406 wrote:Nice photos. Did you make the summit?
Yes, but the summit was an instantaneous turnabout because of whiteout conditions.
Quite anticlimactic.
There was one other rope team that braved it with us (I think Alpine Ascents) along with a couple of climbers that were already heading back down at the crater rim and they did the quick turnabout thing too beause of the wind. It wasn't a Kodak moment. The entire summit crater was a miserable cold place considering what little we could make out and we just headed right back down fearing that the weather might be worsening. I was covered white with frost.
The best part was the descent and being able to see the awesomeness of Mount Rainier once we got out of the clouds and below 13.5K. Above Cathedral Gap and Gibraltar the Glaciers are MONSTER. We left camp at midnight and most of the trip up was under moonlight and headlamps. The crevasses we jumped were plain scary in cross section on the return.
Tim wrote:Nice trip! Looks like you were just a week behind that nasty storm that trapped 3 day hikers (1 of them didn't make it) at Camp Muir. If you get the chance, got any more details of your climb? Were you with with a guided group? How many days on the mountain?
Yeah, talked to a few people who were there. It was 500' below Muir - too close not to survive. The lack of route-finding in the whiteout (along with an insulated pad where they dug in) is what did them/him in. I brought compass bearings and pre-programmed my gps with known waypoints. We did it on our own, no guides. Spent 3 nights/4 days on the mountain.
So here are the details:
The day after Taco and I got off San Gorgonio my buddy Paul asked me if I was interested in climbing Mount Rainier along with his wife.
As it turned out the timing was great. We had five weeks to prepare and almost immediately decided against paying the $850.00 for RMI guides.
With our combined experience and some good research I had no doubt. Paul and his wife have experience summiting Kili, Elbrus, Aconcagua and BigMac, so I had to get in shape fast!
The time flew by and so did a lot of money accumilating gear I still needed, like a sub-zero hooded jacket, crevasse rescue equipment and more ice gear.
All the money saved by not going with guides paid for the gear.
I studied just about every pertinent youtube video tutorial and got a book both TacoDelRio and Paul recommended; Freedom of the Hills. Mechanical advantage for Crevasse Rescue became my specialty, but we still practiced rope drills to ascend under our own power. My Prusik knots worked twice as fast as their Black Diamond Ascenders. We practiced ascending rope, tied off on a hig tree branch near a tennis court by my house. lol
We did one familiarization hike to work on teamwork and headed up Baldy. This is where I erred. They brought their 70# Rainier packs while I carried a daypack with 25#. I took them up the Register Ridge route and felt really good about myself, virtually sprinting to the top. I even took some of their weight for the trip back down and was feeling really good about myself. Little did I realize that toting a 70lb pack without practice up to Camp Muir would just about do me in.
We flew to Seattle, picked up fuel at the REI in Tacoma (TSA wont let you take fuel bottles) along with some odds and ends like a sunhat I forgot (really needed). The most valuable trick we employed was when my partners used up all their fuel either cooking a huge kickarse tunamac (group meal) or because of a leaky fitting on their stove. They had no more fuel after just one day but we needed to melt water at 10K and hydrate for the climb. This is where a Summitposter's advise to me came in. We used plastic trash bags to utilize solar radiation to melt water and after experimenting with a couple techniques developed three water making factories. The snow melted best on the bags, not in them. We made ramps with a catch-basin and lined them with the trashbags. Voila! More water than we needed.
Off we went from Camp Muir on the summit push starting at midnight by crossing Cowlitz Glacier to Cathedral Gap. After some mixed climbing on a Talus slope we reached to top of Cathedral Gap and there the winds reached 100mph! Goggles were invaluable, even if at night. Fortunately the wind was in our backs and it blew us right up the Ingraham Glacier to the Flats. The hard part was returning straight into the wind during our decent. It was the most difficult part of the climb, sustained hurricane force winds blowing up the ridges from the Emmons and Ingraham Glaciers. It took almost a quarter liter of water just to wash the grit out of my teeth. At the Flats we saw the handful of tents from the high camp like lanters in the sky. By now there were three or four rope teams ahead of us and we could follow their headlamps snaking up the Disappointment Cleaver, DC. That was the coolest part for me, making out the DC after studying it for weeks. First we crossed a half a dozen crevasses and snowbridges to traverse the flats to the DC. It was cold so they held well and the biggest jump was only a foot or two. The trail was well marked and guides cut a foot wide ice ledge along the steep ice at the toe of the Cleaver. Then came 40-45 degree mixed portions for a couple of hours. Fixed lines were invaluable for the descent. At the top of the Cleaver we passed two guided RMI rope teams that turned around because of the winds. We continued on behind another rope team (Alpine Ascents I think).
< This is only 1K below the summit (13,350ft at 5:01AM)
It was a total whiteout above 13.5K and it got VERY cold. I looked like Frosty from ice crystals that built-up. We headed up to the Crater and made the quick turnaround. We couldn't stop until we descended back down below 13K. On the route down we took a couple of pictures because it was daylight by then. Thats why the order of the images above are not in chronological sequence because of the darkness heading up.
In a nutshell I'm glad we didn't go with RMI. They seemed like slavedrivers. What they call a three day climb is actually one day schooling followed by the climb. On the second day they head up late morning and arrive at Muir by mid-afternoon, get a couple of hours sleep in their sardine box lodging and then rope up for the summit, returning all the way down the next afternoon. We carried way more gear but had the luxury of setting our pace and acclimatising.
