The Summit of Tahoma (Mt. Rainier)

Paradise was thrumming with tourists as I pulled in. Eyes and cameras pointed upwards, fumbling feet 0n wet snow. Hundreds of cars filled the steaming lot as the sunny day hit it's peak. Alight in the afternoon sun, Tahoma was a bright mass of white against a pure blue sky. Picturesque and daunting. I was early. Way early. I was eager and anxious, because soon we were going up.

At the end of April I was coming off of an ascent and ski of Mt. Hood. While driving back into Washington I got a text from a buddy, Evan. He was in London, on a job, but was heading back to Salt Lake the following day and was eager to follow the spring weather up to the PNW and start ticking off big lines in preparation for his upcoming attempt at Denali. I was as free as I'd ever been, with a month away from work, and looking for partners as well. The timing was perfect.

We went back and forth over text as he made his way back to the states. Making and changing plans. Combing through weather forecasts and trip reports. Both of our wishlists were long, and everything could go. I was looking at Eldorado, a brimming and proud mountain at 8,872 ft, with a notoriously laborious entrance. Evan had his sights dialed to a higher altitude. The North Ridge of Baker, a ski descent of Glacier Peak, and a summit of Mt. Rainier. Rainier was interesting. The obvious object for any cascadian mountaineer. Always looming on the horizon, no matter where you stood. Massive, beautiful, dangerous, yet incredibly accessible.

I had been toying with the idea myself, though I still had my reservations. 14,410 ft tall and a minimum of 9,000 ft of gain to reach the summit. It's no short order. On top of that, Evan and I share a similar aesthetic taste, preferring to paint our ascents with a single brushstroke. No stopping to camp, no big pack to carry, just leaving in the dead of night and returning the same day. I had been struggling to maintain that sensibility when I craned my neck up towards Tahoma. 9,000 is a lot of feet, both up and down. The skiing would be taxing and technical no matter what line we chose. No slouching allowed. If there was anyone I was going to be convinced by though, it was Evan. He had convinced me to attempt the same thing on the Coleman-Demming two years prior, under similar hesitations at Mt. Baker's prominence, and since then we had both only gotten stronger.

The plans were made, Evan was on his way.

Our prime weather window for Tahoma was a few days away, so when Evan arrived we made a break for Cascade Pass. Despite deciding that the 7,000-ish ft push up Eldorado was ill advised with such a large objective on the horizon, we figured why not still use the area as a practice ground to kill time with incredible views and reacclimatize to our partnership. We packed up a full camp in our bags, slung the skis on, and trekked up the 3 mile road closure so we could camp surrounded by the devestatingly beautiful peaks of the North Cascades.

After a surprisingly good night sleep, a wily bushwhack through a wild thicket of alder, a short booter, some easy skinning, and a whole mess of incredible views, we made our way onto the warm snow of the Sahale Arm. Still opting to forgo the summit, instead choosing to keep our bodies tack sharp and well rested. Still it was a gorgeous and lonesome day, nothing but immaculate peaks, a few marmots, and our own tracks to keep us company.

When we made it back down to the cars, our camp hastily stuffed back in the bags, we confirmed all of the decisions we made before leaving cell service behind. Both Sunday and Monday were looking incredible for Tahoma, quiet winds and clear skies. Since neither of us were working at the moment, we opted to wait until Monday. Enjoying the benefits of our flexibility to give our bodies another day of rest and let the crowds we were sure would flock to the mountain peter out.

Our intuition had been correct and as we sat causally beneath Tahoma a few days later. Dozens of parties descend from the upper mountain, filling the prime lines with little zig-zagging dots. We ambushed them as they slid into the lot, tired and glowing. Which line did you ski? How was the snow? What time did you drop? Evan and I (mostly Evan—ever the extrovert) barraged them with questions as we refined our plans for the following morning.

