prince George file. It's really crafty because it did not tell me to run an execute program.

It's hard to pin point exactly where I got that malware virus because I did not run any execute program, on any tabs or files I tried to open. This makes me worry about how sophisticated these bastards are getting. I did visit both sites but I did notice all the pop-ups after the wetpaint site.

Be vigilant, if you try to open something and it asks you to run an exec program don't bother. Or if you try and open it and it seems slow, close it.

I had to dump my operating system and reboot it. That malware virus is malacious enough that it will block access to a CD/DVD drive so you can't download any files onto a DVD. It did allow me to save jpegs onto a flash drive. What I read about the virus is that it will live in documents like a PDF, and when you try and open the file, it could infect your machine. I did find anti-spyware that claimed it could remove it, but I was skeptical when the sites wanted me to download something onto my machine and then pay to remove the threat.

I cleaned it up the old fasioned way and managed to save any important pics. I did loose all my email contacts because I use outlook. All PDF files and other types of word documents I had were purposefully erased, to avoid carrying the virus.

Interesting. I've used both the northernbcice and its sister site northernbcrock for some time now and have never had a problem with either.

I went there as well and downloaded the PDF, scanned and opened it (nerd curiosity?) no troubles, site seems fine. Google also scanned it as fine:

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=www.northernbcice.wetpaint.com+

General stuff to avoid headaches.
-make sure your Windows Updates get done.
-use Firefox and never use IE 6, ever.
-install AVG - a good free AV scanner.
-make sure you are keeping up with Acrobat Reader updates.
-backup stuff (Mozy Home is 5 bucks / month for unlimited storage, w/ versioning and of course its off-site).

That's interesting. Did not do a lot of browsing yesterday, aside from those two sites and my normal stuff on the favorites list. Might have to start putting some sites through the google safebrowsing tool. Maybe my virus definitions and software is just enough out of date to be any easy target to new threats.

Thanks for the suggestions, I will check out the AV scanner and I am getting an external hard drive. Lesson learned for being lazy.

In addition to what is listed on the sites above, there were some ice climbs up around the Toad River area described in the CAJ a couple years ago.

Just got around to checking this thread. Thanks for the heads-up on the Northern BC ice page. I am on it. My pop-up blocker prevented something from opening... so maybe that saved me. Thanks again!!!