Fred at the car, with our packs. Note the grocery bag with our food, still in the car. This will be an important fact later in the day.
Apart from a climb of Mt. Baker a few years before, and a couple of hikes up to Camp Muir and Camp Schurman, this was my first real climb. Fred had been trying to get me to climb Rainier for a while, and so I finally committed to doing it.
I rented the boots, crampons, and ice axe, I borrowed a seat harness and an old headlamp, and we used Heidi's $50 Costco tent. I had an external frame Kelty pack, obtained second hand.
It was drizzling when Fred met me at our place in Fremont. It seemed pretty ill-advised, but I'd spent a fair amount on rental gear, so it seemed like we should at least give it a shot, and we went up to buy food at Fremont Market, and headed south.
It was still drizzling slightly when we hit the White River trail, but it stopped fairly soon. It was uncanny, it was like we were pushing the clouds ahead of us; when we first saw the Interglacier, we could barely see the ice, but as we approached, the clouds lifted. By the time we got to Camp Schurman, Little Tahoma was clear, and we could see all the way to the crater rocks.
We pitched the tent, a lightweight, inexpensive single wall tent made for summer backpacking. It fluttered just amazingly in the wind, all night long. We brought some good-sized rocks into the tent, for fear of the whole thing blowing away, or collapsing around us.
Fred set up the stove and got water heating. And this is where it turned out that I'd left our freeze-dried food back in the car. Oops. I remembered postponing putting it into my pack because it was so bulky. I guess I just hadn't remembered. So, we dined on instant chicken soup in little packets, hot chocolate, and power bars.
We got up around two or so, and it was dead calm. This was my first time seeing the night sky at this altitude, and I was just blown away -- there were so many stars, I couldn't pick out the big dipper! You could see the mountain mostly because of its black bulk blocking the stars, but meandering up the side of the mountain were several rope teams, which made me think of constellations up on the glaciers.
When I went over to use the outhouse, I noticed that there was standing water on top of the metal barrel next to it. It hadn't gotten down to freezing that night at all.
Back at the tent, I was going about preparing my pack, which I'd left outside, and scared a mouse out of my plastic bag of gorp! I can't imagine how those mice live up there, under feet of snow half the year.
On my pack, I had put a button that read "Luck Visits the Well Prepared." It had been a sales motivation tool our old sales manager, Kurt Haney, had given us back when I sold computers for Sears. He had died of leukemia the previous year, and I brought it along partly as a memorial to him. I also meant it as an inspiration, but in view of the forgotten food, the crummy tent, and the bad weather, in retrospect it turned out to be a bit more of a rebuke.
So, we headed out. We hadn't gone that far, less than half an hour, probably, when one of my crampons came off. It was such a pain to mess with it in the dark, and I was so tired from lack of sleep, that I just put it into my pack and continued on with the one. I never noticed any danger or slipping, but the Emmons route isn't very steep.
We pushed pretty hard, passing a number of parties, and basically didn't stop for more than a clothing adjustment until we got to about 13,000 feet. We hadn't eaten much either, besides a power bar or two, and a few gulps of water. The sun was up, and I was getting pretty anxious. The sun was about even with us, and like it does sometimes, it seemed to illuminate the snow from beneath us, and I was convinced that we were walking over crevasses. We couldn't see the summit, which was encased in clouds.
We turned around. Later, we learned that no one had summited that day from this side, which I guess should make me feel better. But we headed down, and got back to the tent about 1:00 or so. And slept. I actually slept for a couple of hours, which helped a lot.
So, we headed out. That long, long, hike out from Camp Shurman: around the Emmons Glacier, up over that scree hill, over Interglacier. It was quite icy at the far, and I was pretty worried about it, even with both crampons on. So I was pretty glad to see a couple of other people waiting there, and a climbing ranger in the process of sinking an ice crew into the ice, and rigging up a rope for them. We waited our turn, while he belayed them down over the slick ice to the rocks. Then, when we percieved it was our turn, he took the gear down!
So, we just walked across the ice, no real problem. It was pretty scarey for me, though. No nerve.
The hike out on the Emmons is just demoralizingly long. Fred and I were both pretty unhappy, and neither of us was in a very good mood. We'd brought running shoes to hike on the trail, and it was nice to get out of the heavy plastic boots and into the lightweight shoes, but it was still a long, tedious, slog. Lots of marmots, thought; I took several pictures of them.
Back at the car, we just dumped everything in the back, and headed out. It was raining by now, and we had to drive all the way to Enumclaw to find anyplace opened for dinner. We finally went into a Burger King, cold and hungry. I was desparate for something warm to drink, but all they had was coffee, and I figured I'd need so much coffee to warm me up that I wouldn't have slept for a week.
We asked if they had a pay phone, since both of us wanted to call our wives. [Oops, I guess I wasn't actually married then, was I? Fred wanted to call his wife, I wanted to call Heidi.] Well, yes they did have a pay phone. Out in the parking lot. In the rain. Hell.
The long cold drive in the rain. I never did get warm, the whole way home. We both swore we'd never do that route again, and neither of us have.