We would ascend the mountain via the "Ingraham Direct" (the ID), cutting through the gut of the Ingraham Glacier on the east side of the mountain, and then descend via the "Success Coulior" on the south. The ID was being reported as "straightforward". A few crevasse steps and snow bridges, but the booter was in great form and the guides had wanded the terrain well. The Success Coulior was more of a mystery. A lesser skied line when compared to similar south facing lines like the "Fuhrer Finger" or even the "Kautz Headwall". We tried our best to photograph the line from below and make guesses about how it would compare to beta from previous years.

Luckily we managed to catch someone coming off of the line and finalized our beta. Summit first, then traverse to point success, use a picket to rappel the upper cliff band, and then hopefully downclimb the chute which had a small blocked choke, bringing a second picket just in case it was hairier than it looked from below. That was it. Preparations were as complete as they could be given our vantage. All that was left was to head to bed as early as possible for our midnight wakeup call.

Sometime in the midst of all of this planning we picked up a third party member, Evan's friend: Orion. Happenstance put him looking for partners the day after our attempt. When he heard we were headed up the following morning he dropped everything and made it up to paradise shortly after we went to sleep.

My alarm has never been permitted to ring prior to an "alpine start". Some combination of foreboding anxiety and the awkward sleeping conditions in the back of my Rav4 add up to numerous midnight wake-ups. My phone read 11:45 PM as I checked it for the sixth time. I had managed a hair over three and a half hours of sleep. The lights were on in Evan's van as well, we were both up early. It would have to do.

We met Orion in the upper lot and started upward around 1:30 AM. The mountain was ablaze with the light of the moon and stars danced above her. Skinning without our headlamps, only guided by the ambient light around us, the scene was spectacular. A shooting star blazed over the summit, a good omen, foreboding our arrival. We made quick work of the snowfield, arriving at Camp Muir before dawn. Stopping between the small shanty huts and rolling snow banks we let the sun rise while we sorted our gear. Donning harness and rope. Trading skis for crampons. It was a short hop over the upper Cowlitz before we were on our final line up the ID.

The sun rose quickly, turning the purple snow into a bright sea of white. Rounding the corner onto the glacier we could see our route in full view. 4,000 ft of continuous climbing through the undulating core of Ingraham. I led the rope team upwards, plodding a steady cadence to keep the line taught between us as we headed towards the open cracks that criss-crossed our path.

Our progress slowed dramatically. Taking our time as we crossed snow bridges and planks, staring down into the dramatically distant depths below us. The route steepened as we made it through the peeling convexities and onto the curling headwall. My head swam while I french stepped diagonally up the bootpack. The day was warming quickly and the air was still, cooking my brain within my helmet as I tried to keep on enough layers to cover my skin from the sun. Altitude plus heat is a nasty combination. I stuffed snow into my hood and drank from my pack often to keep my wits. Evan took the lead. Slowly we continued.

The other groups surged ahead as we slowed, we were one of the few "first-timers" on the mountain and it showed as we crawled higher and higher. Evan and I struggled again the rising altitude while Orion cheered us along from the middle of the rope. Our stubbornness and his positivity rebounded off of one another, keeping us moving steadily towards the summit.

Ecstatic to see something other than steep snow ahead of us, we crested the ridge into the East Crater which marked the final leg of our journey. A quarter mile and 200 ft more gain and we would be at our high point on Columbia Crest. It dragged on endlessly, perhaps the longest quarter mile of my life. 14,000 ft was beating against me. My mind reeled as I imagined skiing down. It reeled even harder when I imagined traversing, then digging and burying a picket for the required rappel we needed to do to enter the Success Coulior.

We crested Tahoma's peak just after noon to little aplomb. It's not a miraculous sight, flat all the way to the edge of the west crater. You are so far above everything that the world seems distant rather than grand. We dropped our bags and asses into the dirt. Halfway there. We still needed to get down, 9,000 ft down.

