So after a good summer of climbing, all successful with no altitude problems, in September 2006 I gave myself an early birthday present and booked a guided climb up Mt. Rainier. Not a California fourteener at all, obviously, but something high up on my general “to-do-in-my-lifetime” list. This was with RMI, the former monopoly operator of guided climbs on Rainier for many decades. Much more on them later. I flew to Seattle, rented a car, drove to Rainier and spent the night in one of RMI’s cabins. This was at relatively low elevation (5000 feet or so) and in retrospect I should have camped out along a dirt road high up in the surrounding hills. The next day consisted of self-arrest and glacier traverse training on the lower slopes of Rainier. Much of this was review for me, from my self-taught practice on my many Shasta trips, but there was new material and the course was well-taught.
Next day brings the approach up to the high camp, Camp Muir, at around 10,000 feet. Most of this was on snow, with relatively light packs as we’re sleeping in a stone hut and being provided with hot water for cooking.
Somewhere on the hike up, my brain fizzled out and failed to shoot any photos of the very strange community of hikers, climbers, guides, rangers, and clients at Muir. There’s nice toilet there, which is always welcome. The guides went over the basics for the summit day, which would be starting around midnight that night. Then ate a bit, and tried to sleep at around 7pm or so. I’m not sure I slept at all, being still quite early, despite earplugs and a bandanna tied over my face.
At midnight the lights come on, and I just about leaped out of my shelf, ready to go. Ate some ramen noodles, drank quite a bit, got dressed, and packed up my gear. The cold was intense and biting, probably around 5-10F. We tie into teams and hit the trail. The easiest route up Rainier is very steep, long, crosses innumerable crevasses and ice bridges and honestly puts anything in California to shame. You need to be back off the glacier before early afternoon, when the ice melts and starts to move. So starting at midnight and moving fast are key. The guides enforce that rule with a cruel passion. If you slow down the rest of the team, you are finished and they will force you to stop and park your ass. Sometimes they will assemble a whole rope team to be led down by one of the guides. Otherwise they’ll put up a tent and throw you in, and leave you behind. No arguments. Climbing as a private party, you are welcome to take however long you wish and be on the ice late. The guides however do not care if you summit, they already have your money and I’m sure they’d just as soon that you have to return and pay them again. Lots of fit and capable people get parked on this climb and I don’t have to tell you that this is highly frustrating. There was a couple on the climb who were unprepared and over their heads compared to the rest of the group, and could barely pace the rope team on the flats, much less the steep ice. They got parked in a tent at the first rest break, the head guide telling them “this is as far as you’re climbing.” Such tact! Further on, someone farther up the line was climbing strong but suddenly felt quite ill. One guide took him down, and collected the two in the tent along the way.
There are dozens of trails on the ice, braided together and impossible to tell apart in the dark. Many of the old trails still sport willow wands so it’s essentially a maze. Only one of them does not end at a crevasse too wide to step over, and it changes all the time. The guides know them by heart. We passed all the private parties on the ascent, all of them lost on one of the other trails and backtracking after cliffing out at crevasses. This is what you get for your $900 guide fee.
My HRM strategy of climbing slow and steady is not compatible with these guys, obviously. The guides are constantly agitating the team to move faster, don’t stop to drink, no pictures, stay focused. My heart rate was not crazy high, but definitely into my personal danger zone. My headlamp (an old school halogen Petzl Zoom) went dead – don’t buy one of these, and if you have one, get rid of it – and my backup 4-LED headlight was brighter anyway. Dawn arrived eventually but the intense cold stayed. At the top of the climb, around 14,000 feet, I just hit a wall and could not keep pace with the team anymore. But a hundred feet more and we were standing on the crater rim, looking down into the caldera of this dormant volcano.
We descended down into the bowl and I just about collapsed. Could not catch my breath despite trying to breathe deep and steady and pressure-breathe from time to time.
The summit caldera
Hard, dagger-like ice penitentes. Hard to find a comfortable place to sit.
wasted.
The descent was considerably more relaxed. This being September, the snow cover was quite patchy in places and we were descending on lots of bare rock and loose scree in plastic boots and crampons, which is really, really far from ideal. My appetite was zero and I was surviving by continually sucking on jolly ranchers. Breaks seemed more frequent on the descent and we had time and light for photos.
More penitentes, and the broken and chaotic surfaces of the glacier far below. Note the tiny figures of another couple of rope teams.
We get down below the bare rock, cross the last dangerous bit of glacier, and are again on relatively level and safe ground around 11,000 feet. I took a bit of a Clif bar, needing solid food despite a tremendous lack of appetite. The mealy dryness of it just did not want to go down, and I forced it down my throat with a gagging revulsion I’d never experienced before. Of course a minute later, I’m vomiting bright orange Gatorade-colored puke in the snow and feeling like the end of the world. I got up and tied back in anyway. We get back to Camp Muir without any more drama. I’m drained from lack of calories and desperately need to eat and powernap. At this point the danger is long past, it’s about noon or 1pm, and all we have ahead of us is a leisurely stroll down to the visitor’s center and a celebratory dinner. The guides announced a one hour break before heading down, so I ate quickly, set an alarm, and laid down to sleep. Not fifteen minutes later one of the guides was shaking me, saying it’s time to go, everyone else is waiting. Very annoying. Of course I understand not wanting to delay the rest of the group. I offered to go down on my own, even to miss the bus back to RMI headquarters and hitchhike or walk, but “sorry we can’t allow that.” So I got up, and we walked out. Got to the bus with THREE HOURS of daylight to spare. And then WAITED at the bus for a full hour for another group to come down.
These guys have been running this scam for thirty years, and they don’t have these details down? I got the impression that above all, the guides want to be back home by 5pm so they don’t miss their TV shows or something. They were given an official monopoly by the Park Service decades ago, and like all monopolies, they really took it to heart. Flexibility and client satisfaction comes way down the list, at #10 or #15. I’m not the kind of guy who pays money to have someone show me how to do things. Usually I figure it out myself, and I often can’t even convince my friends to join me, so I’m out there solo. So these annoyances grated on me to an extreme degree. The Park Service broke their monopoly in 2006 in response to years of complaints about RMI. Of course RMI lobbied and wrangled and countersued and delayed implementation for two years. Plenty has been written in the outdoor press about that. But as I write, there are three licensed guide services going up Rainier. I highly recommend going with someone other than RMI, and let RMI learn to compete with more than a “our way or the highway” approach.