Crossing a crevasse on the Wintrop Glacier.
Looking back over our track to St. Elmo's Pass.
Wednesday morning I took Peter in to school, loaded up the car and headed down to Mt. Rainier. I had to pick up an extra gas cylinder for Michael’s stove, but both Feathered Friends and REI don’t open until 10:00, so I stopped at the REI in Federal Way for a cylinder.
Got to White River around 11:30, and met Michael in his rented Jeep Liberty. An omen?
Saddled up and headed down the trail. Once we got to Glacier Basin, which was much more snowed in than it was when I’d been there in the past. The whole thing was so beautiful that I thought once again how I don’t get up there enough.
Instead of going up to the Interglacier, you hang a right and go up over St. Elmo’s pass. This is the one part of routefinding I was worried about, but it was pretty obvious, and would have been even if there weren’t two guys ahead of us heading up the pass kicking nice steps for us.
Over the top, and down the other side, where we roped up for the Winthrop Glacier.
Looking back over our track to St. Elmo's Pass.
Made it to the first camping area (surprisingly enough, it doesn’t seem to have an established name, though there were a number of bivy sites all cleaned out.) There was a group of three or four guys in a Megamid tent from Tennessee there, they'd cooked up a big pot of spaghetti (with ragu sauce, packed up in a zip-lock bag) they couldn’t finish, so they offered it to us. It was good, better than the freeze-dried dinners I'd brought. (We never did see those two guys who kicked steps for us.) Another guy with an amazing sunburn came through on skiis. Apparently he’s a guide down on Mt. Hood, and was going to do LR with a friend who cancelled, and so he decided to solo it. So we had a nice relaxing afternoon and evening, setting up camp, chatting with other climbers, watching the alpenglow, looking over the route, and snapping photos.
There was some excitement when we heard an avalanche coming down the Liberty Wall. It took well over a minute to descend the full distance to the Carbon, and the next morning, we got an up-close look at the substantial debris fan that it left. Pretty impressive, and a reminder of what can happen up there.
The Nordwand in alpenglow. Liberty Ridge, of course, is the large wedge-shaped feature in the center, and our climb went up the snowfield on the right side of the ridge.
I never sleep well camping, but I slept better than usual. I woke up at one point and checked my watch, surprised to see it was 1:30 already. Then I rolled over, when I looked at my watch again, it was 3:00.
We had hot chocolate and broke camp, and headed out well before the other folks. We followed the boot track up to the toe of LR, and around to the right, where it just vanished. Without any ideas of what to do, we decided to climb up the bergschrund, or ice fall, or whatever it was, about ten feet, and up onto the snowfield on the right side of the ridge.
I went first, and ended up having to take off my pack to scramble up. It’s the most like ice climbing that I’ve ever done, and pretty scary. Ice climbing is similar to rock climbing in that you have to get to trust your tools, and that takes using them. Which I haven't done much of.
Mike sent the packs up, then came up himself, while every few seconds I yelled “Rock!” as another one hurtled down the chute above me. There was a very neat chute in the edge of the snow, and all the rocks (and some chunks of ice) came down through that, so there was just one place I had to watch. But there was a lot of them.
Reassembled, we headed on up the snowfield. We headed up, up, up, looking for Thumb Rock. Finally we saw something that looked like it, but it was way above us. We were both moving kind of slow by this time, the altitude and the pack weight taking its toll. We cut over to the left, above the rocks that where causing the rockfall, and eventually saw Thumb Rock, with tents and everything, about 500 feet below us. (Mike had his altimeter.) So we ended up heading up further looking for a bivy site. Finally around 12,000 feet, we found a spot that we thought would work, comparatively sheltered from the wind.
We carved two platforms out of the snow, the first time I’ve gotten to do that, and set up our camp, and had dinner. Ichose the “Polynesian Chicken” Mountain House food from my stash, which I'd purchased thinking the name was an amusing juxtaposition to a high glacier climb, but man did it hit the spot! The pineapple really makes it.
It was cold up there; my ice axe was standing out in the sun, but the leash still froze. So we burrowed into our sleeping bags to wait out the night. I was pretty worried about the cold, and making it through the night. When I first climbed into my sleeping bag I was so cold that I tucked my head down inside, and breathed into it, then I started worrying about the dampness of my breath soaking the down. (I had a pair of polypro long johns in my pack, but didn’t think to put them on.)
But I slept, as well as can be expected. I had some pretty strange dreams, which prove that I was actually sleeping: one was about a guy who rolled up Thermarest pads: for $1 he’d do a quick roll, for $5 he’d make it 1/3 the size you could do it yourself.
In the night as I lay there, I was laying there with a bit of a headache, wondering if I was experiencing cerebral edema. What do you do? Well, you descend as fast as possible. Okay, then, maybe I don’t have that, then, maybe it’s just a headache. It was a real effort to get out of my bag far enough to get my Advil and a gulp of water from my platypus, and back into the bag.
But it was pretty neat to lay there, thinking about how I was sleeping there, more than two miles above sea level. Not quite at the summit, but only 2400 feet below the summit.
When I woke up, I lay there for a while quietly, not wanting to say anything to Mike, so that he wouldn’t make me get out of the sleeping bag. I thought about how hummingbirds usually die in the morning, when they can’t get their hearts revved up enough to fly and go looking for food.
