The Ledge (14 page)

Mike crawls into his sleeping bag and immediately crashes, wiped out. I feel pretty good, so I stay awake. It is the kind of partnership we enjoy: When I struggle, Mike picks me up, takes the lead. Now Mike needs a little help, and I go to work with the stove, melting snow. An hour later, Mike wakes up, starts eating and drinking, and begins to feel better.

By the time we shimmy into our sleeping bags for the night, Mike is joking again. We are back in business.

AS THE LAST
rays of the sun slip away, the lights of Seattle shimmer in the distance, 13,600 feet below us. Hours pass as I drift in and out of sleep, feeling the glacier’s cold through my foam pad, through my bag, through my clothes.

Around four
A.M.
, I open my eyes. Stars twinkle above us, the first wisps of pink brush the eastern horizon, and a trickle of relief courses through my achy muscles. The sky is still clear.

It is Sunday morning, June 21, Father’s Day. The summer solstice, the day the tilt of Earth’s axis will mean the sun is as far north as it will get. The longest, sunniest day of the year. I doze for another two hours, my rest broken by one overriding thought:
Man, twelve more hours of good weather, that’s all we need. Then we’ll be off the mountain
.

PINK-ORANGE ALPENGLOW
from the rising sun marches across the summit snowfield of Mount Rainier, illuminating Mike’s smiling face.

“Mornin’—feeling better?” I ask.

“Yeah, lots,” Mike says. “Guess I just needed some sleep and water.”

“Good, because the day looks awesome.”

Mike coaxes the stove to life. At 13,600 feet, it grudgingly sputters but soon throws out heat. As the stove slowly melts ice to water, we busy ourselves getting ready for the summit, and our last day on the mountain.

While we sip weak tea and force down the last of the granola, we watch two rope teams trudge up the last few hundred feet to Rainier’s 14,410-foot summit. They are on the standard northeastern route. We are a quarter mile west of them in the glacial saddle between the true summit and the Liberty Cap.

Stuffing my blue sleeping bag into my pack compresses the air out, and I catch a whiff of rank body odor: mine. We have been climbing, sweating, and sleeping in the same clothes for three full days. A hot shower is going to feel awful good.

Mike says, “Hey, let’s make this easier and summit without the packs.”

“Uh, I’d rather just bring them with us,” I reply uneasily.

“Why lug ’em?” Mike asks. “Just leave ’em here, then get ’em on our way down.”

I look again at the climbers on the Emmons-Winthrop route. After three long days of blazing our own path across glaciers slit by countless crevasses, I envy those climbers following the relative safety of the well-trodden snow trail. What Mike’s proposing means cutting across additional unknown ground later this morning to reach the trail. Exhausted and wary, I’m apprehensive of traversing more untested glacier.

Studying the most direct route between us and the summit, the northwest snowfield, I see rocks around the edges and dirt sticking through the thin snow. No crevasses. I point at the snowfield.

“Let’s go up this way and bring our packs with us,” I suggest. “We’ll summit and then just follow the main track down with everyone else.”

“Why waste all that energy?” Mike responds. “After we summit, we can pick up our gear here, and then contour across to the trail.”

I roll it over in my mind. Mike had been ill last night, probably from exhaustion and moderate altitude sickness, so we don’t want to push too hard. I don’t want to make an issue of a minor strategic difference, especially when we’re almost done. The summit sits just 800 vertical feet above us, so reaching the top should not take very long. The packs can stay.

AFTER WE FINISH
stowing our gear, we each shove an ice hammer into the snow, handle first, and clip our pack to it. Spaced our usual fifty feet apart, we tie back into the thin glacier rope that tethers us together. Grabbing the map, cameras, and one water bottle, we start
up the final snowfield to the summit. Mike heads out, wearing his crampons, holding an ice ax in his right hand.