The conversation was loose, unstructured. Ideas flew half baked. We were punch drunk. Success was our line, but in the moment it seemed unfathomable. Evan argued for it a bit, but he was struggling as well. We just wanted to leave, to get down as fast as we could. Orion floated the Fuhrer Finger, the line he had wanted to ski before he joined up with us. It was the most direct way to the bottom. At least in that moment we believed it was. We hadn't prepped for it in the same way as we had Success, but it had been skied by dozens of parties over the last few days, and two parties had departed the summit 10 minutes prior heading down it. Surely it would be easy navigation. Surely, we agreed quickly.

We ripped down into the Nisqually, feeling better with every turn as we descended fast. There were a lot of tracks, far more than we had expected, going in every direction. Of course. There were plenty of routes down, not just one magical sharpie line through the broken field of ice and snow. We did our best to make our way through, following tracks where we found them, trending towards what looked clear.

Evan was leading the charge through a narrow funnel when he stopped suddenly and looked up toward me. He was surrounded. The ground below him opened up on every side without any path through. At the moment he seemed safe, but he didn't want to move. I slid within twenty feet of him, putting myself in a safe spot above him, and threw a rope down. Digging my skis into the snow I hip belayed him as he hopped his board out of the corridor, trying to give him some meager sense of security. Was it the right thing to do? Should I have made a real anchor then, extending the time he sat in that position? I'm still wrestling with it. We had practiced so much, and yet the situation was just outside of the things I had spent the last week visualizing. It wasn't catastrophic, but we won't ever really know where the line was. I felt good knowing I had acted quickly, but the severity of the line had made itself immediately clear.

We climbed out of the choke, booting 400 ft back upwards to the other path through we had seen. Adrenaline had taken over and climbing at 13,000 ft no longer felt debilitating. We waited, taking advantage of the sliver of internet we could manage between the three of us to double check the new path through. Had we prepared this line in the same way as Success we would have had this at our disposal already without the need for siphoning LTE up thousands of feet. We all agreed we had made a mistake. The choice to switch lines to something we hadn't prepared thoroughly had been brought on by the fight-or-flight sensation of being up too high, not by sound decision making.

We managed to navigate the rest of the glacier quickly, spending as little time as possible below looming seracs and between massive open crevasses. The line became more clear as we descended and eventually we exited the glacier and skied into the finger proper as it bisected the Wilson Cleaver. We were far too late now, past "corn o'clock" and into "half-decent chunky spring snow hour".

After a few thousand feet of enjoyable skiing, the fear of big crevasses now behind us, we picked our way between scattered rockfall and avalanche debris on the Wilson Glacier. The snowpack had been active. Debris was fresh, cutting off of convexities and covering recent tracks.

Later we would learn that one of these had caught a skier on the line a few hours earlier. We were somehow too late for the warming due to our shenanigans on the upper glacier.

Relief finally began to fill us as we traversed through the horrible sticky slop that covered the base of the mountain. The overhead hazards dissipated, the chance of slides dissolved, our mistakes had been mitigated, relegated to learning experiences rather than complete epics. We made one final transition, climbing the few hundred feet back over to Edith Creek Basin where we descended to a chorus of whoops and hollers.

Tahoma was already a mythical place in my mind before this climb. Now, it sits as a paragon of what actual mountaineering is. Nothing on the lines up or down Baker, Adams, Hood, or any other mountain in the cascades had truly prepared me for what lie on the massive slopes of the Mother of Waters. The scale of everything was so far beyond what I had imagined, it was profound in a way I wish everyone could feel.

I can already feel her calling me back. To be in the mountains is to have a short memory. To long for bettering oneself, to feel better, to move smoother. It's as close to spirituality as I get. For now, I'll settle for getting to see her, looming on the horizon as I walk to the train or crest over lesser peaks. Knowing we are closer than we ever have been.

If you are interested in some of the gear used on this ascent, check out this quick video I made while unpacking afterwards: