Rainer via Emmons

Last Sunday, Wyatt and I made loose plans to climb Rainier on Friday. Wyatt was worried about lenticular clouds on Saturday, so Friday became our day. We decided to check trip reports on Wednesday evening to make the final go/no-go call. Wyatt’s biggest concern was that the snow from the previous weekend would not be sufficiently consolidated to provide good corn skiing. On Wednesday, Wyatt found a Strava trip report indicating decent conditions. We decided to go for it. We each paid the $68 annual climbing fee and made plans for me to pick up the climbing permit at the ranger station before 5 p.m. on Thursday.

On Thursday at around 2:10 p.m., I left SpaceX and drove directly to the White River Ranger Station. I was a bit concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get a walk-up permit, but it turned out to be no problem. The two young women working there were friendly. I filled out a form with information about Wyatt and me, including details on the preparatory routes we’d climbed and our glacier gear. As far as I could tell, the rangers barely looked at the form before issuing the permit. They mentioned they had overheard someone “who seemed like he might be a ski patroller” talking about wind slabs up the mountain; however, they reassured me that I shouldn’t worry too much since the slabs were only the size of dinner plates. Slightly perplexed, I didn’t push the point. At the ranger station, I also briefly chatted with two guys from Aspen, CO, who were also making a single-push climb. They worked in physical therapy and had taken a 10-day trip to the PNW with the goal of climbing Rainier, among other things. A man who had climbed Rainier 93 times was also there. “That’s a lot of times,” one of the Aspen guys remarked. “Maybe go find another mountain. There’s a lot of them.”

After getting the permit, I enjoyed a leisurely evening eating the chicken curry I brought from work and reading Stephen Ambrose’s book about Lewis and Clark as they struggled with snow in mid-June crossing the Bitterroot. When Wyatt indicated he’d be a bit late, I drove to the White River Campground, parked, and fell asleep around 9:30. Wyatt arrived at 9:45, and after a brief chat, I went back to sleep.

We set our alarms for 2 a.m., which allowed us about four hours of sleep. When I woke up and started getting dressed, I was mildly concerned that if Wyatt slept through his alarm, I wouldn’t know exactly where he had decided to lay out his sleeping bag. But it was no issue. By 2:20 we were both packed up, ate a quick breakfast (yogurt and a scone for me), and started walking in our trail runners at 2:34. The first ~3.5 miles was on a decent trail, which eventually became partially snow-covered as we gained elevation. The walking was easy, and we covered those 3.5 miles in a little over an hour. At that point, we crossed a creek on a sketchy snow bridge and proceeded on snow for the rest of the day. Around 4 a.m., as we were putting on our boots and skis, we started seeing color in the sky, with the sun rising about an hour later.

Wyatt taking a photo of the sunrise.

Wyatt looking over at the track up the Emmons glacier.

We made it to Camp Schurman (9500 ft) at around 7 AM.

From Schurman we had relatively easy skinning up the next 2500 feet at which point we put on our boot crampons and started slowly trudging upwards. At 12k both Wyatt and I really started slowing down. We stepped over about four crevasse. My previous crevasse experience has largely been crevasses that are totally filled in during spring skiing or in bonier conditions where the crevasses are very apparent.

We got to the ridge below the summit at about 11:45. Wyatt and I decided to split up as he wanted to go inspect Liberty Bell (not having any interest trudging back up to the very flat and somewhat unimpressive summit). So we dropped the rope on the snow and split ways. I spent most of the last 400 feet talking stiltedly between breaths with a group of three from Vancouver. They were all strong athletes and skiers but spent more time at lower elevations (not dissimilar to me these days) so we made our way together slowly to the summit. One of the Canadian guys was singing to himself and told me “I can’t remember a time before I was on this mountain” and then a bit later after I did not respond to that comment “Get me off this fucking mountain”. That said I sumitted with the Canadians in good spirits and spent about 15 minutes on the summit eating a couple snacks and talking to a group of Seattleites originally from Iran (on foot) who had successfully climbed all the Cascade Volcanoes and requested that I take a photo of them.

The summit of Rainer is remarkably unremarkable.

From the summit I was able to look over at Wyatt on Liberty Bell and see him ski down towards our meet point. As I started to ski down I felt markedly incompetent. Every 3 or 4 turns I would stop for a breath, partially the snow was somewhat lumped and icy and partially perhaps I was feeling the absence of spending any time on skis in the previous month.

Wyatt pausing for a snack while I take a photo as an excuse to catch my breath.

In any event, I eventually made it down to and joined Wyatt and we began skiing down. Similar to the climb we yo-yo with both the group from Aspen I had met the previous night and the Canadian group. The highlight of the ski down was when we got to air the crevasse. Not a lot of air but enough that it was exciting.

The ski down was on so-so conditions, there had not been quite enough melt freeze cycles to develop really great corn (as Wyatt predicted), so we were mostly skiing down in something that verged between frozen mush, mush, and slush. Still better than hiking down. We eventually made it back to the stream crossing where we stashed our trail runners and stripped the ski boots, ate some food and began walking the last four miles out.

Despite the length of the walk, it was quite pleasant. We probably did 80 percent of our talking in the first 1.5 hours and the last 1.5 hours of the day because walking on an easy trail lends itself much more to conversation than skinning up a glacier separated by 15m of rope.

We made it back to the car a little after 5 pm. Our elapsed time was a little over 14.5 hours. We packed our stuff, debated the merits of washing our muddy skies the minute we got back to our respective houses versus postponing until after we caught up on sleep, shared and Orange, complained about how how the hot the cars where, talked to a women looking for beta on the route, and then started the drive back to Seattle. On the way out I stashed my permit in the box at the ranger station that they use to track which climbers have returned.