As he climbs, Mike probes the ground in front of him to check for possible crevasses hidden beneath the snow. Before each step, he plunges his ax handle in, feeling for resistance. When he pushes and the ax won’t go any farther, he figures the ground ahead is strong enough to hold him.

Our fifty-centimeter, technical ice axes were perfect for the steep terrain we ascended the last few days. But here on the low-angled snow slope, an ice ax that measures less than twenty inches is way too short. Touching the spike to the ground requires bending over and reaching out. It’s annoying, but we have no choice. It won’t last long, so we hunch over and keep probing the snow as we go.

We climb this last simple section without helmets, switching the lead, taking turns out front as we share the joy of topping out on a clear, bluebird day.

We should be moving more quickly—we’re not carrying any weight, and we both slept okay. But the air is thin, the strenuous alpine climbing wore us down, and the fire of exhaustion burns in our legs, so it’s still a trudge. I pause briefly between steps to let my thigh muscles rest a bit.

Between panting breaths, I look west toward the Liberty Cap, which we climbed across yesterday. By comparing it to our current position, I estimate our elevation to be about 14,200 feet. We’re getting real close.

Mike’s out front. Atop a small, rocky ridge, he stops, turns to face me, and casually takes in the rope as I approach. He’s not belaying me, so I know the climbing is easy and that he’s waiting for me to reach him so we can summit together.

I crest the small rise and see that we are on the highest portion of the summit crater rim. Below us in the giant circular bowl are a dozen climbers, some resting and some creeping across the inner
crater floor toward us and Rainier’s true summit, the Columbia Crest. Savoring our sweet moment of success, we walk together one hundred feet westward, to the summit. Mike drops the coiled rope, throws both hands into the air, and says, “Hey!”

I step toward Mike and we execute a manly handshake–hug–back slap. We have the top to ourselves. Totally safe here on the dirt, we untie from the rope. After three long days and nights being tied to each other, it feels strange not to be tethered to Mike. But we relish strolling independently about the flat summit.

Looking south, I see the lesser Cascade volcanoes. Mount Adams is closest, and the exploded shell of Mount Saint Helens sits farther away. In the distance rests the white, blurry triangle of Mount Hood, in Oregon. Mike opens our water bottle and passes it to me without taking a sip. Only forty minutes out of camp, we aren’t dehydrated and there is plenty of water, but I still appreciate Mike letting me drink first. I slug down two gulps of melted glacier and feel residual volcanic grit settle on my gums.

“We did it, man,” I say as I hand the bottle to Mike.

“We sure did. You know, there’re very few people I could have done that route with, even other instructors.”

I’m stunned to be compared favorably to Mike’s Outward Bound colleagues, and I’m pleased by his compliment and his confidence. I reply, “Well, there’s no one else I could have done a route that serious with.”

We grin at each other from behind our dark glasses.

Breaking out the cameras, we take summit photos of each other with the southern Cascades in the background. Soon another climber arrives, alone. I wonder if he ascended the whole mountain solo; or maybe his partners are resting down on the crater floor, unable to muster the energy for the last leg to the summit. He bubbles with energy and spits out that this is his one hundredth summit of Mount Rainier. Impressed, I offer my congratulations, then turn to
Mike and drop my jaw silently. Mike nods his head in approval and says, “His hundredth summit, our first. Only ninety-nine more to go and we tie him.”

The climber then talks into a radio, describing the summit view to someone. Confused at first, we soon understand that he is talking to people in a small plane circling overhead. His friends in the airplane are there to celebrate with him and probably take photos. It dawns on me that our presence may be detracting from his big moment, so we shuffle off the summit a dozen yards. Gripping his ax in his right hand and the radio in his left, he throws his arms wide above his head and holds them there while the plane makes a low pass.

About then, a party of four climbers arrives at the summit. After they celebrate, I ask one of them to take our picture. The easterly wind puffs up my hood and whips around the drawstrings of Mike’s wool hat. We toss an arm over each other’s shoulders and the climber snaps a photo of Mike and me on the summit of Mount Rainier.

