Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So a few years ago we began publishing Side Roads, an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It recognizes and celebrates passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.
We post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we stick to the mission of this blog, as explained on the Our Philosophy page.
Our previous Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto; recounted my climb to the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park; took you along on an African safari; shared the story and a few pictures of a visit to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa; looked at the 90-year rivalry between two National Football League teams, the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears; and described a classic Midwestern snowstorm.
Today we recall my ascent of Mount Rainier, a 14,411-foot volcano in the Cascade Range just south of Seattle, in the middle of night ten years ago this summer. (For the record, I am no longer climbing mountains.) Mount Rainier is the fifth-highest mountain and the single most-strenuous climb in the lower 48 states. Though stopping a little short of the summit, I still regard the climb as successful for lots of good reasons. Here’s the whole story.
Mount Rainier
by Thomas J. Lee
The first goal of any mountain climber is just to come back alive. That is especially true for tenderfoots like me on a heavily glaciated peak like Mount Rainier. So anyone who returns from climbing Rainier has already achieved his primary goal. If that’s a little simplistic, it’s also as real as a heartbeat; some climbers don't make it back.
There are two kinds of amateur mountain climbers. I call them the “reachers” and the “searchers.” For some climbers, reaching the peak is everything. The destination is all that counts, and they are determined to get there. For others, the journey matters more; the adventure and thrill are paramount. I was always proud to be a searcher.
All along, summiting this 14,411-foot volcano was secondary to the experience and to the knowledge and insight I was searching for. I took away profound lessons for my life, a grasp of nature's incredible power and beauty, terrific memories to last forever, and lots of deep, soulful satisfaction.
True, it all came at a cost: nasty scratches and hockey-puck bruises, feet full of blisters, a high-altitude sunburn, grime that wouldn’t wash away, legs that couldn't climb stairs, and a body that ached so completely and so severely that I constantly had a jar of Advil within reach. Worse yet, I was registered to run the Chicago Marathon a couple of months later, and running was out of the question for a couple of weeks.
I actually made it farther up the mountain than I had hoped, and I am convinced that we would have made it all the way if we had departed high base camp according to our plan, preferably by 1 a.m. and certainly by 1:30 a.m. at the very latest. Instead, my team finally embarked at 2:45 a.m., which was much too late (thanks to our guide, who chose this occasion for some extra winks).
The beauty we saw was phenomenal. Even from the elevation I reached, we were looking down at Little Tahoma (the state’s third-highest peak, visible to the far left in the photograph above), Mount Adams (the second), the ash-gray and hollowed Mount St. Helens, Mount Baker (the fourth) and, in Oregon, Mount Hood and the Three Sisters. The mountain snow was glaringly white but the glaciers were pockmarked with granular pumice. The air was thin, and the sunlight was almost painfully brilliant. We wore SPF30 sunblock on any exposed flesh and even inside our nostrils. People without sunglasses have actually burned their retinas.
After a day of training, we had set out in the morning and reached high base camp, at 10,100 feet, by 5 p.m. It was already a grueling climb with 35-pound packs on our back. Camp Muir turned out to be nothing more elaborate than a tarpaper shack with sheets of plywood on which we could stretch out our sleeping bags. But by the time we got there, it looked like an antebellum mansion. We enjoyed a marvelous one-course dinner consisting of all the hot water you could want.
Each climber carried his own pre-packaged heat-and-eat food like oatmeal and soup, along with plenty of Gatorade and candy bars. Stretching out on the hard plywood felt wonderful after climbing all day.
Our party consisted of 24 climbers and six professional guides, a couple of whom had done Everest. It was a group of overachievers. Among the climbers were four physicians, an attorney and his two grown kids, several executives, a Harvard grad student from Israel, an accountant, a magazine publisher, a couple of college students, a high-tech entrepreneur, a small businessman, a Microsoft programmer from India, a honeymooning couple, a manager, and I. There were 19 men and five women. From the main base (5,400 feet) to high base camp we hiked all together, through montane meadows and up rocky bluffs and finally onto year-round snowfields (different from glaciers inasmuch as snowfields don’t move).
After reaching Camp Muir, we had time for dinner and then bunked down for some ersatz sleep with blindfolds and earplugs. By 7:15 p.m., it was quiet. Everyone was tired. We dozed lightly until being awakened at 1 a.m.
That seems early but it was really too late, and we didn’t set out for a final attempt on the summit until much later. It's a strenuous, 11- or 12-hour hike just from Camp Muir to the summit and back. Thus, setting out at 2:45 a.m. means that you don’t return to high base camp until mid-afternoon, after the sun has had six or seven hours to bake the front of glaciers. That creates a serious hazard of avalanche, especially in late summer.
