Looking up to the base of the Finger
Mt Rainier, Fuhrer Finger
CliMROD, the Climb of Mount Rainier in One Day. I’d put a note up on the REI bulletin board looking for climbing partners (this was back in the pre-Internet days) and got a call from this enthusiastic-sounding guy from down in Tacoma, named Thai. We talked on the phone about different possible objectives, and settled on a one-day climb of Rainier, via the Fuhrer Finger route.
So after work on Friday, I went to dinner with my wife and her father, and drove down to Tacoma to pick up Thai. We arrived at the park about 1:00 AM, and were climbing by 1:30. The good thing about arriving in the dead of night is that we didn’t have to pay at the entrance, and I didn’t have to pay the $15 summit fee. The bad thing is the we couldn’t register, and all day I was worried about getting busted by a ranger and having to pay some exorbitant fine. I don’t mind the summit fee, but it would be nice if you could register some other way. I’m pretty sure that when Fred and I did the Emmons, we just registered by filling out a card at the ranger office, which was empty. Of course, they have to get the fee from you somehow.
The fog was so thick on the road up to Paradise that I had to drive in first gear part of the time, which didn’t bode well, I thought. Thai had told me on the drive over that when he’d been up there last time (this was his fourth climb this year) he’d seen a fox at Camp Muir, and this morning we saw it at the parking lot, in his head lamp. I was surprised by the number of cars in the lot in the dead of night, there was at least a hundred. By the time we were halfway to Glacier Vista, we’d left the clouds behind, and the sky was filled with stars, like a painting. The Milky Way was splayed out across the sky bolder than the Big Dipper normally is from in town. It was just splendid -- it’s easy to think of there being a discreet number of stars, that what you see, the few hundred or so visible from the city, is more or less all there is, but seeing them on a night like this in their uncountable plenty reminds you of their infinity. We stopped for a minute and turned off our headlamps, and just looked up at the sky to marvel at it.
The route follows the Muir Route up to Glacier Vista, then drops down to cross the Nisqually Glacier and back up the other side. I’m pretty used to seeing that sheer rock wall across the glacier from the Camp Muir trail, it was surprising to be able to look back and see that there is one the Muir side.
Before we turned away from the glacier, we looked back down and saw the lights of the Paradise parking lot far below us, looking tiny and isolated, like lights in a cabin window on a winter night.
The first hints of sunrise started by about 2:30, and the vision of the infinity over our heads faded. We couldn’t see the sunrise, of course, since we were on the southwest side of the mountain, and we didn’t actually get into the sunlight until about 8:00 or so, at the top of the finger. When it got light enough to see, an hour and a half or so into the climb, we stopped and Tigh pointed out the route to me, and I realized that the entire mass of the mountain was still ahead of us, that we had been doing no more up till now than crawling around its flanks like a couple of ants. I had been feeling like we’d gained a lot of elevation already, but now it felt like we had the entire mountain still above us. And I thought – I’ll never do this. I’ll never make it to the summit. All I could see doing was going as far as I could, so as to not let Thai down.
When we’d started, the snow was soft and I was comfortable in just my long-sleeved t-shirt, but after an hour or so we’d gained enough altitude that the snow was hard and crunchy, and it was much colder. I had to stop to put on my jacket and gloves.
We passed a few tents, and some people were already going ahead of us on the finger.
As the light of dawn increased, it illuminated the tops of the clouds that filled the land below us with red, and Mt Adams, Mt. St Helens, and the Goat Rocks standing up above it. The clouds were higher that the mountains of the Tatoosh range, about 6000 feet, and it was nice to think that the people just waking up (it was 6:30) would think it was a grey cloudy day, when we knew it was glorious. (In fact, on my return, my wife said she’d assumed we hadn’t been able to climb, since it was grey and overcast all day long in Seattle.) It occurred to me that this was probably one of the most beautiful vistas that exist in the world, and wondered whether it would be so impressive if I’d taken a tram up there. Probably not, it would be like looking at a photo of the Grand Canyon. I had brought a set of spare batteries for my headlamp, but I was able to turn it off before the rechargables wore out, to my pleasure.
On our way up the Finger we passed a three-person rope team. The middle guy seemed to be pretty heavy and out of shape to be doing a climb like this (sure enough, we saw him later on the way down, waiting for his companions.)
Words can’t describe the beauty of the glaciers and rock formations on the mountain. They’re so massive, so incomprehensibly huge, and acted on by such massive forces, that they’re beyond description. The glaciers are twisted and thrust by their movement down the mountain into impossible-looking shapes, like the landscapes of a Dr. Seuss storybook, and the colors are subtle, bold and imaginative. Climbing in that dawn seemed like living in a coffee-table photo book; everywhere were things to photograph or just to stop and look at.
