Climbing

Mount Rainier’s Trailhead

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

To hikers and climbers near Puget Sound, Paradise isn’t in the afterlife or an abstract idea for a Caribbean beach, it’s an actual place. Paradise is an area of reference in the National Park Service map and the name of a valley in the same region of Mount Rainier. The name is also synonymous with the starting point for most visitors’ adventures in Mount Rainier National Park.

Coming from Tacoma or Seattle, people normally pass through Ashford on route 706 – where the guide concessions are located – and enter the park through the Nisqually Entrance in the southwestern corner of the park. From there, visitors continue to the Longmire Museum or just drive straight to Paradise – just 16 miles from the entrance. The road in Paradise itself is mainly in the Paradise Valley. (Keep in mind, road access is limited in the winter based on conditions.)

When most people think of a valley they think of it as the deepest area between two mountainous slopes. Paradise Valley is not a valley like that. Instead it’s actually elevated. It is actually a broad shoulder of the mountain with elevated features on three sides of its plain. On the north end, flowing into Paradise Valley, is Sluiskin Falls – named for the Indian warrior guide to Stevens and Van Trump in 1870 I wrote about earlier – and Narada Falls on the southern end. The water plummets about 200 feet from Narada Falls and out of the “valley.”

Paradise Valley is technically a “hanging valley.” It is also what is left of a glacial cirque. Treeline is approximately 7,000 feet elevation, and Paradise sits at approximately 5,400. There, at that elevation, in winter the landscape can see 30 feet of snow. It buries the Paradise Inn on the western rim of the valley, only to melt and give way to some amazing alpine meadows.

For non hikers and climbers, Paradise is often where the journey stops, but oh what a view! From this hanging valley of alpine flora, you have a front row seat to take in the mountain. If you thought Rainier seemed enormous from Puget Sound, here it would make your HD television’s definition wanting. From there, you can take in the Nisqually Glacier, Gibralter Rock, the edge of the Emmons Glacier and Point Success.

For the hikers and climbers, Paradise is just the starting point. If you’re inclined to hike, there are several trails around Paradise for brisk walk to take in the views or pick up the Wonderland Trail – which circumnavigates the mountain – from the base of Narada Falls. For the climbers, this is where the ascent really begins. More on that later.

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Sources: 1) Schmoe, Floyd, A Year in Paradise: A Personal Experience on Mount Rainier in the Early 1900s, The Mountaineers (1999); 2) National Park Service’s Mount Rainier website.

Rainier’s First Celebrated Ascent: 1870

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

They must be spirits, he thought. They had gone up the south face of Mount Rainier and they should not have come back. He had warned them. He had heard there was a horrible pool of fire at the top. But after a little more observation from afar, Sluiskin, the Yakima Warrior from the Battle of Grande Ronde and now their guide, was relieved and thrilled they were truly alive.

Sluiskin learned they had been to the top and he was overjoyed. Hazard Stephens and Philemon Beecher Van Trump, had summited Mount Rainier on August 18th, 1870. It was the first documented ascent of Mount Rainier.

Hazard Stevens was already a force to be reckoned with. He had some advantages as he was the son of the first governor of the Washington Territory. However, he had already proven himself with valor: Stevens had earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for his courage in battle during the American Civil War. After the war he returned and became – as you and I would – captivated by Mount Rainier. But admiring it from Puget Sound was not satisfying.

Stevens had met Van Trump and they became friends because they shared a common passion for approaching and attempting Mount Rainier. But it was their meeting of Thomas Edward Coleman, a British Subject and one of the original climbers among the Alps. He gave them the final nudge to commit themselves to the task and together they headed into the backcountry of Washington without roads.

Sluiskin was hired as their guide to get them through the forest and down the Nisqually River to Mount Rainier; he took his time in order to work and be paid for more days.

Coleman was more of an irritant or comic relief on the journey. Each day he insisted on bathing or at least making a sponge bath, no matter what the inconvenience required. He also sipped tea as his colleagues made camp. Most amusing of all, he filled his own canteen with whiskey instead of water, which he emptied part way to the mountain; he was mildly stunned at the pace Stevens and Van Trump intended to proceed.

Coleman could not make the final attempt as he lost his pack (it fell when he set it down) climbing a nearby slope. Though they lost the bacon for protein, Stevens and Van Trump were determined to press on. I will use contemporary names for these landmarks: They ascended from the Paradise River, walked up the Muir Snowfield, climbed up Cowlitz Cleaver (with a good view of Gibraltar Rock), trudged over Camp Misery and onto the summit proper. They only carried an alpenstock, creepers (similar to crampons), rope, ice axe (like a navy axe of the day), a canteen, lunch, gloves, goggles, a plate, flags, and ascended without coats or blankets.