IT’S NOW AFTER
nine
A.M.
, and more climbers are arriving. I am surprised to see so many mountaineers, then remember that it’s Sunday, June 21. I think of my dad, twenty-five hundred miles away, and silently wish him a happy Father’s Day. About a dozen people tag the top, take photos, and leave, with most of them retreating south to the standard Disappointment Cleaver route. A few head back down the northeast side of Rainier to descend the Winthrop and Emmons Glaciers. Time for us to get going, too.

We rope up again and head back down the northwest slope of the summit cone, alone. Following our solid tracks in the snow, we reach our packs in less than thirty minutes and prepare to traverse eastward so we can join the standard route on the Winthrop and
Emmons. The Emmons itself is nearly five miles long, and together these two glaciers form the biggest mass of ice in the United States outside of Alaska.

With the solstice sun now high in the sky, we are sweaty, so we strip off our pile jackets, put our shell jackets back on, and then squirm into our chest harnesses. Staring eastward across the upper Winthrop Glacier, I see curved crevasses and ice blocks the size of vans thrust up out of the snow. I say, “Let’s play heads-up here, okay?”

“You seem nervous as a cat. What’s up?” Mike asks.

“I’m okay. I just don’t like the looks of this.”

Mike studies the untracked terrain lying between us and the established snow trail off in the distance.

“We’ve been through a lot worse in the last few days,” he says. “We’ll be fine.”

By ten
A.M
. we are moving, with Mike leading the way. Cool breezes roll across the glacier as we navigate around some obvious crevasses. Seeing the cracks so close, I constantly scan right and left, looking for trouble, and I feel my confidence ebbing.

The warming snow balls up beneath our metal crampons. Quickly, the snow trapped beneath my boots grows several inches thick, and it’s like walking with a tennis ball stuck to the bottom of each foot. I pause, lift one boot, and bang the side of my crampon sharply with the shaft of my ax, knocking the snow off. I switch legs and clean the other boot. Mike and I soon synchronize our crampon-cleaning breaks to reduce the number of stops.

We cut above some linear crevasses. I find myself nervously measuring our progress to the established trail ahead: We’re halfway across; two-thirds; almost there.

A short rest would be nice, but with tilting ice chunks poised just above us, we push on.

Another one hundred feet and we finally reach the snow trail
stomped out by all the passing climbers. I exhale deeply and let my chest loosen up. Now we are on the main descent route, and we are no longer alone. There are probably twenty people on the route, most above us, a few below.

We drop our packs onto the snow, taking a break. Mike picks through our food bag—there’s very little left, but that’s okay because we should be off the mountain in another four or five hours.

“You want the greasy cheese or the granola crumbs?” he asks.

“Uh, sounds great. I’ll take the cheese.”

I gnaw indifferently on the slimy yellow cheddar and grin as I watch Mike chase granola bits around a clear plastic bag. He licks a finger, stuffs it into a corner of the crumpled sack, and, like an anteater feeding, pulls out a few morsels. After he sees that I’m amused, he makes a big show of licking each crumb off his dirty finger. I shake my head and we both laugh. Steady wind from the east chills us, so we don’t linger long. Mike heads right down the trail at a good clip, and when the rope between us tightens, I follow. The morning sun casts sparkles and shadows across the glacier.

Going straight down means that to stay centered over my feet, I have to bend at the knees and lower my butt. We’re descending fast; after twenty minutes, my thighs are on fire.

When the snow softens a bit, I start plunging my heels into the glacier’s surface. Driving my heels down dents a firm, flat platform for my foot. Mike is heel-plunging now, too. This takes more effort, but our pace doesn’t slacken much. I feel a bit rushed and nauseous; maybe I’m altitude sick from sleeping so high last night. I shout ahead to Mike, “Hold up!”

Mike halts, then turns to face me.

“I don’t think I’ve got the oomph right now to heel-plunge. Let’s sidestep.”