by Jim Davidson
I lead the next pitch. It is hard glaze ice, and my crampons and picks bite into it solidly. About every thirty feet, I look for a low-angled ramp to stand on while I crank in an ice screw, hooking the pick of my hammer through the screw’s eyehole and using the ice tool as a lever. It is awkward and tiring work. After clipping our rope to the screw with two carabiners and a nylon sling, I feel my tight shoulders relax and my heart rate slow a bit. I’m safer now, the potential fall shorter. I catch my breath, then resume leading.
Around eight-thirty, I look up and, for an instant, don’t believe what I’m seeing: a single climber with no rope making his way down toward us. He moves slowly, backing down the steep, frozen mountainside, kicking in his crampons and swinging his axes, one at a time.
As he draws closer, I move about three feet to one side. I am afraid that if the guy falls, he might slide down and knock me over like a bowling pin.
“Hi, how’s it going?” he asks after reaching me.
“Good,” I answer. “How about you?”
“Tired.”
“Where you coming from?” I ask.
“The top.”
“The top of the mountain?”
“No, just the top of Liberty Cap.”
“Where’s your partner?” I ask.
“Well, I don’t have one,” he says in a scratchy voice. “He was gonna come with me but he got sick and he couldn’t, so I’m soloing.”
“How much more of this water ice?” I ask, pointing at the slope above us.
“A thousand feet,” he replies. I don’t believe him.
“I soloed up from Thumb Rock this morning, and I’m going back tonight. If you fall on this, you go all the way to the bottom of the ice slab, and you’d go right over the Willis Wall,” he says, giggling.
“Yeah,” I answer, “I guess you would.” This guy seems wacko.
“You’ll never reach the top before dark,” he says.
He must be wrong, I think. But what if he’s right and we’re still on this ice slope when night catches us? I feel a surge of anxiety. He heads down, and I continue the pitch.
That’s the thing about meeting someone going in the other direction. It can be invigorating: You’re almost there. Or depressing: You’ve got a long way to go.
As he passes Mike below me, they exchange a few words, but there’s no time for chitchat. Darkness is coming fast, and we are in a race. As I climb, I continually scout the terrain, trying to memorize it before we lose the light, searching for a place to sleep. Over to my right, I see the tops of some big rocks, suggesting the edge of the ice and maybe a flat area—our best chance to find a spot for the night. Otherwise, we’ll have to lead more ice in the dark—a bad option. I set a quick anchor and belay Mike up.
“Why’d you stop?” Mike asks as he reaches me, seemingly perturbed. “We still had slack.”
“I think there’s a flat spot over there,” I tell him.
It is so dark by now that we dig into our packs for our headlamps.
“Well, where is it?” Mike asks.
“It’s off to the right,” I say. “About seventy-five feet out.”
I settle in to belay, using ice screws and my tools as anchors.
“Let’s hope you’re right,” Mike says, flicking on his headlamp and heading into the darkness. As I feed out the rope, the light bounces off the ice. He moves in the middle of the glow, a ghostly image in a world of ice, cold, and blackness. I turn off my headlamp to save the batteries, and when the darkness closes in on me, fear rises in my gut.
As Mike angles farther away, it gets harder to see his light. Then it disappears behind an ice bulge. Two minutes go by. Then five. Then ten. The rope twitches a few inches, then stops. I mutter aloud, “Come on, Michael, find us something.”
Now I know I’m anxious—I call him Michael only when the situation gets really serious.
“I got it,” Mike finally shouts from somewhere off in the dark, and I breathe easier. We’re going to be all right. After Mike pulls the rope tight, I traverse across the ice toward him, pulling out the screws as I move. Finally there, I see that the spot isn’t great; the ice-and-rock shelf, about the size of a picnic table, tilts downhill. There’s no flat place to set up the stove, and we’ll have to sleep in our harnesses, roped to ice screws. But it will do.
