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Fifty on Mount Rainier

Lewis Turner

How do you celebrate a half century of life? I had been thinking about how to acknowledge this Life Peak since I started climbing during the previous year. Maybe Mount Rainier would be a good place to be at 50. The Mountaineers had already given me invaluable skills and experiences. Why not culminate this experience on top of the Northwest's highest peak? This article is about that trip, and how The Mountaineers got me there.

When I first started backpacking 20 years ago in Oklahoma, I read all of the books on the subject that I could find. I also accumulated equipment, and on my first trip, was surprised that my pack weighed 75 pounds. All of my Okie friends thought I was pretty strange to backpack—why would anyone want to walk around in a forest carrying a bunch of weight on their back? I never could figure out why backpacking wasn't fun and consequently, quit after a few years.

In 1984, I escaped to Washington, paradise compared to Oklahoma. Western Washington isn’t flat, brown, cold, or hot. Mountains are only one or two hours away, as are desert and ocean. Washington has been my mecca for outdoor recreation. A friend and I started doing day hikes, carrying minimum weight in tiny fanny packs. After a few years of trail hikes, I wanted a greater challenge. I wanted to pick a compass bearing and have the skills to follow it, no matter where it pointed. As a first step towards this goal, I joined The Mountaineers, a worthwhile environmental organization that offered several adventurous outdoor courses.

Because of schedule conflicts, six years went by until I was able to enroll in a scramble course. Everett's 1992 course was great and scrambling was fun, but the elevation gain was tough. I became more fit as the season progressed, but going up was still difficult. I've learned that most people who take the scramble course do not continue after the first year. I think it's because of the physical effort required in this sport and lagging motivation to maintain physical fitness during the inactive winter months. Everyone knows how getting back in shape is painful. My solution—Winter Travel Course and snowshoe trips. Scrambling also requires a strong sense of humor which is why people who scramble or climb are my favorite people. They have positive personalities and a sense of humor.

By my second year of activities in The Mountaineers, I'd received so much from the organization that I felt I had to give something back. I had many doubts about being a trip leader; fear of responsibility, level of fitness and lack of experience come to mind. As a compromise, I assisted instructing the 1993 Scramble Course. Guess what? I loved it! Helping with the course made me feel good about myself, and about what I was doing. I started thinking that maybe even being a trip leader might be OK. Besides, if you're not mature and confident enough at 50 to be a leader, then when?

I took the plunge and volunteered to be an assistant leader for a scramble trip up Mount Baring. I researched the scramble route. I talked to leaders who had done the trip previously; some felt it was very difficult, some felt it was not very difficult. Being a leader seemed to involve more than I had anticipated. I had so many things to think about, plan, and anticipate: route finding, social skills, equipment, weather, organization, contingency plans, safety and fun.

Unexpectedly, I became the leader of the Baring trip. My boots shook. My ice axe slipped. Speech was difficult, Would I do a good job? Could I get the group to the summit? Could I get us back down safely? Thick fog, sleet, snow “bombs” falling from trees, route finding difficulties, lack of experience, and fear, caused me to turn back at 350' vertical from the summit. At the time it was a very difficult decision, and one that I questioned for a long time. But safety was the final determinant.

The trip taught me a lot. I was forced to make difficult decisions on my very first trip as a leader. But overall, the good feelings from the trip encouraged me to continue to lead. There's a real joy in leading, and providing a fun and safe trip for others. Picture yourself and some close friends making it to the top of a Cascade peak, enjoying the view of countless other majestic peaks; or snowshoeing through a white forest with freshly fallen snow delicately covering the trees as though placed there by a dreaming artist.

During my second year of scrambling, a friend said, “Lewis, this is our eighth scramble together, and it's the first time we've ever been on a trail.” I decided then that I had finally become a “real” mountaineer. And I was beginning to understand why my non-mountaineering friends thought I was a tad bit weird—we all know that normal people don't willingly climb mountains off trail, and certainly not for fun.

Unlike the previous year of perfect weather, my second year of scrambling was perpetual rain, drizzle, clouds and fog. A subsidiary benefit was the low cost of film; one picture of the fog was able to represent every trip.

In 1994, I took the Basic Climbing Course, but I first had to talk my body into it. I didn't want to fall from high places, hang off of a rope on some vertical rock wall, or dangle gingerly from some thin crack. Surprise! The climbing course was a blast! Compared to scrambling, it was more physically, technically, and mentally challenging. The physical challenge was the weight of the climbing equipment. Where was my fanny pack? I've learned that each additional Mountaineer course means more weight. This may sound perverse, but after taking Basic Climbing I wanted to obtain even more skills. I thought—Intermediate Climbing Course.

After a trip, particularly the difficult ones, I soon start to forget the difficulty and the fear, and tend to expand the memory of the fun and good experiences. Thus, the fun of mountaineering is perpetuated.

For my birthday month of June, everything fell together. I passed the entrance exam for the Intermediate Climbing Course. I could now look forward to ice, winter, and leading fifth-class rock climbs. I completed successful climbs of Dome Peak (one of the most remote in the state), Mount Hood (Oregon's highest), and Mount Olympus (highest in the Olympics). Whew! No rocking chairs yet.

