Rainier Attempt via Emmons

Rainier Attempt via Emmons

At the start of the crevasses around 12,000ft

April 2, 2021

Eric and Duncan

With good weather, stable snow, and good low-elevation snow coverage we decided to try a car 2 car ascent of Rainier on Friday. The south side routes from Paradise are limited by the gate closure hours at night, but the north side routes have no such access restrictions. Of course, the north side road to White River is unplowed, but with my snowmobile that’s not a problem. Satellite images looked like patchy snow from the north entrance for a few miles, then good coverage on the roads.

The route

In order to ride over long stretches of pavement I had just installed retractable wheels on my snowmobile, and was eager to test them out. I had previously climbed/skied Rainier car 2 car via the Fuhrer Finger route on the south side in 2019 and based on that trip I estimated around 15 hours round trip from the trailhead from Emmons, plus an hour approach by snowmobile. That meant we wanted to leave pretty early Friday morning.

I arrived at the sno park around 9:30pm Thursday night and after a few hours nap we were up and moving by 1:30am Friday. Snow coverage was thin starting from the sno park, then a foot deep on the road. Interestingly the right half of the road is plowed down to pavement all the way to the ranger station while the left side is left as snow. We soon hit pavement patches and I got to try out my new retractable wheels. They lift up the skis so the tips don’t grind against the road and the wheels make it possible to steer.

Sunrise from Inter Glacier

Coverage became continuous after a few miles and we went back to ski mode. We stopped briefly at the ranger station to register then rode to the trailhead by 2:30am. We soon started skining up from the White River campground. Interestingly there was an old set of skin tracks to follow that helped with navigation. The snow was icy but we made our way to Inter Glacier by sunrise. We alternated between cramponing and skinning up, then cramponed down to the Emmons below steamboat prow and roped up.

The summit looked deceptively close and we were optimistic about topping out. I’d previously climbed the Emmons in August 2007 and Duncan and I had descended the Emmons in 2018 after climbing Ptarmigan Ridge, so we were pretty familiar with the route. Just to be safe, though, I had downloaded the most recent GPS

Dropping down around Steamboat Prow

track I could find of the route (from Vladimir Oster on peakbagger from aug 2020 – thanks!). We skinned up to Camp Shurman, which was eerily deserted. It felt weird to be on a popular route on Rainier and have it all to ourselves, without even any ranger at the camp. But that’s one of the nice things about climbing early season.

As the route steepened we switched to crampons. Higher up we saw the remnants of old boot prints, interestingly sticking out positively from the snow. It appeared the wind had scoured away everything but the tracks. We followed the tracks up to the start of crevasses, where they ended. I led cutting right and zig zagging through the crevasses. I eventually reached a point at 12,600ft tantalizingly close to the saddle below the summit.

Skiing back down

Unfortunately by that point Duncan was showing pretty bad signs of altitude sickness and couldn’t go any farther. We had come straight from sea level, while most people take a few days to acclimate.  I was feeling fine, but for some reason I’m not affected by altitude very much, which I think is not normal. It wasn’t safe to split up so we really had no choice but to descend.

We followed our tracks down to the end of the crevassed section, then put on skis and started skiing down. The conditions were actually pretty difficult with sastrugi and wind crust to contend with. There were also occasional wind squalls that nearly knocked us over. But we soon reached camp sherman. The slope up around steamboat prow was steep enough we had to crampon up, but then we put skis back on to ski down Inter Glacier. We were briefly caught in a whiteout, but followed the GPS track I’d been recording and made it down below the clouds.

Back at the sled

From Glacier Basin we skied back out the trail to the snowmobile and rode back out to the car by 9pm.

Duncan camped out at the trailhead that night but for better or worse I had planned another trip the next morning starting from Twisp in eastern washington. It was a 6 hour drive away and I’d told my partner we’d start at 4am, so I didn’t have much buffer time. I drove through the night, though, eating skittles and red bull and getting pulled over by a cop once for a broken headlight, but managed to roll into the twisp river sno park just in time at 3:30am to start the next trip.

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