Bryan Estes has been a regular reader of The Adventurist for quite some time. This past weekend Bryan and a few friends had the opportunity to venture to Mt. Rainier. The summit wasn’t the overall goal, but if the team found a window they were going to go for it. Luckily, Bryan decided to share this adventure with all of us and has allowed me to post this trip report.
While on Mt. Rainier, Bryan and his teammates had the opportunity to take quite a few photos. You can tell by looking at the images that the weather decided to make a slight turn, but Bryan and his team did manage to make the summit, although not in the most perfect of conditions. Some cool photos and a nice report of the day’s events follow:
Here are my pictures from last weekend on rainier. we reached the summit at 14,411 ft via the emmons glacier route on 6/21 in just under 7 hours.
http://flickr.com/photos/bryanestes/sets/72157605753960469/
We registered at the white river ranger station on friday morning and started the approach from the white river campground trailhead at 4,300 ft on the glacier basin trail. Flooding last year destroyed a lot of this trail, but the park service has those sections flagged so it was easy to follow on the way in. Sections of trail exposed to direct sun light were snow-free but most of the trail with any tree cover still has in some places 4-5 ft of dirty snow still covering the trail. The glacier basin trail led us to the inter glacier where we roped up and climbed to camp schurman at 9,460 ft and setup camp.
We ate dinner and melted snow before going to bed around 8pm with my alarm set for 1am. It was very windy most of the night so i never slept more than 20 or 30 minutes at a time, i think. At 1am I heard some groups leaving as we where getting ready to go in the tent and saw another group leave as we were getting out of the tent to finish packing, put on our crampons and rope up. We left at 2:15am as the last group out of camp. Since QWuinn had suffered from altitude sickness during our last climb we had him take the lead on the rope so he could set a pace that he felt comfortable with.
From camp schurman, the route takes us up “the corridor” on the emmons glacier to over 11,000 ft. From there we had been told and saw that the rest of the route was wanded for the most part. We climbed past a couple of the different groups that had left before us and around 13,500 ft passed a 2-man team and a solo climber who had both summited and were on they’re way back to camp. As we got close to the summit the wind gusts we had been climbing in the all morning became a sustained 40-50 mph wind and would gust strong enough to force me back a couple steps and onto one knee to wait for it to let up. After a 15 minute walk along the rim we reached the summit at 9:10am and spent only a couple of minutes taking pictures before heading back down. We moved pretty slow on the way down because visibility was so low and eventually made it back to camp around 1pm as it was starting to snow.
Two of the groups we passed ended up turning back and the third group was just reaching the rim as we were coming back down. They also summited and ended up back in camp a little over an hour after us. I think 9 people summited on the route that day. On the way back down Quinn started to feel pretty exhausted so he rested for an hour while Dennis and I packed up and got ready for the hike out. We glissaded most of the way back down to the trail and made it back to the car around 6pm after some stupid route finding errors once on the trail. I think we let our guard down once we got off the mountain and just went into cruise control to get back to the car.
Overall on our summit day we spent almost 16 hours on the move, climbing just under 5,000 ft and descending over 10,100 ft. i’m looking forward to going back and getting to the top on a morning when i can enjoy the view!
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