A Bad Idea

Mount Rainier must rank among the top ten spots in the nation as a Dork Magnet. They’re up there in spades!

In spite of glorious weather and being on the technically easiest route on Mount Rainier, we failed to reach the top of the mountain. In fact, we just made it about half way to the top before turning back. The idea of doing a route where the main tools of use were long snow pickets and a single ice ax just did not have much appeal to me. I really did not want to do the slog up there so I talked Cindy into doing a something a bit more interesting sounding (to me) and much more ambitious. I suggested that we try to ski it. Cindy had been to the top several times and had never done so with skis. The idea of getting in a nice, long ski descent sounded WAY better to me than plodding down a long glacier. I then suggested that maybe we should just try and do it in a single push from the parking lot (I know, this was really fucking dumb, but what can I say?). So, she said “yeah, lets do it!” She had skied up to camp Muir and down many times, so going another 4K to the top and down could not be that bad. I recommended we try the Emmons route as it offered a little nicer line to ski plus, I would probably not run into other guides over there.
The idea morphed a bit from here. We would hike in the trail to a camp right below the route at 5,900 feet. Then, we would ski to the top and down with light packs and hike out. After packing, printing maps, and all that shit, we hit the road much later in the afternoon than expected. Wit heavy traffic and all of that we did not get to the trailhead until around 8:00. So, we figured why not just go for it from here with day packs now. We would hike through the night and then summit in the morning (yeah, this was the next dumb idea). We drank some Red Bull, stripped the packs of all the overnight stuff and hit the trail. As we quickly came to find out, the major floods of last autumn wreaked havoc on the trail into the mountain and it ended up being a bit of an adventure tripping over big trees, logs and loose rocks in the dark. Needless to say, we were unable to make good time on the trail. A major new stream crossing, an errant trail and tricky snow conditions on the lower glacier put us way behind (what I estimated to be) our schedule. We reached about 9,400′ and it was well into the morning. Cindy was wiped out. The summit was just 5K above us and it looked like it would be a great ski. She said she was game, but I knew better. After no sleep and ten hours of hard work on the approach, this one would not go down well if we were to keep going on. So, I pulled the plug and we went down (it was a sunny, Saturday morning) and passed all the amazing dorks full of questions on their way up.

Last night, I had a big burger and slept hard.