They believed they could make the ascent in a day, but were forced to spend the night near the top in an ice cave. Van Trump injured his leg on the decent, but that did little to dampen their victory. They were not ghosts, they were Puget Sound’s latest heroes!

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Sources: 1) Haines, Aubrey L., Mountain Fever: Historic Conquests of Rainier, Oregon Historical Society, 1962; 2) National Parks Service website.

Beyond the Mountain

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Beyond the Mountain is the alpine climbing autobiography of Steve House. For those of you not familiar with House, he is a progressive mountain climber that is known for great alpine challenges, or, as Reinhold Messner put it in the forward, “He climbs the right routes on the right mountains in a time when everyone is climbing Everest.” Generally, it is an engrossing, intense and at moments even offensive story about climbing at the highest possible level. He takes his reader straight into the action of his climbs from 1989 through 2004 without hesitation.

The book addresses House’s introduction to alpinism through the Slovenian student exchange program he was a part of when he was nineteen years old and the trip he took with his Slovenian hosts to Nanga Parbat and first the Rupal Face. He also addresses his most impactful climbs personally and in the climbing community, including a lightning ascent of the Slovak Direct Route on Denali and even a multi-expedition trip to conquer K7 in the Charakusa Valley of Pakistan, plus his ascents with famed-mountaineer, guide and one of his mentor’s, Barry Blanchard, in the Canadian Rockies.

The main take away from this story is about greatness. Steve House is a great climber. He’s got the 10,000 hours put in that qualify him as an expert climber. Not only that, he has an additional 10,000 hours on the most challenging peaks and alpine walls of our day to boot! The book gets at the idea of commitment as the way to greatness. Whole commitment. Maybe obsession is a better word. The book is worth the read if you want to be challenged to climb better and is inspiring to the armchair mountaineer on the idea of pursuing a goal relentlessly.

Of course, the goal that House chose was one that opened the door to the top without the potential for disappointment, unless he quit or died trying. While he started his young climbing career as wanting to be good enough to climb the Rupal Face, he matured and dogmatically pursued becoming the best alpine climber he could become. Whether he is the best is up for debate, but he is certainly in the top five of climbers currently climbing.

He continues to climb. He recently returned from climbing Makalu in the Himalayas. Beyond the Mountain was not a complete autobiography, but it was a milestone in climbing literature for its forthrightness and a rare chance at intimacy with a private, self-motivated climber that has a lot of life issues and value propositions that might offend, but his output from the equation of his life in climbing has netted out to being remarkable.

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Mount Rainier’s Foggy First Ascent

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Unlike the conquests of the Alps or the Himalayas, the events of the first ascent of Mount Rainier (14,410 ft./4,392 m.) were virtually lost in history. The details that we do know are thanks to a Native American that lead the unnamed — and therefore unheralded — duo to the mountain.

Saluskin of the Yakima Tribe was born around 1823 and passed away in 1917. He never learned to speak English so his story of guiding the mystery men to the mountain had to be interpreted. In the latter years of his life he gave two translators on separate occasions his story of the first ascent. This, as well as some other factors described by Aubrey L. Haines, author of Mountain Fever (1962), gave Saluskin his credibility.

Saluskin told his second interpretor, Lucullus McWhorter, the account Haines includes in his book. Haines explains that both McWhorter’s version and the one by A.J. Splawn corroborate on the key details.

In the day when skins trading was huge in what was then known as the Washington Territory, the settlements along Puget Sound were pushing their government to establish a road through the Cascade Range; no reliable route could be found. It’s likely that the two men that came to the Yakima Chief, Owhi, to ask for help in getting to the mountain were surveyors. Saluskin describes two white men, one tall and one short. The short man was clean faced while and carried a pistol; the taller one had a mustache and carried a long musket.

The Yakima Tribe were suspicious of the men’s intentions — most likely looking for gold or some other mineral. The white men explained that they represented Governor Stevens (the first governor of the Washington Territory) and that they were looking to identify the lines drawn in a treaty. The white men then shared their telescope to demonstrate their exploratory intent. This comforted the tribesmen and they assigned Saluskin to take them to the mountain.

Over several days, he lead them to Mystic Lake near the end of the Carbon Glacier. Saluskin was surprised when early one morning, the men put plenty of food in their pockets, put on hobnail boots and left not indicating where they were going.

They returned at dark the same day and described the summit crater adequately, including the rim, ice and pool at the center. The men also reported that they found the lines that they sought through their looking glass. And that was the first ascent to the top of Mount Rainier.

