A Mountain Only a Mother Could Love

A Mountain Only a Mother Could Love

Oct. 21,1980

By Karl Neice

University of Washington Daily

The Mountain. That's what we call it around here. On a clear or even hazy day, The Mountain is much too obvious — a fascinating muscular piece of fearsome nature. Each glance causes one to think twice.

Otherwise normal, intelligent people who have enjoyed hiking and camping for years develop an unfounded resolve to climb to the top of the Big Tahoma. It is completely insane.

So that's what I did on my summer vacation. But I didn't plan it that way. In fact, I went out of my way to get new hiking boots and a new tent so I could enjoy a refreshing hoof-it through the woods around Mount Rainer. A hike — not a climb. I was just about set to go when my mother came up with another idea: “Why don't you just climb to the top?”

“Swell,” I said. “But I know nothing at all about wielding ice picks or falling into crevasses, and it cost over 100 bucks.”

“I will pay,” mom said, “to see a Neice at the top. Besides, you’re still young but will probably put it off until it's too late.” Sometimes moms are good for hunches. And now, since it was a family mission, the sentimental indoctrination “to climb it” was complete. Still I protested.

“It might get too late when I am up there,” I reasoned. “Not everybody comes back, you know.” I was thinking of Willi Unsoeld, the famous climber who died last year leading an Evergreen State College class down from a winter camp on the side of The Mountain at Cadaver (shivver) Gap. 

“Happy birthday,” she replied.

“But my birthday was last month.”

“That's Cadaver Gap,” said Ron the Guide, posed at the rock steps of the Camp Muir Guide Hut at the end of the first day of the climb. “That's where Willi brought down his group and the snow fell… Heck of a guy… Used to climb this mountain with no toes… froze ‘em off on Everest.”

This bit of history was all matter-of-fact to the guides. They were all pissed at the time because an amateur climber ignored etiquette and loosed some rocks down on a fellow guide’s helmeted head earlier. That happened at Disappointment Cleaver, the route we were to take. Later, when we got to the top of the Cleaver, they pointed down and said, “That's where he got snapped.”

It’s not that the guides didn't care, it's just that they were too young to act so cold about it. Facing an unknown but spectacular death as avid climbers for most of their lives might have had something to do with it. Most of them are from the “technical” climbing side of the action. Only a few are actual “mountaineers,” those who ascend The Mountain because it is there but also have more of an emotional attachment to it.

The “technicals” love to talk shop about belays, rappels, pitons, walls and cracks they have known and loved. It’s called “rockcraft.” For the mountaineers, it's bivouacs, crevasses, snow caves and “crampons,” steel claws for the feet that turn an ordinary flatfoot like me into a mountain-climbing machine.

And that’s where it starts. Everyone must send them $125 and get their name on a list. I sent the money in to climb a week before the end of August. There was a full moon slated to appear and I was still trying to be romantic about it. Plus you start the climb in the middle of the night, so the moon can help you see better. Rainier Mountaineering Inc. sent me a confirmed date and a long scary list of gear. Mom and I went up a couple of days early to camp at Cougar Rock, poke around Longmire, and hike the trails at Paradise to see the wildflowers. 

The day before the climb, I showed up to attend “ice-climbing school” — a crash course in crampons, ice packs, ropes, gear and the art of “self-arrest,” or what to do when one is sliding helplessly into the wide jaws of a blue killer crevasse. It was pure physical punishment.

The weather was very bad for August on the day of the “school.” But as they say, The Mountain makes its own weather. Snow for a while at 7,000 feet, rain, mist, avalanches heard. After a manic pace up 1,600 feet from Paradise while enveloped in a sleeting mist, we practiced putting on crampons and taking them off.  Then we were directed to “traverse” a 45° grade. Not go up it, go across it. Like walking on the side of a dam, it can wreck a well-turned ankle. “Walk like your walking down the street,” one of the guides suggested, like the Think Method in “The Music Man.” This actually worked. But walking on a lot of well-worn rental steel with vicious pointed talons and frayed leather laces was enough to wake a few people up to the somber realities of summit-climbing in unforgiving gear. Mainly me.

If not, practicing self-arrest surely gave everyone pause: Line up, slide down on your butt three times, down on your stomach twice and twice upside down. Each slide you must flip over and dig that murderous ice axe deep into the glacial skin before you get to the bottom of things in Crevasseville. Then repeat with full packs on!

