Winter Climbing By Do-Or-Die Rules

Outside our hut at Camp Muir, elevation 10,000 feet, the wind gusted to 40 mph off the flanks of Mount Rainier.

Wind blew the snow in a ground blizzard, creating white-out conditions. Hunks of snow, ripped from the slope, smashed into our building. Inside the unheated shelter, the temperature was 15 degrees toasty compared with the minus 10 outside.

We were hunkered in the hut, listening to a lecture on frostbite. Climbing to Rainier’s 14,411-foot summit would have to wait. The wind-chill factor outside was an Arctic minus 50. Perhaps colder.

Four Rainier Mountaineering, Inc. (RMI) guides were leading the discussion. The day before, they’d led us across the Cowlitz Glacier. We’d cramponed up Cathedral Gap and climbed to the Ingraham Glacier under brilliant blue skies.

“You take the weather your dealt,” said George Dunn, 43. An RMI guide for more than two decades, he has climbed Rainier an amazing 386 times. “And remember, my rule is that good weather always follows bad. You just have to be patient.”

That was a good lesson to learn for the 12 student mountaineers, some of whom were training to climb Alaska’s 20,320-foot Mount McKinley this summer.

Our group met a few miles outside the national park in Ashford. Dunn and his three assistants issued us avalanche beacons. They also checked out our gear, making sure we had the proper equipment to survive the week.

That night, before we camped in tents 1,000 feet above Paradise, guide Aaron Horwitz lead us through 90 minutes of avalanche rescue drills.

“Speed is life,” said Horwitz. “After a while, you’re just looking for a corpse.”

The next day, after a tough, six-hour slog on snowshoes, we reached the huts at Camp Muir. Half-way through a tasty cup of hot chocolate, a wave of nausea hit me. I lowered my head between my knees and tried not to vomit.

Dunn looked me in the eyes, told me I had mild altitude sickness. Sleep felt good.

We spent the next morning learning self-arrests with our ice axes, feet and hands.

“If you fall, or someone else on your rope falls, you have to stop or you may well die,” said Horwitz.

We then worked with crampons, stomping on the sharp spikes and “front-pointing our way up and down steep, snowy slopes. The drills were fun.

After lunch, Heather Macdonald showed us how to rig up our harnesses. When I failed to double back my waist belt, she told me sharply: “You can’t overlook that. Marty Hoye, (one of RMI’s first woman guides), fell and died on Everest in 1982 because she forgot to put on her harness properly.”

We put our crampons back on and clipped our caribiners onto different ropes. The four teams scrambled over snow and rock up 500 vertical feet. In the snow, my crampons found purchase. But on the rock, they slipped. I shuddered.

Back at Camp Muir, we dug two caves in a hard-packed wall of snow as furiously as we could to stay warm. Wednesday greeted us with blue skies and calm winds.

I joined Horwitz’s rope group and we ambled out across the Cowlitz Glacier at a steady pace, stopping only to dig avalanche test pits. With the temperature in the 20s, it almost felt like summer.

Slowly we climbed onto the Ingraham Glacier and into an area known as the “bowling alley” because of occasional rock falls.

Dunn, whose group was in the lead, stopped to dig another pit. He checked the snow layers, didn’t like what he saw and said, “Head back.”

Climbing would have to wait for another day.

When we broke for lunch on a perch across from 11,365-foot Mount Tahoma, Dunn told us he’d felt terribly exposed on the slope above.

“That slab was ready to go,” he said. “And it might have dumped us into the crevasse right below.”

Back at camp, we dug our own avalanche pits, climbed with fixed ropes and did self and group crevasse rescues.

Dunn told us we’d be up at 4:30 a.m. the next morning and on the snow an hour later.

“The chances of making the summit are around 30 percent,” he said. “At the least, we should get above Gibraltar Rocks at 13,000 feet.”

But it wasn’t to be. Shortly after we crawled into our sleeping bags, the wind began to howl in a storm that lasted 30 hours.

“Still, it wasn’t like the time was wasted,” said Mike Matthews, a South Carolinian who plans to climb McKinley this spring.

“We trained hard the days before. And even when we were stuck in the hut Thursday, we learned a lot about altitude sickness, mountain medicine and other things we can use.”

On Friday morning, the wind dropped. We swept out the hut, reassembled our gear, laced up our snowshoes and threw on our packs.

Funny, but straps that had given me so much trouble before seemed to go together easily.