Finally I dove halfway out of the bag and retrieved my polypro long johns from my pack and drug them back into my bag. I managed to put them on (I had to unzip the sleeping bag all the way, but the bivvy sack kept some warmth in while I took off my pants) and once I had the long johns and my pants on, I felt quite a bit warmer.
So, we got dressed, packed up, and headed out, around 6:20, and headed straight up the hill, following the steps in the snow.
Man it was hard work! It was just killing my calves, and it took all the discipline I had to keep from complaining. Gradually, gradually, the slope started to ease up as we approached the bergschrund, and finally it was level enough that I could sidestep in my crampons and my calves didn’t hurt so much.
It took a fair amount of meandering around, finding our way up through the rather complicated series of crevasses that make up the bergschrund, trending generally to the right. Once again, we were on our own, not following boot tracks at all. It was kind of nice, since we were pretty secure that we could make it, not having to follow someone else’s footprints.
The tube of my platypus had been partly frozen when we got up, so I'd removed the tube, rolled it up, and stuck it down in my pants to melt the ice. And it worked, at least for a while. I drank some water out of it, but eventually I neglected to blow the water out, and it froze, uselessly, just like I've been warned it would.
At one point just below Liberty Cap, we turned a corner around an ice wall, and into what felt like gale-force winds. We retreated and dressed more warmly: I’d been wearing my Smartwool shirt and a shell; I put on my down coat under my shell, my earband, and my glove shields, and felt like an Everest climber, head down, stomping into the wind, alone in my little world.
We got to Liberty Cap right around 8:00. We’d pretty much decided not to go to Columbia Crest, though I’d sort of wanted to. But looking up at that 800 feet of altitude gain, mostly scree, I just couldn’t get up for it.
. 
Yesterday, when we were stopped for a snack up on the snowfield at 10,000' or so, a hummingbird flew by us and disappeared. At Camp Schurman, another one came by, or maybe the same one. What the heck are those guys doing up there?
We stopped at the camp and cooked up some more water. I was able to dump off my blue bag, which was nice, and the climbing ranger lectured us about being on the glacier unroped. So when we descended from Camp Schurman, we roped up and headed out onto the lower Emmonds, up the rock onto the Interglacier, and on down. By now the snow was very soft, and we weren’t able to glissade until it got pretty steep.
As we headed down, on the Interglacier and below, we passed a surprising number of people heading up. Down at the end of the snow, we stopped and took off all our extra clothing: I zipped off the legs of my pants, took off the polypro long johns, changed my smartwool shirt for the t-shirt I started on, and we put out boots back on and headed back out.
The hike out was long, but not nearly as bad as I remember from that neverending hike out after our failed Emmonds glacier climb, when I was trying to estimate the distance remaining to keep myself from complete dispair.
We signed out at the ranger station, and we headed out to the Naches Tavern for a milkshake. Then we said goodbye and talked about doing Mt. Schuksan next year.
Later, I read in cascadeclimbers.com that the others who climbed after us that day had a much more difficult time of it than we did: they had such a difficult time getting up over the bergschrund that they had to bivvy on the summit in a tent that had been ripped by rockfall at Thumb Rock!
Equipment notes: I rented a Feathered Friends Hummingbird sleeping bag for the climb, and it was just magnificent! Warm, light, and packs amazingly small. Also, this is the first time I’ve used a bivvy sack, and I’m a complete convert.
*Afterward, June 2004
It was a year ago I did this climb, one of the funnest climbs of my career. Over the last month four climbers in three different parties have died on this route. I feel a little remiss about keeping this trip report up here, making the route sound like such a lark. People can and do die up here. We were lucky to have three bluebird days, and virtually perfect snow conditions. One of the complications of this route is that the weather tends to come from the southwest, which means you can't see approaching bad weather until it's already on top of you. And, bad weather here can linger for days, or well over a week. No matter what you see on TV, a helicopter isn't going to appear out of the driving snow and pluck you and your injured partner off an ice slope just as the avalanche is bearing down on you.
Cell phones often don't work up here, so don't depend on one to be your lifeline. (And remember, if you're calling for a rescue, you're calling other people to risk their lives to save yours! People die during rescues.)
People get hit by rockfall at Thumb Rock, reputed to be the one safe spot on the ridge to camp. People slip on not particularly steep slopes, can't self-arrest, bash into a rock, and die of head injuries. People get carried off the mountain by avalanches. While this is not by any means the most difficult or technical climb on the mountain, it's a big mountain, the rock is crap so rockfall is a constant danger, it's steep enough that if a recent snowfall hasn't consolidated properly there's a real risk of avalanche (and poor consolidation conditions can continue for weeks!)
The window for doing this climb isn't very long -- between the time the White River entrance opens in lat May sometime, and early July. The weather in June in the NW can suck, but for God's sake, don't be tempted to just "go for it" because you've done Rainier three times already, as well as Denali and Orizaba, so you've got plenty of experience. The four people who died this spring ALL had more experience, and more high climbs, than I did, but that didn't save them.
End of sermon. Just treat the route with respect. Thanks, and be safe.