Thai is a fast climber, and doesn’t like to stop much. That’s good, because that’s the way I like to go, generally, but he seems to be even more eager than me. We had been in the full sunlight for half an hour before he stopped so I could take off my coat and get out my sunscreen and glasses. He also had an altimeter, which helped a lot in gauging our progress.
Climbing in the finger was pretty easy, since the snow was covered with suncups, which acted like a million little stairsteps. Even without crampons it would have been fairly easy to climb.
An hour or so after we’d gotten into the light, we stopped for half an hour or so for some lunch. It felt good to sit on the warm rocks and look down at the splendid landscape below us.
I was sort of under the impression that once you get to the top of the finger, you just "walk over to the summit." That’s pretty far from the truth, it turns out, the top of the finger is about the altitude of the top of Disappointment Cleaver, and it doesn’t really get much easier after that. Towards the summit, for the last hour or so, we would walk twenty or thirty steps, then pause for ten seconds or so, take another twenty or thirty steps, and pause again. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, or maybe it was taking the entire mountain at one go, but I felt the altitude more than before. This punctuated walking sounds a lot like the stories people tell of being on the top of places like Mount Everest, where you feel just fine until you start to walk, then you’re out of breath at once. I had thought about going to Point Success, the highest point on that side of the mountain and half a mile or so from the true summit, but it was off to our left, and seemed like an awful lot of work to no real point.
After we got to the crater rim, we stood there for a minute deciding what to do. We were just about to dump the rope and go over to Columbia Crest when we heard a guy hollering that someone had fallen into a crevasse there in the summit crater. We raced over there at a fast walk, which was as much speed as we could muster, and contributed Thai’s rope and our muscles to helping get the guy out. He wasn’t hurt or even in any hurry; in fact, he said to wait a minute so he could take a picture down there. He wasn’t even cold down there, the hole (it wasn’t an actual crevasse) was caused by steam. They tossed him down a pulley to clip to his seat harness and tied one end of the rope to an ice axe (I think, I’m pretty sure there was no pickets or anything involved) and four of us pulled on handles tied into the rope with figure-eight knots, and he came out pretty easily. In pulling, we walked up the rise to Columbia Crest, the true summit. Of course we had to go back down to get the camera for the obligatory summit photos, and it was harder the second time to walk up the rise.
The climb took ten hours from the parking lot to the summit, from 1:30 to 11:30. We hung out up there for over an hour. It didn’t seem like it to me at the time, but between the rescue, signing the summit book and eating lunch, Thai said later it was about two hours. I called my wife, to let her know we were okay, and was surprisingly sentimental, perhaps another effect of the altitude. This is the first time I’ve had phone trouble on a summit; the reception kept getting cut out by what sounded like a two-way radio, for ten seconds or so it would get horribly staticky, then it would get crystal-clear again.
The descent didn’t seem much quicker, at least at first. We descended the Kautz glacier, which is to the left of the finger, and involved climbing down a very steep slope, maybe 80 degrees, of almost ice covered by a few inches of snow. That was the scariest part of the trip to me, climbing down those couple of hundred feet. After that we passed Camp Hazard, which is similar in size to Camp Schurman, but was surrounded by a spectacular crop of neve penitentes, although with no ranger cabin, and then the glissading started.
We glissaded about a third of the vertical distance down the mountain. That’s a serious advantage over the standard route, none of which is steep enough to glissade (except maybe from Panorama Point.) I got pretty soaked, my rain pants are slippery but not anything like waterproof, but it was great fun. We only walked a quarter of a mile from Camp Hazard to the Nisqually, we glissaded all the rest of it.
Camp Hazard, surrounded by neve.
The base of the finger, from the west.
The southwest face of the mountain.
The climb back up to Glacier Vista was a good deal longer than I remembered it coming up, although it had been in the dark, so it was hard to tell. The hike back down to Paradise from Glacier Vista also seemed to take a good deal longer than I’d remembered from the way up. When we got to the parking lot, though, I wasn’t nearly as tired or cross as the other summit climbs I’ve made. That first time on the Emmons, I was so tired, so thoroughly bone-tired, that it didn’t even feel any better to sit down when we got to the car.
I grabbed my clothes bag and went into the bathroom to change. Unfortunately, when I left Seattle yesterday it was warm, so I didn’t have anything but clean shorts (and dry underwear thankfully) and a short-sleeved shirt to change into. I was pretty chilly in the parking lot. We went over to the climbing hut, so Thai could see whether he’d got off the waiting list to be a guide, and I ran into the lodge to buy myself a snack.
The drive home was long. The highway is full of 35mph speed zones, so it takes a lot longer than it seems like it ought to. We did get to see four deer in various places on the side of the road, which was a first for me. Thai offered to drive, and I should have let him, but I felt okay at the time. After I dropped him off, the drive back to Seattle was pretty grim, and I had to struggle to keep my eyes open.
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