Partner: Sam Lien
Mileage: 20.6
Gain: 12149'
Elapsed Time: 2 days
Start time: 4:45 AM (summit day)
Approach/deproach: Snowmobile from Crystal turn off
Ski Gear:
Technical Gear: Single axe and Crampons
Rope: Yes
Pack: Lots of warm clothes
Start: Mount Rainier Park Boundary Highway 410
Finish: Start
Dryland: About 1 mile of snowless road, sorry snowmobile carbides : (
Note: Sorry for the poor image quality, this one is all shot on my iPhone, forgot the nice camera at home
Mileage: 20.6
Gain: 12149'
Elapsed Time: 2 days
Start time: 4:45 AM (summit day)
Approach/deproach: Snowmobile from Crystal turn off
Ski Gear:
Technical Gear: Single axe and Crampons
Rope: Yes
Pack: Lots of warm clothes
Start: Mount Rainier Park Boundary Highway 410
Finish: Start
Dryland: About 1 mile of snowless road, sorry snowmobile carbides : (
Note: Sorry for the poor image quality, this one is all shot on my iPhone, forgot the nice camera at home
In the last 4 years Sam and I have been doing a good deal of sled access skiing. It's generally just a way to reach day touring that's not worthy of a TR on this website. Sleds do offer pretty amazing access to the north side of Rainier in the winter though. On a "normal" (whatever that means, sadly warm winters like this one seem to becoming normal) this sno-park would be well... snowy. It's a very easy road ride up 410 to the Sunrise turnoff and up to the White River campground, All totally legit to ride per NPS.
Several years earlier Sam had mentioned that he was interested in doing Rainier in the winter sometime and that seemed like a "fun" idea. Washington had just experienced a sunny warmup so skiing options were going to be quite limited for the passes (read awful) especially since things were refreezing. That just left high north facing terrain possibly holding cold non-sun affected snow. The other thing that really got me going on this idea was that while freezing levels had been a little higher than desired for most of the season, We had not had a super high rain event. I was thinking that there shouldn't be an ice layer going way up the mountain that the snow would nit be continually blowing off an ice bed layer, like it does some years.
We had considered the south side of the mountain, but I wanted a wilderness experience and didn't want to deal with NPS gate or administrative bullshit. Riding into the White River campground seemed like the most straightforward way to approach things. Also in the interest of not making things too complicated we opted for a route we both knew very well, the Emmons/Winthrop glacier route. I had skied it four times previously and knew the route well. We also waited until the absolute last minute to decide if we were going or not, Keeping a close eye on the winds, the Mount Rainier Recreational forecast only shows winds 2.5 days out. We weren't sure about Saturday versus Sunday but when we saw much higher winds on Sunday we knew Saturday was the day. The forecast was for clear with 45 MPH NW winds and low single digits at the summit.
We set our alarms for 2:45 AM figuring it would take a little while to get going... it did. I generally figure getting out of camp takes at least an hour. In the cold that's more like 90 minutes. The moonlight was spectacular and headlamps were optional, what a night! Inter glacier was expectedly icy, freezing levels had hit 8k' with sun a few days prior.
We were treated to yet another of the best sunrises of my life (several have been while climbing this route) just as the moon was setting behind the mountain. As we dropped onto the Emmons proper we also found the wind-board snow we were hoping for. We didn't have any delusions of skiing powder, it's just to windy a mountain for that. Wind-board and sastrugi are just fine, not the greatest skiing but good enough and it also made for fast trail breaking.
Just to be safe we roped up for the entire ascent, including skinning. There are a lot of crevasses that we couldn't see but knew were there. The snow seemed stiff enough that a snow bridge breaking seemed unlikely, but better safe than sorry. We made good progress up the Emmons skinning to about 10.6k' where we switched to crampons.
We opted for the large traverse onto the Winthrop Glacier. That always seems like the simplest route and we wanted the path of least resistance. Now, it had been cold all day. When we switched to crampons we really started to bundle up. I run pretty warm and rarely climb in base layer bottoms or a mid layer on top. I was wearing both and then hard shells over all of it, even managing to wear my goggles without fogging them.
We took a break at 13.5k' and that's when it was really getting cold. We put our parkas on for the break and then decided to start climbing with them on and see if we got too hot... we didn't. Sam was wearing the parka he bought for Denali, which he only used around camp and I hadn't had to hike in a parka since my days in New Hampshire and Vermont. I did really enjoy breaking out my dusty old cold weather skills, I even had a 20 year old EMS Nalgene insulator to break out, I haven't ever needed that in the PNW before.
Luckily Liberty Cap had given us some protection from the NW winds. The winds were bad down low on the Emmons, then they just became gusty and variable as we got higher then we didn't catch the full force until we hit the saddle between Liberty cap and the Summit. It was whipping up top and we did our due diligence and went to both the new and old summits. There was a nice little sheltered spot just to the southeast of the old summit where we were able to take a minute to rest without totally freezing. The views were spectacular with clean cool air allowing for terrific visibility.
We dove into the descent and it was as expected. We stayed very close to our ascent route aided by the gps track on our watches and half a dozen wands I had placed on the way up. Wands can be nice, this was the first time I had ever used them. A GPS track and staying near the booter seems to be sufficient when the visibility is good, but when you see a wand it's nice to just be able to ignore the watch and booter and ski to it. It should be noted that climbing and skiing one of these routes when there is no booter in and no ski tracks is a vastly different experience than the standard "booter highway" that one encounters in the spring, We had a similar experience on the Tahoma Glacier the previous spring and I had tried to learn some navigational lessons from that experience. The take home lesson is that it's hard to enjoy the skiing if you're constantly looking for your single set of faint boot tracks or squinting at a red line on your watch.
Skiing the Emmons went well and then it was on to Inter Glacier which was, well.. awful. The 8k' freezing levels and sun of the prior week had really frozen things up and they were not thawed at all. We survived down to camp where we took a minute to pack up. The thing I noticed about this whole endeavor is that it was really taxing. All we had to do was gain 8k' from camp to the summit, not a big day, but something about the wind and the cold made it very tiring. I even did my best to fuel well and stay hydrated, I think this type of climbing and skiing is just much more work on the body than standard spring conditions. Really puts into perspective what it must be like to ski in the greater ranges.
Even though the ski quality was nothing to write home about I'm really glad we went for it. Summiting Rainier in the winter is a truly unique wilderness experience and having that entire half of the mountain to ourselves was also really neat. The incredible sunset, moon, views, and cloud formations only further added to the experience. Dry winter air also provided some of the best views of Seattle I had ever had from the mountain. Seeing the mountain from the city a few more times this winter I can't help but think to myself "I bet it's cold up there right now."
Even though the ski quality was nothing to write home about I'm really glad we went for it. Summiting Rainier in the winter is a truly unique wilderness experience and having that entire half of the mountain to ourselves was also really neat. The incredible sunset, moon, views, and cloud formations only further added to the experience. Dry winter air also provided some of the best views of Seattle I had ever had from the mountain. Seeing the mountain from the city a few more times this winter I can't help but think to myself "I bet it's cold up there right now."