Mt. Rainier

Hello and welcome!  The 2013 Pan-Mass Challenge is mere days away, and I have arrived back in Massachusetts to readjust to the time zone (and the heat) and go for a couple of last rides before the big day.  My hometown of Boxborough is great for cycling, with rolling country roads winding through farmland that hasn't changed much since before the American Revolutionary War started not far from here.  Not a bad place to keep the legs limber until the ride.  The donations continue to roll in, I am at about $2,000, or almost halfway to my $4,500 goal by the October deadline.  Thanks to everyone for your generosity, and if you haven't had a chance please go to my PMC profile and donate if you can.  PMC riders pay additional registration fees to cover the cost of infrastructure and organization for the event, so every single penny of your donations goes to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.  I've got an exciting story for you this time!  My first summer of graduate school research did not leave me with a whole lot of time for major mountaineering objectives, and I have had to content myself with the smaller ranges around Vancouver.  I wanted to get up onto at least one high summit before the ride, so with a few days to spare before leaving for the east coast I committed myself to driving down into Washington state and taking a shot at the most serious mountaineering objective in the lower 48. 

Jamie and I nearing the Muir snowfield at about 7,000' on Mt. Rainier.  

At 14,400' Mt. Rainier is the highest Cascade volcano.  It is one of the furthest north, the most glaciated and far more technically challenging than any of the others.  It is definitely the jewel in the collection of any Cascade volcano peakbagger and one that I had been dreaming about since starting to climb in this range.  My old friend Jamie had flown out from Boston, so we made a plan to climb the mountain we had been talking about since our first hikes together on New Hampshire's Mt. Washington.  

Setting up at Camp Muir, 10,000'.  

I drove the 5 hours south from Vancouver to Mt. Rainier National Park, found a campsite and waited for Jamie to arrive from the Oregon desert where he had been climbing at Smith Rock State Park.  The next morning we organized our gear and drove up to the Paradise ranger station to register our climb and get our permits. These permits are required for anyone planning to travel above 10,000 feet on the mountain, and are used to be sure climbers return by their expected date.  Those who do not are assumed lost or worse and will have search and rescue initiated to find them.  Needless to say, one takes care while filling out this kind of paperwork.  After we had crossed all the t's etc. we chugged some last minute water, shouldered our packs and headed up the skyline hiking trail towards the Muir snowfield.  

Camp Muir on the Cowlitz Glacier.  

The Muir snowfield is the first tough part of any climb of Rainier up this side of the mountain. It is five miles of relentless, featureless uphill slog in blazing hot sun.  The snowfield climbs from 5,000 to 10,000 feet so altitude is not a huge issue, but the sun is killer and our packs were loaded down with tents, sleeping bags, several days worth of food and fuel, climbing gear and ropes.  It was a seemingly endless afternoon, I spent half of it relishing the PMC training I was getting, and the other half cursing Jamie for dragging ass all morning leaving us to climb the snowfield in the heat of the afternoon.  All in all I felt pretty great, I'm a bit of a Cascade veteran at this point and have learned the painful importance of sunscreen, and also of chugging water like a crazy person in the days and hours before a climb like this.  These things, plus a spring's worth of PMC training led to a surprisingly easy climb. Let me qualify that statement by saying that by 'easy' I mean I didn't think I was going to die before completing the next ten steps.  It was not easy, but it was the least painful high altitude approach day I can remember.  We breezed by other climbers, huffing and puffing and trying to keep it together.  I had never before felt the positive impact of training quite like it, I began to feel pretty OK about this whole godforsaken PMC idea.  By the time the sun had hit its high point and began its journey back down we were nearing our camp, and the mountain ranges and volcanoes to our south were laid out before us.  

Guide's huts at Camp Muir near sundown.  

At around 6 pm we arrived at 10,000 feet at Camp Muir.  The camp is named after John Muir, an author and naturalist who fought for preservation of the western forests and petitioned congress to create the National Park bill which was passed in 1890.  Camp Muir would be our home for the night, and by night I mean the next 5 hours.  We had a lot to do once in camp, set up the tent, eat as much as we could, pack for the night's climb and melt a lot of snow for drinking water.  As we hurried through all of our tasks it began to dawn on me that all the other climbers at camp were quite relaxed and sitting around chatting and playing cards.  As it turns out most folks climb Rainier in 3 days, with an extra day to relax and acclimatize to the thinner air.  Physical activity is extremely hard on big mountains like Rainier, at the summit the air contains a little more than half the amount of oxygen available at sea level.  Climbers near 30,000 feet in the high Himalaya in India are dealing with only 30%.  Most at that this altitude use bottled oxygen, but some don't, and that's insane.  Given enough time the body will adjust, creating more red blood cells to carry more oxygen, but with all our heel dragging back at the bottom we had only a few hours to prepare everything and get a good nights sleep before the toughest climb I would yet have done.

The view from Camp Muir.  The Tatoosh Range foreground.
Mt. Adams, WA (12,500') background left and Mt. Hood, OR (11,300') background right.

The benefit of climbing here in the northwest in July is the stable weather.  So far in my experience the late summer and early fall are almost guaranteed to be completely dry, no rain, no humidity and very few storms. The downside to climbing at this time of the year is that you have to be off of dangerous slopes early in the day, long before direct sun has had a chance to warm and weaken the glaciers.  This would be particularly important given that our route would pass under several building sized towers of ice called seracs, which routinely topple over and crash down the mountainside.  So, we rose at midnight after precisely zero minutes of sleep, threw on our packs and harnesses and headed up.