It is eleven P.M., and exhaustion overwhelms us as we crawl uncomfortably into our sleeping bags, our rope ends leading out of the bags, back to the anchor screws. Through the night, we fight a constant battle, creeping down the sloped ice ledge to the ends of our anchor slings, awakening, then worming back up the hill in our sleeping bags and resting, fitfully, a little more.
I OPEN MY eyes in the early morning light. Below me, to my right, is the ice field we’d come up. Sunrise colors reflect off the slick surface for 500 feet below me, until the ice slab plunges off over the shoulder of the Willis Wall. It is a precarious place to awaken.
“Whoa,” Mike says just then, and for a moment I assume we’re both looking at the same stunning thing.
Then I turn and see that Mike is actually staring in the opposite direction. I wiggle over to him, the nylon of my sleeping bag scratching on the rocks, and suck in a sharp breath. We are looking right down the Liberty Wall, with 2,500 vertical feet between us and the glacier we stood on yesterday afternoon.
“Holy smokes,” I say.
In the dark of last night, we’d stumbled onto this almost-flat spot just a few feet from the sheer drop-off down the wall. We are just below the Black Pyramid rock formation.
“Man,” I say, “I’ve bivouacked out a little bit, but I’ve never bivied anywhere like this.”
“I’ve bivied out a hundred nights,” Mike answers, “and I’ve never bivied like this—I don’t even know anyone who has.”
Our nerves jingle and our muscles ache. Even in the daylight, there is still no good place to put the stove, so we carefully pack up and resume the climb, headachy and dehydrated, our water bottles nearly empty.
Mike leads first, then me. We swap the lead a couple more times, moving like molasses, hunger racking us. By ten A.M., we are out of water. We battle altitude and thirst, feeling as if we have hangovers, as if our legs and packs have doubled in weight.
Late in the morning, after crossing a badly crevassed area, we reach easier ground, light the stove, and melt ice. We eat, replenishing our bodies, and fill our water bottles. We’re at about 13,300 feet, roughly 800 feet below the Liberty Cap.
We rest awhile, and then start up again. Mike takes the lead, kicking steps in the knee-deep snow. I lead for a short while, but I am so weakened by the altitude that I am painfully slow. Mike volunteers to take the front again. Out of guilt, I protest, but Mike correctly points out that we’ll be faster if he just keeps leading. Chagrined, I bring up the rear, promising myself that whatever it takes, I will not make Mike wait on me. I force myself to match his pace.
Finally, we approach the last steep section, topped by a dead-vertical ice wall that is 40 feet high in places. Mike finds a section where the wall is maybe 20 feet high, swings his tools and kicks his crampons, and starts up, moving smoothly. He reaches the top, pulls himself up and over, onto solid ground. Still belaying him from below, I see handfuls of ice chips fly over the edge as Mike chops out the next belay spot.
The rope snaps tight, and I climb, my nose pressed against the steep ice as I struggle up. I reach the top, sink one of my picks, then the other, pull myself up, get a leg on top, and muscle my way over the lip.
“Welcome to the Liberty Cap,” Mike says, a big grin breaking across his tanned face.
Too tired to respond, I bend over my ax and pant like a dog on a one-hundred-degree day. All the tough terrain is behind us—ahead is easy snow climbing to the summit.
I am finally feeling better, and at the same time Mike starts deteriorating, the toll of leading for so long wearing on him.
“Sorry, man,” Mike says as we’re getting ready to head across the next section. �
��I just can’t kick steps anymore.”
“No problem, amigo,” I say. “You carried the ball for a while. Now it’s my turn.”
I’m glad that I am able to rally and lead again. We grind our way to the highest point on the Liberty Cap, at 14,112 feet. We snap a few pictures, eat a little, then start moving down the east side of the cap. Mike says he really feels cruddy—light-headed, ready to puke—so we move slowly. He grows quieter than usual, and when I don’t hear a witty comment out of him for over an hour, I know he is hurting. Finally, we reach the flat saddle between Liberty Cap and the summit and knock off for the day.