”Dig! Dig! Dig!” The guide yelled as many of the once-eager climbers became an imaginary sacrifice to the dormant volcano Tahoma. One guy never caught on. He had come all the way from New York to climb this “damn pile of ice” and there was no way on god’s cold earth he was going to make his axe stick or his crampons grip. I mean, 125 clams for a Seattelite isn’t that bad, but an East Coaster has to pay to fly out with high hopes and lots of travelers checks. 

I came down from ice-climbing school with my doubts. As a backpacker, I felt experienced, healthy and respectful. After ice-climbing school, however, I felt completely inexperienced, anemic and very, very respectful.

I added up the dangers: Worst weather in many Augusts – worst climbing conditions even Jim Whittaker could remember (instead of the glaciers advancing at a rate of a few inches a year, they were receding at like 50 feet per). Adding to the drama was Mount St. Helens’ dark ash melting snowfields all over The Mountain’s flanks from a murderous eruption in May. Plus I had to bear a full 40-pound pack with sleeping bag, food and extra clothes in case we had to camp on The Mountain due to weather, injury or altitude sickness. This mountain-climbing gig wasn't at all like playing with a full deck. I went to dinner with mom and had a ceremonial last brandy and cigarette.

“I’m not worried, you’ll make the right decision,” was all mom had to say about the three cold strikes on me already. It’s swell, I guess, spending the last day of your life with the same person you spent the first nine months with. I ordered wine for the occasion. Perhaps one of the waitresses, whose name and college were written on a little card that sat on each table, would help me figure out a better way to employ my incredible physical and emotional aspirations. No, they would be unmoved — they saw these idiots every day. Some of them have even climbed The Mountain themselves — so what would they want with a cold, wet, quivering mountain pansy like me?

The odds changed, like they always do, when I poured the last glass of wine from the bottle. That and the chalked-up weather report at the front desk had improved dramatically. The rain was due to stop the next morning.

“Mom, I’m not worried either. I’m feeling lucky,” I said, and that was that. Still scared, but feeling lucky. Cowboy courage, a wing and a prayer, a death-defying attitude — all from a guy whose only previous death-defying act was to stay out of the army.

And why shouldn’t I feel lucky? The list of must-have gear including two of almost everything — mittens, sweaters, socks, shirts, hats — all wool for when you’re all wet, which is all the time, inside and out. Wool pants, thermals, parkas, flashlights, food, down sleeping bag and first aid. Most of the climbers had to rent boots, ice axes, crampons and packs. Then there’s the tinted sunglasses with side shades, super sunscreen, canteen, and gaiters to keep snow and ice out of your boots.

On the hike up from Paradise to Camp Muir, it had rained. But after 10 minutes at Camp Muir the clouds cleared away baring Cadaver Gap and the walls we’d have to climb past. The entire states of Washington and Oregon were a sea of fog below us except for Mount Adams and Mount Hood. Mount Saint Helens, having blown itself to smithereens in May, was below the clouds. I got out my camera shot more than half of my two precious rolls of film. The gung-ho nature of this climb didn't afford much time for sightseeing — lest you do you miss a step and put your party of four on death’s short waiting list.

A little rock and plywood flophouse was to be our first night’s ghetto grotto at Camp Muir, after climbing nearly 5,000 feet in elevation with the full pack plus the heavy steel crampons and ice axe riding on top. A bunch of uncomfortable bunks welcomed us, “dinner” was consumed, and bedtime was about 7:30 PM. Everybody slept restlessly. A tittering teenage couple made out in the danky dark. 

Reveille came at 3 AM in the form of a stumbling guide kicking up with heavy metal door propped closed by large rocks. The rocks scraped savagely over the plywood floor — adrenaline production was immediate and gushing. The “day” began with the dark muddled thoughts, hot chocolate, canned  pears and lukewarm oatmeal.

The guides brought their groups out person by person to tie on the rope “swami” belt, and attach a metal carabiner used to tie the main ropes binding together the four-person groups. My belt was so tight I thought I would be suffocated or at least be forced to heed nature’s call on some steep ice field. Luckily either happened.

I knew from the climb up to Muir that one can almost go naked in the stiff breeze and still sweat. When they gave us Kool-Aid at Camp Muir, I drank about 15 cups and only used the stifling PortaSan facilities once on the entire adventure. And I didn’t pee on the climb or down at all. This amazed even an old Trail Mule like me. I drank a lot of water in the morning, Took a quart with me, was given some, ate snow, and still came off the mountain seriously thirsty. When I got home I felt dehydrated for a week.

