Winds, weather and wonder on Rainier

Published 10:42 am Wednesday, August 12, 2015

We hauled our bags – heavy with ice axes and crampons – up the hill to the climber’s office. Once inside, the ranger gave us a once-over.

“You spend a lot of time on Orcas?” he asked, nodding toward my hat imprinted with an image of the island.

“I’ve lived there for about four years,” I said.

“It’s a magical place,” he said, handing us our permits. He added that he wanted to kayak in the Salish Sea and paddle over to Sucia Island.

“People die out there,” I said. “Kayaking can be sketchy if it’s not during a slack tide.”

I said this with authority, but had only heard about this danger from a boat captain after several of my own naive crossings. The most recent death on Sucia was in 2012 after a kayaker capsized.

The ranger raised an eyebrow. Perhaps he thought it was odd that I was giving him advice on hazardous activities as I was about to make an attempt of the summit of Mount Rainier with my friend Cat and her 16-year-old son Nathan.

According to the National Park Service, Mount Rainier, standing 14,410 feet, is not only an active volcano, but is the most glaciated peak in the contiguous U.S., spawning six major rivers. Between 1.5 and 2 million people visit Mount Rainier each year. About 10,000 people attempt the summit each year, and 50 percent succeed. According to professional mountaineer Alan Arnette, more than 185,000 people have summitted Mount Rainier and around 96 have died since 1887, mostly from falls and then avalanches. In 2014 six climbers were killed by avalanche-related incident on the Liberty Ridge route.

So yes, people do not always return from their trek up the mountain.

The unpredictable nature of mountaineering was weighing on our minds on my recent trip due to a storm coming in accompanied by 45- to 50-mile-per-hour winds.  But as quickly as storms come, they go, so we made the decision to hike up 10,000 feet to Camp Muir in the hopes that blue skies would appear. About halfway up to Muir the clouds came in and visibility dropped to about 10 feet or less. Our spirits sank into the mist.

This was our second attempt in two weeks, and the summit looked much farther than 4,000 feet in this weather. We might as well have been headed to the center of the earth.

Last week we had headed up the mountain quite late, as I had misjudged the timing of the ferry crossing and traffic. Halfway to Muir we faced a rainstorm and some wind. By the time we reached 11,000 feet at around 1 a.m., Cat was struggling for air. Her sinus infection at that altitude was causing her some serious problems. She did not want to turn around, but our travel up the glacier against the eerily blue fissures in the snow was slow. We headed for the Disappointment Cleaver – a mammoth of loose rock – and walked for hours on hard stones. The wind blew the dust into our eyes and it felt as if we might be flung from the rock by only 35-mile-per-hour winds.

By the time we reached 13,300, we had been on the mountain for nearly seven hours, and the sun was beaming down on us, melting the snow beneath our feet.

“I think we have to turn back,” Cat said.

It was a safe decision, but I loathed it all the same. The summit was within my sight – then it was gone.

So last weekend as the snow came in and my vision blurred, I had one choice: to let go of my expectations and to let the mountain be a mountain. Altitude sickness and weather are what make a mountain so majestic – so within our grasp and so beyond our reach.

So up we went on the snowfield to the Muir hut where we slept through the storm, and the next day as we descended back into the mountain’s valley, we watched as the white sky turned a perfect blue, but alas we had to return to our jobs in the real world. We gazed at green hills and the views of Adams and Mount St. Helens and the blue white glaciers of Rainier behind us.

I felt so small, but in the best of ways.