In early 2014, I took off with my brother and one of his friends to attempt to climb the infamous liberty Ridge route on Mt Rainier. This is a very different route from many routes on Mt Rainier in that it involves some fairly technical ice climbing - using dual ice axes and pick like crampons to climb up a 60+ deg ice slope. I even had to get some new gear for this trip.
2014-05-24
The trip started off fairly irresponsibly - we ended up leaving the white river trailhead after 6p with the goal of “getting as far as we could”. This concept is, in general, a mistake - especially with three fairly bull headed men on the trip. We ended up making it all the way up to the top of St Elmo pass by about 2a and then we had to dig out a small bivvy in the most exposed area of the climb because we were exhausted and couldn’t make it any further. None of us slept well and morning came way to early. I think our exhaustion was one of the biggest factors as to why our trip ended the way that it did. Also, people generally do this climb in 4-5 days and we were essentially planning to do it in 2 and a half.
2014-05-25
The following morning, we woke on the top of St Elmo pass and prepared for the descent. Before St Elmo, there is snow but no glacier so we hadn’t roped up at all yesterday.
We got our glacier setup all worked out and we made our way down St Elmo pass. Despite our exhaustion, this part of the trip is amazing and you can really see how big/rough this mountain is. This got the adrenaline pumping and we started to feel a lot better.
The rest of the day was spent traversing across 3 glaciers - the Winthrop Glacier, the Curtis Glacier, and the Carbon Glacier. This was another fail - as we were trying to maintain altitude rather that dropping down to cross from the Winthrop to the curtis glacier at a lower elevation. The Curtis ridge didn’t look particularly forbidding, but it is basically impassible at the higher elevations - so we had to do some backtracking to get across the ridge.
Once we got on to the Carbon glacier, we had a short climb to get to a camp called the “Thumb”. This is a small outcropping on the Liberty Ridge that’s big enough for maybe 2-3 tents. Teams generally do an early morning departure from the Thumb to get hard ice on the upper part of Liberty ridge.
We made it to within a half mile or so of the Thumb before disaster struck. Mark’s friend Kyle injured his knee on the ascent, stepping funny on a piece of ice and cranking it sideways. I think our exhaustion exacerbated this - Kyle wasn’t necessarily watching his footing or climbing as deliberately as he would have otherwise. We did a bit of first aid/triage, but there wasn’t a lot we could do other the immobilize it. We took a break for a few hours to see if it got any better, but instead his knee started to swell up and feel worse.
Unfortunately, there was no good way to escape from the climb at this point. We could go back across the glaciers the way we came or I had this idea of heading down and finding the Wonderland trail which would take us back to White River directly. We opted for the Wonderland trail route and dropped down off the glacier
The trail proved to be extremely challenging to follow given the amount of snow still left on the trail. We did our best, but we weren’t able to find a way over the skyscraper ridge that separates Wintrop Glacier and the white river basin. This was easily passed via St Elmo pass on the way in, but that was probably 3k feet of elevation above us. This was demoralizing and we were exhaused, so we made camp for the night.
This ended up being another miserable camp. We were down below the snow line, so everything was wet and melting - we were wet and cold all night and on top of that it started raining in the early morning. The morning light couldn’t come soon enough.
2014-05-25
We packed up everything the next day and headed back to the Winthrop glacier to make the 3k feet ascent back to St Elmo pass. It was slow going, but as we gained elevation the rain turned into snow and that helped a bit.
It was near white out by the time we made it back to St Elmo pass and we ascended. Kyle had made a makeshift brace for his knee out of a few pieces of webbing and a pole and Mark and I had taken most of his weight off in the hopes that we could get back in one piece.
After St Elmo pass, we glissaded into glacier basin (which no longer has glaciers, only snow at this point). We ran into one other climbing crew - a crew from Alpine Ascents with 2 guides and 4 climbers. We didn’t realize it at the time, but we were to be the last ones who saw this group alive - they made it up to Liberty Ridge 3 days after we saw them and, from what anyone can tell, they were caught in an avalanche on the ridge itself. We didn’t realize this until later in the week. Very sad.
We continued our descent and setup on the small deck outside of the museum in white river to wait for pickup. We cooked some food and climbed back in our sleeping bags to keep warm. This was a rough trip.