Sorry that it's been a while- we've had a lot going on here at Eller Adventures. We recently decided to go on the greatest adventure ever- we got married!
But enough about that let's talk about the summit of Mt Rainer. We left for Mt Rainer on Sunday 01 July 2018. We weren't really expecting to leave that day so we looked at it as a bonus day! We got to within 600 meters of where we wanted to camp when a really big snow storm started to roll in on us.
We quickly set up camp and dug in our tents. Then we sat in them for two days before the storm and the white out conditions broke. Then just like that the sun and clear skies came out. We moved up to our camp location about 500 meters below Camp Muir and prepped for heading to the summit that night.
As we started out so did about 12 x 10 person guided climbing teams. We let them go by knowing that they were climbing fast due to the fact that they were packing lite. But what happened next caused us to regret that fact. Starting at the Disappointment Cleaver there was a massive bottle neck. It took us at least two hours to get up the Cleaver.
Once on the top we crossed the top of the Ingraham Glacier under the large ice falls and seracs- which all had evidence of smaller ice falls. Once past that we crossed multiple crevasses and finally hit the summit ridge at 0800 (two hours later than we normally make it). But once there we had a great time signing the summit registry book and looking at the gas vents.
We eventually started our decent, but once more ran into bottle necks along the way. Most of them caused by teams which didn't know how to use a running belay (they actually tried to set up working belays on them slowing everyone down behind them). By the time we hit the top of the DC the winds picked up with gusts of up to 60 mph and that knocked down some of our team but we short roped and kept moving.
When we reached camp we sat down and had a celebratory cup of tea! It was a great and adventurous climb!