Highs & Lows on Rainier

At 48, David Adlard of Athol is in the early stages of being a mountaineer, but he’s already had a taste of a perfect climb.

He graduated from the venerable Spokane Mountaineers mountain school last year and was helping the school train a new crop of climbers this spring.

However, in early May he checked out to Mount Rainier – alone.

“I couldn’t get anyone to go with me, so I was resigned to doing one of the standard routes and tucking in with other climbers,” said Adlard, who coordinates the Adventure Sports Week – 24 events in 10 days – that debuted last summer in North Idaho.

With reports of deaths on Cascade Range volcanoes this year, Adlard’s journey is a reminder that most climbs go right.

He admits enduring some trepidation on the 6.5-hour drive to the mountain for what he calls a shot at “doing a real mountain.”

The Paradise visitor center and trailhead, still mired in 20 feet of snow during the first week of May, was virtually deserted when he arrived, which was a surprise. The official climbing season was set to start the next day.

But when another solo climb drove into the lonesome snow-corralled parking, he sensed he was in business. Two people sharing a rope have many more options, and a huge safety advantage en route to Rainier’s summit at 14,410 feet.

Adlard joined forces with Mark Medevene of the Tacoma area and began the trek at 4:40 p.m. to where they would begin climbing early the next morning.

The weather was iffy with occasional whiteouts as they slogged and post-holed at first up the snowfields, arriving at Camp Muir, elevation 10,180 feet, at 9:30 p.m. Temperatures had plunged 30 degrees to 4 above zero during the trek, which gained 4,788 feet in elevation.

“The walk up was excellent, though difficult,” Adlard said, noting that he was carrying a 67-pound load to the base camp.

Medevene, a 2:46 marathoner, was 19 years younger, 40 pounds leaner and his pack was 20 pounds lighter.

“It was all I had to sort of keep up,” Adlard said.

A group of guides was training out of Muir for the upcoming opening of the climbing season. A mother-son team was descending from Muir. That was about it.

With no crowds to negotiate, the climbers slept in with their water bottles, fuel canisters and anything else they didn’t want to freeze. The temp at 5 a.m. was minus 4 and surprisingly pleasant.

“The sun was already up, the sky was completely clear as only a mountain sky can be, and most important, there wasn’t a single breath of wind.”

Still, they packed enough summit gear to deal with the possible dark side of Rainier’s weather pattern. Packs weighed 30-35 pounds.

The guides were training somewhere else and they wouldn’t see another climber above Muir the rest of the day.

Adlard notes Rainier has walk-up routes and technical routes, but none of them should be rated as easy.

“Summiting is optional; getting back down is mandatory,” he said, reciting a mountaineer’s credo. But teaming with Medevene, an experienced Rainier climber, allowed them to challenge themselves on the Gilbralter Ledges route.

“It’s a fairly demanding test early in the season, and reasonably technical.

“We opted for a standard ice axe, one trekking pole and one ice tool each, as well as crampons from the start, two pickets and a fair amount – we thought – of webbing, Purlon nylon cord and carabiners.”

The men alternated leads up to Gibraltar Rock with Medevene leading the more technical rocky ascents.

The sun bearing down on the mountain was accelerating avalanches. House-size ice chunks were calving off the Nisqually Glacier forcing them to abandon plans to ascend the Gibraltar Chute route.

“With no real options, we rappelled off the spire at the top of Cowlitz Cleaver, made a fairly technical traverse over to Gibraltar itself and descended maybe 300 feet down to where we were able to free climb over the 75-foot-high gap, fashioning anchors from slings and carabiners.”

Medevene led while Adlard belayed and followed up the semi-icy rock, hauling both packs and the other climbing gear. He said he had one close shave with sliding 1,500 feet down a near vertical snow face before remembering he’d brought an ascending device he could use to clamp himself and the packs to the rope.

The reached the top of Gibraltar only to find they’d have to make two 60-foot rappels before they could continue climbing across the top of the glacier past Cadaver Gap, where they joined the standard Ingraham Direct-Disappointment Cleaver route to the summit.

“To be honest, after the journey, summiting was almost an afterthought,” Adlard recalled. “We were already thinking about trying something cool on the way back down.”

With a few extra hours of clear, windless daylight left, they retraced their steps to Gibraltar. They made five 60-yard running rappels off Gibraltar and down the 65 degree glacier/snowfield between Gibraltar and Cadaver Gap before walking it back out to Camp Muir.

“Almost 1,000 feet of rappelling and controlled descent was a great way to finish,” he said, noting that the slog down a mountain can be the most grueling part.

“I used a ton of skills I learned through the Spokane Mountaineers, and, in all likelihood, couldn’t have completed this trip on the route we had chosen without them,” he said.

The club instilled Adlard with its rule for wearing helmets, and he made the right decision to apply that rule to a non-club climb.

“On the way out, I got hit in the head by rock that broke my Black Diamond helmet and almost knocked me off my anchor,” he said. “My eyes were definitely watering for a few minutes, but the helmet saved my life.”

He was stripped down to short sleeves for much of the climb, and the only breeze of the day was a katabatic (downhill) tailwind off the glacier than helped propel them the last couple of miles back to Paradise.

“If I live to be 100,”Adlard said, “I may never see a better day to climb, especially on the fickle Mt. Rainier.”