Both translated accounts gave the approximate timing, which places the first ascent in 1855 or so — some historians still disagree on the precise year.

It is interesting that the climb’s details have been lost in history to the degree it has. It is likely because the summit team did not think it more important than other events of their journey and that the visit to the top was more curiosity than athletic or sporting accomplishment.

The story of these two unlikely mountaineers should also not give the impression that Mount Rainier is an easy climb. Naivety would say that it is a walk to the top. However, the conditions of the surveyors’ climb and that they skirted danger, such as crevasses, may have been more due to luck than ease of the challenge.

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Mount Rainier: First National Mountain Park

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

In 1899 the United States Congress established Mount Rainier National Park. It was the first park where the primary feature was a mountain and not mainly a forest, like Yellowstone, Sequoia, Yosemite and General Grant National Parks before it.

Mount Rainier was designated as federal public land to enjoy and preserve the “outstanding scenic and scientific value for the enjoyment of present and future generations,” according to Theodore Catton on the National Park’s website.

In fact, the park almost did not come to be. The land around it was first designated as forest preserve and covered part of the mountain’s glaciers but not all, and even then, the forest protection did not provide sufficient authorities to ensure the conservation of the mountain’s features. The eventual National Park designation addressed all these issues and more thanks to lobbying from the conservationists in Seattle and Tacoma, Washington.

The establishment of Mount Rainier National Park, according to Catton, also set a precedent for America’s growing National Park system. It signaled that conservation could include more than just natural resources, like forests for lumber and ore deposits for mining, but natural landmarks of beauty.

Mount Rainier tops the Cascade Range and dominates the skylines across the communities of Western Washington. If you live and work in Seattle or Tacoma or fly in for a visit, you’ll get a glimpse of the mountain. Maybe you want to get closer and be absorbed by it.

Without the National Park designation, I wonder whether the park could have a Whistler-like ski resort at its base. Would the area be less pristine? Would commercialism have trivialized the wilderness experience there?

My speculation about what could have been makes me appreciate this mountain and the community around it even more. I’m glad the mountain is where it is and what it is.

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Several Perish on Denali in 2011

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

Updated: June 28, 2011

It’s only June 1 and much of the climbing news has been on the deadly accidents on Mount McKinley/Denali in the Alaska Range. I don’t ordinarily cover accidents and deaths in our sport on this the Suburban Mountaineer — it’s sadness is something I prefer to casually avoid– but this has been difficult to ignore with any forced grace.

  • May 12, 2011 — Beat Niederer (33) of Switzerland died around 18,000 ft. of unknown causes after a fall.
  • May 16, 2011 —  Luciano Colombo (67) of Italy died from injuries in a 1,000-foot fall between Denali Pass and the 17,200 ft. High Camp.
  • May 25, 2011 — Alpine Ascents International Guide Suzanne Allen (34) Seattle, Washington and one of her clients, Peter Bullard (45) of China  passed away as the result of an unwitnessed fall along Denali Pass around 18,000 ft.
  • June 10, 2011 — Alaskan resident Brian Young (52) died of “apparent cardiac arrest” after going to sleep in the 17,200 ft. High Camp. It has been historically rare for Alaskans to perish on the mountain.

It should be noted that accidents elsewhere in Denali National Park also occurred in the same span of time: Two other deaths occurred between May 21 and May 23, 2011 when they were over due.  Jiro Kurihara (33) of Canmore, Alberta and Junya Shiraishi (28) of Sapporo, Japan were attempting a new route on the west face of Mt. Frances when they died in an avalanche.

According to the National Park Service, “As of the morning of May 14, there were 282 climbers attempting Mt. McKinley. Eight summits have been recorded thus far. A total of 1,029 climbers are registered to climb during the 2011 season.”

Others have been injured and many lives have been disrupted from these events, no doubt. Events like this remind me that “it’s okay, just Denali,” isn’t true. It’s Denali. Be careful!

I sincerely hope that what remains of the climbing season goes smoothly for all the climbers; the rate of incidents was high this season, though tragedy hits regularly every year.

On the upside, it’s been 10 years since Erik Weihenmayer became the first person to summit Mount Everest in May 2001. Congrats to Erik for the inspiration that he has given to so many mountaineers and non-mountaineers alike!

Well, thanks for visiting again. If you enjoyed this post, please consider following the Suburban Mountaineer on Facebook or Twitter. I normally post on this site early in the week and late in the week  — except lately while work and some good life changes are going on — and share news and other information on the social networking pages as it becomes known to me. Happy climbing!