Hi friends,
Its been a while. I write this post in March 2024 about a trip out in Washington where we attempted to summit Mt Adams and Mt Rainier.
In July 2021 I came back to NYC to start my job at Bloomberg (again) but had the lucky opportunity to go with Ming and Wojtek to Washington and attempt an unguided ascent of Mt Rainier. Mt Rainier has a big place in my heart because it was the mountain that I first set eyes on as an objective in 2017 when I signed up with Alpine Ascents. To acclimate, we decided to go up Mt Adams before Mt Rainier. Ming joined me for the Mt Adams ascent but he was already acclimate, coming off a big Colorado trip where, with Wojtek, they bagged a bunch of 14ers.
Mt Adams is a really rocky looking mountain, experiencing significant glacier recession due to climate change. Without trying to dimnish the danger of glacier travle, Adams Glacier is nowadays classified as a snow field because its not thick enough to have deep crevasses. We still had to be careful.
Our plan was to go take two days. Go up to Lunch Counter on the first day, camp a few hundred feet above it in a rock sheltered area and then to summit on day 2 followed by a descent down to the car.
Since I am writing this after a few years, all I remember is that we had a long two days, a close encounter with a mountain goat at our campsite, stellar but windy conditions and a successful summit. We also experienced a lot of rain and longer than expected day that required us to find last minute housing near Mt Adams in kind of an awkward shack.
We soon met up with Wojtek the next day and made our way to Paradise where we checked in with the ranger station at the base, got a little beta and repacked our equipment before making our way towards Camp Muir, our first stop. The plan was again to climb the Disappointment Cleaver route over two days - Camp Muir on day 1, summit and back to car on day 2. The hope being that we were all well acclimatized.
I remember being close to my limit on day 1 itself. It was around 4000 ft of consistently steep vertical hiking with the last thousand feet or so being at altitude.
When we arrived at camp, we discovered it very full and ended up mistakenly taking one of the guides eating spots (since there was noone there). They were quite upset but said that we could stay there. We wrapped our with dinner around 6pm and try to sleep early to wake up around 1 am for our alpine start. We try to travel through the night to limit rock fall and maximize snow/ice strength.
However, altitude combined with the loud guide party next door, I struggled to sleep for more than 10 continuous minutes that night. I also did not hydrate enough which became problematic the next day. We woke up in the middle of the night around 12.30am and got ready to get moving by 1ish. We were a little late to the party as huge crowds had already started moving.
We were roped up and generally moving quite slowly because I was struggling but making progress. We navigated the transition onto the Cleaver as we heard a constant barrage of rock fall in the distance - quite unnerving since we cannot see anything beyond the little bubble of our headlamps.
I met my guide from 2017 - Jangbu Sherpa who was also guiding that day - really cool to see him. Unfortunately soon after we topped the cleaver, I felt completely tapped out with a high heart rate and unable to take more than a few steps without needing a rest. There is a chance that I could have continued but I was not feeling great at all, and the altitude was definitely getting to me. This was at around 13000ft of elevation. At this point however, we had to take the difficult decision to turn around and unfortunately it also meant a denial of summit to Wojtek and Ming. It was maybe the perfect conditions for a summit, yet it eluded us due to my not being ready for the trip conditioning wise and also altitude wise.
We had a hectic scramble down the mountain to our tents, took a quick nap (Wojtek continued on without a nap) and then headed back to the car and then to the airport the same night. It was truly a hectic day.
A fantastic outing in wild terrain. A veritable summit of Mt Adams without a failed bid on the epic Mt Rainier. The best trip is the one where you go out and come back in one piece. We did that and had a great time despite not achieving all our goals. The mountain will be there, and we will be back.
- G