| Description | Pat, Aaron, and Dave set out to climb Mt. Rainier via the Emmons-Winthrop Glacier route. We started the morning of Monday July 6th, 2009. We left White River Campground (4400ft) and hiked up to Camp Schurman (9500ft). After a few hours of non-sleep we tried our first summit attempt at 2am Tuesday morning. We got up to about 11700ft and realized that we were not going to make it. We were just too tired and not acclimitized enough, thus we turned back to Camp Schurman. We slept away the day Tuesday. Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, we woke around 1am to check the weather, and it looked good so we made some hot chocolate and set up the mountain. We were the last group to leave that day. We hike up and found a sketchy section around 12000ft which required some protection (running belay on way up and a real belay on the way down). Thankfully the weather stayed undercast all day with clounds starting at ~8000ft and slowly moving up to 11000ft. At about 13000ft, we all got headaches and met the first group coming off the summit. At this point we had a good idea we were going to make it as long as we continued to put one foot in front of the other. The route we took at first went way climbers left to go up the Coridoor and then went way right up to Liberty Saddle where we crossed the Bergschrund at about 13500ft. The last 800 ft from the saddle to the summit went really slow as we were tired, out of water, out of breath, and cranky. We slowly pushed up to the top, getting to the top of Columbia Crest 14411ft at about 1pm. We snapped a few pictures and argued about what we were standing on was the true summit or not. (Note, yes, after checking the map, it was the true summit, don't doubt the map and compass) We now had to just not mess up on the way down. On the way down, we knew we were the last ones down on that route that day and that the mountain was going to be slushy. On the way down, we saw that where we had initially crossed the Bergschrund was no longer there so we went around. Also, on the way down we stopped at 13000ft to make water. We had a relatively uneventful downclimb getting back to Camp Schurman at 6:30pm. Thursday, we waited for the sun to rise and left camp around 9am getting back to the trailhead at 2pm. We glissaded a large portion of the Interglacier. To top it all off we had mexican food when we got back to Enumclaw, WA (yum). All-in-all it was a great time. We learned a lot about mountianeering and even made it to the top this year! |