We briefly consider going to summit and sleeping on top—the weather is so beautiful. But Mike just doesn’t have it in him right now.
He sits on his pack while I jab the handle of my ice ax into the snow around us, feeling, making sure we aren’t over a hidden crevasse. I pound two shovel-shaped snow flukes into the glacier, tie us to them, and settle in even as the sun still lingers in the western sky.
Mike crawls into his sleeping bag and immediately crashes, wiped out. I feel pretty good, so I stay awake. It is the kind of partnership we enjoy: When I struggle, Mike picks me up, takes the lead. Now Mike needs a little help, and I go to work with the stove, melting snow. An hour later, Mike wakes up, starts eating and drinking, and begins to feel better.
By the time we shimmy into our sleeping bags for the night, Mike is joking again. We are back in business.
AS THE LAST rays of the sun slip away, the lights of Seattle shimmer in the distance, 13,600 feet below us. Hours pass as I drift in and out of sleep, feeling the glacier’s cold through my foam pad, through my bag, through my clothes.
Around four A.M., I open my eyes. Stars twinkle above us, the first wisps of pink brush the eastern horizon, and a trickle of relief courses through my achy muscles. The sky is still clear.
It is Sunday morning, June 21, Father’s Day. The summer solstice, the day the tilt of Earth’s axis will mean the sun is as far north as it will get. The longest, sunniest day of the year. I doze for another two hours, my rest broken by one overriding thought: Man, twelve more hours of good weather, that’s all we need. Then we’ll be off the mountain.
CHAPTER 9
PINK-ORANGE ALPENGLOW from the rising sun marches across the summit snowfield of Mount Rainier, illuminating Mike’s smiling face.
“Mornin’—feeling better?” I ask.
“Yeah, lots,” Mike says. “Guess I just needed some sleep and water.”
“Good, because the day looks awesome.”
Mike coaxes the stove to life. At 13,600 feet, it grudgingly sputters but soon throws out heat. As the stove slowly melts ice to water, we busy ourselves getting ready for the summit, and our last day on the mountain.
While we sip weak tea and force down the last of the granola, we watch two rope teams trudge up the last few hundred feet to Rainier’s 14,410-foot summit. They are on the standard northeastern route. We are a quarter mile west of them in the glacial saddle between the true summit and the Liberty Cap.
Stuffing my blue sleeping bag into my pack compresses the air out, and I catch a whiff of rank body odor: mine. We have been climbing, sweating, and sleeping in the same clothes for three full days. A hot shower is going to feel awful good.
Mike says, “Hey, let’s make this easier and summit without the packs.”
“Uh, I’d rather just bring them with us,” I reply uneasily.
“Why lug ’em?” Mike asks. “Just leave ’em here, then get ’em on our way down.”
I look again at the climbers on the Emmons-Winthrop route. After three long days of blazing our own path across glaciers slit by countless crevasses, I envy those climbers following the relative safety of the well-trodden snow trail. What Mike’s proposing means cutting across additional unknown ground later this morning to reach the trail. Exhausted and wary, I’m apprehensive of traversing more untested glacier.
Studying the most direct route between us and the summit, the northwest snowfield, I see rocks around the edges and dirt sticking through the thin snow. No crevasses. I point at the snowfield.
“Let’s go up this way and bring our packs with us,” I suggest. “We’ll summit and then just follow the main track down with everyone else.”
“Why waste all that energy?” Mike responds. “After we summit, we can pick up our gear here, and then contour across to the trail.”
I roll it over in my mind. Mike had been ill last night, probably from exhaustion and moderate altitude sickness, so we don’t want to push too hard. I don’t want to make an issue of a minor strategic difference, especially when we’re almost done. The summit sits just 800 vertical feet above us, so reaching the top should not take very long. The packs can stay.