The guides must have seen my Mammut cap. I found the cap in The Daily office last year and liked its mountain logo and thought a “mammut” was a marmot, my favorite high-altitude mammal (actually it’s a mammoth). Mammut at that time was actually a Swiss purveyor of high-end climbing gear, so the guides must have concluded I was one of them on a busman’s holiday and put me in last on the lead team of lean, long-legged, obviously experienced climbers.

Suddenly, I was actually crampon-ing up a glacier on a volcano in the middle of the night, full moon screaming over the deathly ice. Damn straight I could have walked on water I was so mortified. With some trepidation, the looming responsibility of my roped team, we kept “the almighty pace.” It became obvious after a while I wasn’t able to keep up with the almighty pace. But the guides probably knew before I did and made no bones about switching me into a slower, surer group at the first stop.

Whatever it was, I couldn’t call it fun. It was beyond fun, beyond pain, beyond thought, beyond sense. There was only a dulled edge of feeling left, and the pace of many climbers’ performing noisy “pressure” breathing — using your diaphragm to suck in enough air to keep your already light head from floating off into the ionosphere, if it wasn’t there already.

To remind myself I was still among the living, I counted the scary things along the way: Four crevasses to gingerly jump over, one on a steep narrow stretch. One cavernous, deep blue crevasse to climb down into and then up out of on a shaky, leaning ladder. One icy cliff to traverse sideways 30 feet across after just hearing an avalanche.

Then we started up a long, slippery climb straight up the blinding snow fields in the full savage late-morning sun. After countless hours (two or five?), we found myself at the rim of the crater — the top, the view —  and a perfect cloudless expanse. I could see Seattle faintly, and to the north Mount Baker. To the east was the Yakima Valley and south to endless forests and Adams and Hood.

The rules of mountaineering mercifully specify that to “ascend” to the rim of a volcano is to make that mountain your own. With whatever wry humor still inhabiting me, I gave my mountain back to the Indians. We were lucky to be at the top, but I didn’t feel lucky anymore. We still had to walk all the way back to Paradise, and I would have to revisit my mental catalog of scary things along the way. The snow was quickly turning into slush. It was time to get out of Dodge.

Downhill on a beautiful day was much more treacherous than uphill in the middle of the night. It took a while to learn how to “bounce” — bending knees, planting the crampons flat and hard —and pounding the dense, sticky snow off my boots and gaiters with the ice axe handle almost every other step. I didn’t count the brutal bruises to my leg from inaccurate boot flagellation. All I can remember is that after the long slog we reached Camp Muir. The replacement group of guides clapped and yelled to our guide, “Ron, you are OUT of here!” That was the first time I ever heard that phrase. Paradise was found before sunset — just as dinner hour came to the Inn, where luck or not, there was room.

Mom had rented a room when the weather turned good so we could delay our 3-hour trip home. Also it meant I could soak my bones in the bathtub and begin a pain-relief regimen.

Happy about that, I turned in my rental gear and was presented with a “Certificate of Achievement: Ascent of Mt. Rainier” and a questionnaire. First question: Would you do it again?

I don't know, I guess I wasn't in the mood. I looked around my companions. The climb had been so draining I couldn't remember a single name. One of the teenagers’ parents hugged her offspring. First question: Would you do it again?

Is this how masochism begins? Isn’t there more to life than climbing Mount Rainier more than once? Most probably! It seems though, that many of my companions were unaware of the fact that you can't really repeat an “experience of a lifetime.”

Not only that, but it turned out we were really lucky. In three days, we had seen the best and the worst of The Mountain in summer, and made it to the top. Only two other Rainier Mountaineering groups had made it to the top during the five days we had been camped at the park. And nobody got the view we got.

To my companions, the top meant something inside of them: a goal achieved.

Not me. I knew the climb would be hellacious, but I went to see the scenery heretofore reserved for the hardy, by the hardy, and of the hardy. I wanted to gaze into one of those cavernous ice-blue cracks hundreds of feet deep and wide.

But the almighty pace allowed no time. Sure, the pace was smart and got us to the top, but it wasn't a “beautiful hike.” I didn't see as much I wanted. But I was shown — up close — the dubious tradition of “because it is there,” not because it is eerie, otherworldly and awesome. I respect The Mountain, and that is why I may never go back up The Mountain.