The upper mountain and views of Mt. Adams.  

The route we climbed is called the Disappointment Cleaver, and the poor snow season over the winter combined with warmer than average temperatures had left it in pretty bad shape.  Typical snow slopes were turned into steep ice pitches and the thin snow cover exposed crevasses that you could lose your house in.  As we moved carefully upward the lack of sleep and acclimatization time began to catch up with me.  The route gets difficult between about 12,000 and 13,000 feet, where climbers must ascend the Disappointment Cleaver itself.  This is a fin of crumbling rock that is climbed to reach the upper Ingraham Glacier icefall.  This was the section to watch out for, exhaustion and altitude effects have set in while at the same time the terrain requires absolute concentration.  It is important to move quickly through many areas to avoid lingering below unstable seracs, but every step must be flawlessly placed.  A fall could send you and your partner down a steep slope, if the snow is too hard to stop yourself then you're going into a crevasse and then hundreds of feet to the bottom.  At this point I was very glad for my months of PMC preparation.  

Jamie nearing the final snowslopes on the upper mountain.  13,500'.  

Once above the upper Ingraham Glacier the most technical and dangerous parts are over, the terrain flattens out a little bit and from there to the summit is a more gentle climb.  I was glad that the scary stuff was over for the time being, but the final slopes to the top are a real struggle.  The pace is painfully slow but you're going as fast as you possibly can, you can see the top but it never seems to get any closer.  It's always funny to me planning our next moves in these situations, telling ourselves that we'll take a break in an hour when we get to that rock 100 feet in front of us.  Our rapid ascent and lack of time to prepare and acclimatize meant that dehydration, exhaustion and altitude sickness were most definitely hitting us pretty hard at this point.  As painful as it is, this close to the top and after everything we've done to get here, turning back is not an option.  The only option is to take one more step, and then one more step.  

Climbers negotiate the Ingraham Glacier icefall at 13,000'.  Don't blow it here.  

From a little further..

Further still. Those climbers are in the upper left hand corner.  

Finally, right around 8 am we reached the height of land and walked into the summit crater at 14,400 feet.  I have to admit, although I had dreamt of this moment for years, all I could think about was nausea.  I toppled over and fell asleep (or possibly unconscious) for a good 20 minutes.  By the time I came to, I was feeling slightly better and was able to enjoy our hard earned summit.  We took a few photos, I choked down half a bagel, and we began to prepare ourselves for a descent that neither of us were looking forward to.  

Summit shot.  Mt. Rainier, 14,400'.  

Representing PMC.  

Any conservative mountaineer like myself knows that to celebrate too much at the top of a dangerous mountain is to tempt the gods to put you in your place.  Any responsible mountaineer knows that the vast majority of climbing mishaps happen on the way down, not up.  Energy reserves are low, concentration lacks and the business of down-climbing sketchy ice and snow slopes is just more likely to result in a fall.  Add to that the fact that the sun was climbing higher in the sky and the snow was softening quickly leading to dangerous instability.  We remained on top just long enough to gather our wits, and then started down.  

Layers of ash and lava flows from previous eruptions. 

Thankfully the trip down was mostly uneventful.  We were caught in a little bit of a bottleneck on some of the more dangerous sections, which was rather unnerving.  When the weather is right for a summit attempt, climbers from all around come out to take a shot.  If enough climbers are trying to pass through the same difficult and dangerous sections, traffic jams can form leaving you to wait, perched on a soft snow ledge next to a bottomless crevasse.  After dealing with the icefall and the Cleaver we were mostly out of the woods.  At the bottom of the Cleaver, just as we thought we were moving out of the danger zone, a basketball-sized rock came tumbling down off of a cliff above and struck a climber just a few feet in front of us.  Jamie's quick wits and a loud warning may have saved this climber, it struck her arms as she raised them to protect her head.  Yet another reminder not to let your guard down until the mountain is in the rear view mirror of your car.  

Waiting for our turn to climb down the icefall.

Nearing camp.  

Finally, after more than 12 solid hours of hard labor, we arrived back at Camp Muir.  Jamie fell into the tent to get some much deserved sleep, but I could not stand the thought of another afternoon in relentless sunshine on the glacier.  There was a beautiful alpine stream down at the bottom of the mountain that I had seen on my way up, and draining exhaustion was not going to keep me from getting into it.  I flew down the mountain, half jogging and half skiing on the heels of my boots.  I did the 5 miles and 5,000 vertical feet back to the trailhead in just over an hour.  I felt it was well worth the extra effort as I sank into the freezing cold snowmelt of the Paradise River, washing away a couple of days worth of filth and numbing my aching bones.  It was only then that I congratulated myself on another summit earned, not to mention the hardest and highest one of my career thus far.  I had spent 30 hours on the mountain, all but about 5 of them spent busting ass.  I had done 20 solid miles, all of them at altitude, and about 10,000 feet of elevation gain.  Not a shabby couple of days of training.

Paradise earned.  (Mi9.com) 

That's it for now folks.  I am in the final few days before the ride, and a 30 hour ascent of one the hardest mountains in the country has not hurt my confidence.  Please check out my PMC profile and donate if you can, and be sure to check back later to find out how it all went.  Thanks for your attention and generosity lo these many months, wish me luck!