Mount Rainier

We did it!!!

That's right, we summited Mt. Rainier. "We" was me, Zac (his family was on the Antarctica trip), his cousins Ben, Greg, Jeff, and Paul (are you technically a cousin?). Zac, Ben, Greg, and I went on a hike last summer down the Olympic peninsula coast and the plan for Mt. Rainier was hatched then. Our summer hike is quickly becoming a tradition. We were a really good group and it was a lot of fun. Let me tell you a little about our climb...

On Tuesday night everyone met at our house (Ben, Greg, and Paul arrived in the afternoon and got to know Julie and the kids until I got home...), we repacked all the gear, and got a little sleep. The idea was to depart from my house in the morning as I was closest to Rainier. It was still a little over a 2 hour drive to where we started, Paradise. Once we registered to climb, we started up the hill.

He we are at Paradise before we started. (from left: me, Greg, Zac, Ben, Jeff, and Paul on the ground).

Our first day's goal was to hike to Camp Muir. This amounted to about 4 miles and 4,700 feet of elevation gain. The first 1.5 miles was on trails with limited amount of snow. After that it was basically snow all the way. Here are a few pictures from the day.

This is at our first rest stopping point. It was a hot afternoon, we were all overdressed for the initial climb. The view even from here were incredible.

Cramp-ons are the best!!! They make hiking on the ice possible. Only problem is when you catch one on your pants; they're sharp and cut easily.

More walking up a hill. I had a horrible 1st day. My backpack didn't fit right, and basically pulled at me, pulling me down the hill. It made for a really long climb. Zac, Ben, and Paul all had used this same model pack before and where wondering how it was comfortable for me. It wasn't. I will be buying a new one before our next trip.


We finally were getting close. Camp Muir is under the big rock outcropping on the right, called Cathedral rock.

This is looking out from camp Muir in the direction we came. That is Mount Adams in the distance.

Another picture looking out from Muir.

Here is our camp site. We had to dig a lot of snow, as our 6 person tent took up two previous tent sites. Once we got the tent up, we spend the rest of the evening melting snow for water, and boiling it for our dinners. We ate and all crawled into the tent and tried to get some sleep. I think I slept the best, but still only about 4 hours.

In the morning we woke up at about 4 am and actually headed out at about 5. We were about 4 hours behind most of the other groups, but we actually liked this as we only planned to summit and come back to Muir this day (most of the groups summit and go all the way back down on the second day) and preferred to hike in the daylight as much as possible.

After we crossed over Cathedral gap, we had to hike across the Ingram glacier. There were some pretty big (and deep) crevasses on this glacier. The trail though always took you to a place where it was easy to cross. Zac really wanted to fall in (or throw Ben in...) just so we could use some of the gear we had.

Approaching Disappointment Cleaver.

Climbing across and up the Cleaver.


Finally, we reached the top of Disappointment Clever and took a long break. This was at about 12,000 feet. We still had 1/2 the distance to the top...

This probably doesn't show up well, but towards the upper right side of the picture in the snow is two small dots. These were people coming down. This is where we had to go...

The crater!!! That's right! The top of the world (at least in Washington)! We reached the summit at about 3:30, 10.5 hours after we left camp Muir. We didn't have a lot of pictures between the top of Disappointment Cleaver and the top. It was really a long hike traversing back and forth. So much of seeing the same thing and not feeling like you were getting anywhere, that we all started to get tired and didn't want to keep going. That was the great part of having a team of friends, we all motivated each other to keep walking.

This is my Reese's peanut butter cup that Paige gave me for father's day. I brought it as my motivation. I told Paige the day before the climb that I would eat it at the top. It was good.


Mount Adams (I think) in the distant.


Another shot looking out from the summit. I really loved the views from the top. All civilization seemed to melt away, you only saw mountains, hills, and small lakes (that were close). It was absolutely beautiful!!!

Here is our summit shot!!! We don't look that tired, we were able to lift our ice axe's (from left: Greg, Jeff, Ben, me, Zac, and Paul in front).

Unfortunately Ben got a really bad migraine while on the summit and we felt it was probably worse due to the altitude, so we didn't stay up there for long. We wanted to get down a ways hoping his head would feel better. After we dropped about 1,000 feet we stopped to melt some more water for the return trip. Ben did start to feel better, not great though, so we pretty much kept walking all the way back to camp with minimal breaks.

When we reached Camp Muir again it was 9 pm. We had been hiking for 16 hours, and had climbed about 4,200 vertical feet, plus the return.

Ben climbed right into the tent and crashed. The rest of us were not far behind. We melted more snow and made dinners, nobody ate all of their's, and all basically crashed in the tent for the night. Zac and I did have a cup of hot chocolate while we were melting snow though. I think we were the only ones left not in the tent already.

The next morning we got up, packed up rather quickly and headed back to Paradise. The return trip was pretty fast. It took about 4 hours to descend all the way back down. We were able to glissade some which was great, it made the descent go quicker.

All together this was a really great trip. Completely successful for one, but also no one was seriously injured.

I think this was the hardest thing I have ever done. I had heard it compared a lot to running a marathon. Jeff had just run the Portland marathon last year, and I ran the it in 2001 and the Seattle in 2006, and we talked a lot about this. We were in complete agreement that this was much harder than a marathon. I think it was like running a marathon, sleeping for 3 hours and then running a second.

It hasn't even been a week since our climb, and I already am looking at the mountain wanting to go up again. Not for a few years, anyway, but this wasn't the last time either.