I climbed Mount Rainier on the last weekend of June. Because of the hot weather, we decided to hike up to Camp Muir in the evening. We left Paradise on Thursday at 7 P.M. and arrived at Camp Muir six hours later. Like the first day of most overnight climbing trips, the hike to Camp Muir was not particularly fun. My pack was heavy. My focus was primarily fixed on the boots in front of me as I took step after step and breath after breath, continually thinking that the end must surely be close. However, hiking with only a headlamp for light did make the trip interesting and unlike any other; there was only me, darkness outside of my small circle of battery-powered light, a few friends, and millions of brilliant stars.

The climbers' hut at Camp Muir was almost full, so we quickly set up the only tents in the area, crawled into them and fell into deep sleep. We had decided to do Rainier as a three day climb. We weren't in any hurry, and the extra day would allow us to acclimatize to the altitude. On Friday we just lazed around camp. We ate, slept, talked, ate, slept, and watched a few new tents being set up and a form of panhandling peculiar to the mountains.

A few solo climbers showed up at Camp Muir trying to get on rope teams so that they could cross crevassed glaciers safely. I remember listening to two young men making their pitch to a rope team. They asked, “We have ice axes and those spiky things for our boots, but do we need anything else?”

We left Camp Muir shortly after 2 A.M. and observed a rare and wondrous sight, a line of mysterious fireflies slowly moving up towards the night sky. We watched the fireflies bob slowly up and down above the Cowlitz Glacier until they faded away near Cathedral Rocks.

As we were crossing the Ingraham Glacier in the dark, we passed our first “sweaty palm” zone, large crevasses below a steep, exposed ridge of rock called Disappointment Cleaver. We safely negotiated the crevasses and arrived at the upper glacier just after sunrise. The glorious morning was windless, warm and fairly clear with the sun peaking over the horizon. We passed two exhausted climbers parked in sleeping bags by their guides. After completing this climb, I had respect for folks on guided trips who with no experience but lots of determination, make it to the top of Rainier.

Up we went, finding ways over or around small and sometimes gigantic crevasses. They were shockingly deep cracks in the snow, several inches to tens of feet wide; they got darker the deeper they went, until they were the blackness of a bottomless pit. Mount Rainier's crevasses were much bigger than the ones I had seen a week before on Mount Hood.

Six hours after leaving Camp Muir, we were at the top of Washington! One small step for man, a giant leap for a 50-year-old. We signed the summit register, and then spent a couple of hours on top in the warm, windless afternoon sun. It was surreal; we watched guides play Frisbee on a snow-covered moon crater.

Mt. Rainier feels significantly more remote than the other mountains I’ve visited in the Northwest. Rainier is huge. The caldara is at least a quarter-mile across. Rainier has its own valleys, ridges and sub-peaks forming whole ranges of mountains. Once above Camp Muir, even in the presence of other climbers, I felt small, isolated and remote from civilization as if I was in Alaska or the Himalayas.

We started back late in the morning. The hot sun had made the snow cover slippery. I slipped repeatedly and each time visualized myself sliding down into a crevasse. Thus, we slipped into the second “sweaty palm” zone. My nervousness was heightened because one member of our rope team was weakened by altitude sickness. This was my first experience with this potentially dangerous condition. Our friend was mentally alert but physically very weak. He would just sit down and stop moving as though asleep. But when we told him to get up, he would immediately respond verbally, slowly get up and continue downward. We reached the Cleaver; he kept slipping. I imagined him slipping and pulling the whole rope team into the exposed and heavily crevassed areas. In the end, we just went very slow and took one step at a time.

As we were traversing around the Cleaver, I heard “caw, caw”. A crow sat on a tiny pinnacle on the very top of a ridge called Gibraltar Rock, close to Cadaver Gap. I don’t know whether the crow was taunting, beckoning, or perhaps telling us to leave, but she provided a comfort in this remote and beautiful place, a familiar presence of a creature who could easily and confidently explore the mountain without danger of falling, slipping, or being hit by falling rock. When we descended below the Cleaver, we heard a roar. A large avalanche of car-sized rocks tumbled down the glacier to where we had been moments before! Thankfully, all of the rockfall disappeared into a hidden crevasse. Had we been a few minutes slower…

Our sick friend completely recovered within two hours after reaching Camp Muir. I felt good about the climb up Rainier. The altitude hadn't bothered most of us and for me it had been an easier trip than previous glacier climbs. Thanks to The Mountaineers , I was able to stand at the end of my first half-century and laugh. Now I'm starting to think about what to do when I turn 60.

One of the best reasons for taking Mountaineers courses is to increase your skills and then give back some of what you learn by being a trip leader and course instructor. I think most leaders and instructors feel this way. Otherwise, how can you explain an organization of 15,000 that provides thousands of outdoor trips and activities, and operates almost entirely with volunteers? I encourage others to take Mountaineer courses, to experience adventures, to develop leader skills, and then to give those skills and experiences back to others by helping on courses and leading trips.