AFTER WE FINISH stowing our gear, we each shove an ice hammer into the snow, handle first, and clip our pack to it. Spaced our usual fifty feet apart, we tie back into the thin glacier rope that tethers us together. Grabbing the map, cameras, and one water bottle, we start up the final snowfield to the summit. Mike heads out, wearing his crampons, holding an ice ax in his right hand.
As he climbs, Mike probes the ground in front of him to check for possible crevasses hidden beneath the snow. Before each step, he plunges his ax handle in, feeling for resistance. When he pushes and the ax won’t go any farther, he figures the ground ahead is strong enough to hold him.
Our fifty-centimeter, technical ice axes were perfect for the steep terrain we ascended the last few days. But here on the low-angled snow slope, an ice ax that measures less than twenty inches is way too short. Touching the spike to the ground requires bending over and reaching out. It’s annoying, but we have no choice. It won’t last long, so we hunch over and keep probing the snow as we go.
We climb this last simple section without helmets, switching the lead, taking turns out front as we share the joy of topping out on a clear, bluebird day.
We should be moving more quickly—we’re not carrying any weight, and we both slept okay. But the air is thin, the strenuous alpine climbing wore us down, and the fire of exhaustion burns in our legs, so it’s still a trudge. I pause briefly between steps to let my thigh muscles rest a bit.
Between panting breaths, I look west toward the Liberty Cap, which we climbed across yesterday. By comparing it to our current position, I estimate our elevation to be about 14,200 feet. We’re getting real close.
Mike’s out front. Atop a small, rocky ridge, he stops, turns to face me, and casually takes in the rope as I approach. He’s not belaying me, so I know the climbing is easy and that he’s waiting for me to reach him so we can summit together.
I crest the small rise and see that we are on the highest portion of the summit crater rim. Below us in the giant circular bowl are a dozen climbers, some resting and some creeping across the inner crater floor toward us and Rainier’s true summit, the Columbia Crest. Savoring our sweet moment of success, we walk together one hundred feet westward, to the summit. Mike drops the coiled rope, throws both hands into the air, and says, “Hey!”
I step toward Mike and we execute a manly handshake–hug–back slap. We have the top to ourselves. Totally safe here on the dirt, we untie from the rope. After three long days and nights being tied to each other, it feels strange not to be tethered to Mike. But we relish strolling independently about the flat summit.
Looking south, I see the lesser Cascade volcanoes. Mount Adams is closest, and the exploded shell of Mount Saint Helens sits farther away. In the distance rests the white, blurry triangle of Mount Hood, in Oregon. Mike opens our water bottle and passes it to me without taking a sip. Only forty minutes out of camp, we aren’t dehydrated and there is plenty of water, but I still appreciate Mike letting me drink first. I slug down two gulps of melted glacier and feel residual volcanic grit settle on my gums.
“We did it, man,” I say as I hand the bottle to Mike.
“We sure did. You know, there’re very few people I could have done that route with,
even other instructors.”
I’m stunned to be compared favorably to Mike’s Outward Bound colleagues, and I’m pleased by his compliment and his confidence. I reply, “Well, there’s no one else I could have done a route that serious with.”
We grin at each other from behind our dark glasses.
Breaking out the cameras, we take summit photos of each other with the southern Cascades in the background. Soon another climber arrives, alone. I wonder if he ascended the whole mountain solo; or maybe his partners are resting down on the crater floor, unable to muster the energy for the last leg to the summit. He bubbles with energy and spits out that this is his one hundredth summit of Mount Rainier. Impressed, I offer my congratulations, then turn to Mike and drop my jaw silently. Mike nods his head in approval and says, “His hundredth summit, our first. Only ninety-nine more to go and we tie him.”
The climber then talks into a radio, describing the summit view to someone. Confused at first, we soon understand that he is talking to people in a small plane circling overhead. His friends in the airplane are there to celebrate with him and probably take photos. It dawns on me that our presence may be detracting from his big moment, so we shuffle off the summit a dozen yards. Gripping his ax in his right hand and the radio in his left, he throws his arms wide above his head and holds them there while the plane makes a low pass.