Part 3 of Kyle Miller’s 08-09 touring season:

From mid-March through April, storms continued to hammer the Cascades. The epic pow conditions made avalanche danger a huge concern, and I focused on resort riding for a bit at both Crystal Mountain and Alpental.

While I was up at Alpental, I ran into Amar Andalkar, a talented ski mountaineer endowed with a vast knowledge of the northwest’s weather patterns, as well an expert at glacier travel. I’ve used his site, skimountaineer.com, a number of times, due to its comprehensive information about various routes up the northwest’s volcanoes. Much to my delight, we got to talking, and he agreed to tackle Rainier with me.

In early April, we had a 3-day break in the storms, and felt our window of opportunity for Rainier had arrived. After two days of acclimation, we decided to begin our summit push from the Muir public shelter, a flat spot on the southern side of the mountain. Nestled 10,080 feet above sea level, and about 4,400 feet below the summit, this is the traditional base camp for climbing Mt. Rainier.

On the morning of April 6th, we woke stoked for the climb. After a quick gear check, Amar and I harnessed up, and began skinning across the Cowlitz Glacier as the early morning sun warmed our cold bodies.

Mr. Rainier’s landscape is characterized by ice and rock, and with the greatest glacial mass within the lower forty-eight states, it is considered the most technical climb among the Cascade volcanoes. At this point, I had set the seasonal goal of tackling somewhere between fifteen and eighteen of these volcanoes, so checking Mt. Rainier off of the list would be a good step for reaching this goal, to say the least.

After a set of switchbacks up a chute bordered on each side by massive walls of rock, we reached a low col, named Cathedral gap, at the base of Cathedral Rock. From here, the terrain became more technical, so after a few minutes of hydrating, we roped together and donned crampons in anticipation of our ascent up the Ingraham and Nisqually Glaciers.

As we moved up the glaciers, I found it to be a humbling experience to stand on a river of ice, overwhelmed by the power of nature, evidenced all around us by bottomless crevasses and towering seracs. Carefully navigating through the maze of crevasses and crossing bridges one at a time, we cautiously assessed our exposure to potential serac falls from above.

After six hours of skinning, climbing, resting and rehydrating we were standing on the summit of Rainier, alone in a barren landscape looking down among the Cascadian peaks over 8000 vertical feet below. The volcanoes to the south dominated the skyline. Though I’d already climbed Mt. St. Helens that season, Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams were summits and descents I was looking forward to completing later on, once corn season had officially arrived.

It had taken us longer than expected to summit, so our ascent route was covered in shadows, re-freezing the ice that had been more malleable during our climb. We opted to take the sun softened aesthetic Gibralter chute, on the way down, instead.

Soon we were ripping down the upper face of the Nisqually glacier, riding past Crevasses and seracs. The landscape below us was breathtaking.

After about 2000’ of turns, we stood at the brink of a huge roller. Below us, a 55-degree face led into a chute bordered by Gibraltar rock and the Nisqually Icefall.

The terrain was gnarly and the snow was firm, so with that in mind, I took out my ice axe while Amar used his whippets, to navigate the entrance with the utmost caution. A tumble down the 2500’ chute would almost certainly be fatal. We held our edges on the steep, icy slope and prepared for a possible self-arrest.

Amar dropped down first, carefully executing perfect hop turns through the choke, which was less than 10 feet wide. He called up that the snow below was much more carve-able. With my heart pumping full of adrenaline and fear, I carefully edged down through the choke point. I couldn’t help but take in the view off of the 2000’ ice cliff to the right of me, before our route opened up to the apron below.
Relieved to have made it through:

Before long, we were riding down the Nisqually glacier, navigating around bottomless holes and drop-offs, before traversing back toward our supplemental gear that we’d stashed at Camp Muir. Because we’d made such a late summit push and neither of us had made plans for the following day, we elected to spend the evening at Camp Muir.

Traversing with the sun setting behind us, I was weather-worn and weary, yet celebratory that I’d climbed Mt. Rainier, the Cascades’ biggest volcano, so early on in my touring season.