Just three days earlier a huge wall of ice (probably the size of an eight-story building) had come crashing down over the main trail across the Cowlitz Glacier, one of 26 glaciers that so gloriously drape Mount Rainier's summit. We would normally have followed that very trail. Because of the debris, we detoured around it; and from a high precipice we could survey the truck-size blocks of ice now littering the trail. Anyone in the way would surely have been killed by these colossal snowballs.
The night sky was bright with a million stars when we embarked from high base camp. We were roped together with carabiners in teams of four, each team three or four minutes apart and headed by a professional guide, as we traversed glaciers and climbed through ridges of rocks and 
scree in the darkness. We all wore crampons and helmets with headlamps. Within each team we were usually about 10-12 feet apart from one another, but in especially dangerous spots we were “short roped” to about three or four feet. That way, if one of us fell, he would have no momentum to carry down the others.
To compensate for the late start from Camp Muir, my guide wanted to hike double-time up the mountain. I could do that for a few hours, but at my age and at such a high altitude, I just couldn't keep it up even with all my physical training. (On registering for the climb, everyone is advised to be in the best shape of their life and to train rigorously for months beforehand. I was and I did, but hey, there’s only so much a guy can do.) I also determined that, at least for someone like me, to continue on would be to court more danger than I wished. In that situation, a single misstep could be fatal. Better to be humbled and alive than to be proud and dead, I figured. Finally, after climbing steep inclines for four or five hours through the nighttime cold and a face-scraping wind, I had to confront my own limits.
We were atop a steep, rocky ridge known appropriately as Disappointment Cleaver when a couple of us (the Microsoft guy and I) chose to hunker down and watch the sun rise slowly on the mountain's eastern flank. Though the summertime temperature was 20 degrees Fahrenheit and the wind was gusting to 40-45 mph, it was phenomenally pretty, unlike any other dawn I have ever seen: first a scarlet eyelash, then a brilliant splash of magenta across the horizon for more than an hour.
Later a few more climbers came down the slope in retreat. We roped ourselves together, found our sunglasses and goggles, and began the slow trudge back down to high base camp in the light of day. Only then did we realize how close—just three or four feet, really—we had hiked in the darkness past glacial crevasses so deep we couldn't see their bottom even in daylight. The glaciers that we had crossed were massive (several miles in length and 300-500 feet thick) and repeatedly fractured with crevasses, some of the cracks just inches across but others wide enough to swallow a city block of houses. It was incredible.
Back at Camp Muir, we met up with others who had retreated earlier. All of us waited for the return of those who had soldiered on. After regrouping, it took several more hours of steep, knee-buckling descent (in double-time again!) to get back down to the main base camp.
By then, we could scarcely stand and couldn't walk another step. Our feet were covered with blisters. Our shoulders felt like stone. We were all in serious pain. But we were thrilled that we had tried, and we knew that we were forever changed by the experience. We were also profoundly grateful; two other climbers died in high-altitude falls nearby the previous week, so our own blessings were real indeed.
What did I learn from it? Well, things little and big.
At the very least I learned how to use an ice axe to stop sliding for miles down and off a mountain, whether on my face or on my back, and whether feet first or head first. I learned how to walk in crampons across a glacier and up a wall of ice or fragile, old igneous rock. I learned that volcanoes are covered with pumice that stings your face in the wind. I learned how to breathe at high altitude (frequently and fully expel the carbon dioxide from your lungs). I learned the importance of carrying as light a load as possible up a mountain; every pound, every ounce, counts for far more. I learned just how big a volcano can be and just how deep a crevasse can rive its glaciers. I learned the joy of eating cold pizza for breakfast and consuming a dozen candy bars a day while still losing five or 10 pounds. I learned that I really don't enjoy wearing a beard, and so it's gone already after only a couple of weeks.
I also learned some things that other people learn earlier in life. I learned to be much more careful than I have been, for each step I take through life may be my last, figuratively and literally. I learned that a timely start spares haste. I learned to cherish the moment, to see more in life than I have seen in the past. I learned that things around us may be vastly greater than we, but that we are no small creatures either. I learned that respecting both the fragility and the power of nature is a real and a vital paradox. I learned that reliance on oneself and on one's team is the same thing, for all of us must do both; we must respect both the individual and the team. I learned to go slow, one little step after another, ever upward. I learned to see compelling beauty in self-fulfillment and in the satisfaction of a challenge well met. I learned that we have more courage and strength in our being than we know but, for me anyway, it will be found only for the searching, never for the wishing.
The following quotation, attributed to the legendary Swiss mountaineer Edward Whymper in 1871, was posted inside the door of that tarpaper shack at Camp Muir: "Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are naught without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste, look well to each step, and from the beginning think what may be the end."
Indeed. Indeed.
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