The longest day

Monday morning at Midnight my watch alarm went off, which I had been waiting for some hours to hear, as my heart had been pounding too hard all night to get any sleep. We woke up, packed what little clothing we weren't wearing into our packs along with food for the day, roped up and set out for the summit in the pitch black. The night was clear, cold, and silent. We were the first in our camp to get on the move, and were some way up the route before we saw other small snakes of headlamps moving up behind us. The sky was crammed with stars I'd never seen before, devoid of any light pollution, and a sliver moon of a bright fiery peach color had just risen over the horizon. We headed straight up the glacier and made a hard right turn into Disappointment Cleaver to avoid the Ingraham Glacier's massively crevassed ice fall directly ahead. The cleaver was just like Cathedral Gap, only much bigger. Making the footing even more treacherous were the crampons we now wore on our feet to keep traction on the hard icy snow. After quite a while on the cleaver we finally escaped out onto the Emmons glacier. Here we were beset at every turn by ghostly snow formations and gaping maws in the ice, each more awe inspiring and dangerous than the last.

Perhaps my favorite part of the whole climb was the intense feeling I got being 1,000s of ft above the thick cloud cover that had moved in over night, blanketing everything below our camp for as far as the eye could see, with Little Tahoma thrusting through in the foreground and Mt. Baker reflecting dimly on the distant horizon. It was like we were totally alone in the world, and God had decided to give us a little peek at how things looked from up on high. It made the climb itself seem like a distraction between times when I could look over my shoulder and marvel at how high and isolated we were.


We were climbing steadily and all was going well when one of Matt's crampons failed. A screw was coming lose from the underside of the connector plate between the front and rear spikes, causing the whole thing to fail. This required semi-constant fixing about every 300 yds and plagued us for the rest of the day. While we waited another two man team caught up with us, and we traded the lead on the trail back and forth for the next hour or so.

All the while we are passing and crossing enormous crevasses every so often, some particularly precarious. One that sticks out in my mind was an area where one crevasse was perpendicular to the path and another's terminus was coming in at a 45 degree angle and ending just on the other side of the perpendicular crevasse. This left a what appeared to be a free floating triangle of snow in between, which the trail clearly proceeded across. I stopped short of this and said something to the effect of, "no $%ing way" it was clear the route crossed at this very point. After signaling Matt I made my way onto and off of this "floating" island of snow in one step and was glad to be off of it at that.

As the early morning wore on the wind started steadily increasing and the temperature steadily dropping. We again took the lead and continued on, though still hampered by Matt's ongoing crampon issues. By the time the sun had come up it was clear that the weather had changed, the wind was high and buffeting, and small clouds were blowing up and around the mountain. Visibility was still good, but it was clear that the wind could blow anything our way very quickly. We met two other teams on the trail, and both indicated they were packing it in, one team saying they were "beat" after hoofing it up from Camp Muir that morning. Obviously in catching up to us they'd been working a lot harder, and it seemed that between their burnout and the wind, they'd had enough. The older team we'd been trading the lead with since morning quietly turned back without a word. We continued on without much discussion, though as we ascended things steadily got worse in the wind department. It was necessary to keep moving a fairly rapid pace just to keep warm, and with Matt's boot issues I was wondering if we'd be smart to turn back as well. At a break point we talked it over, and agreed that though the wind was very high, it wasn't blowing us off the mountain (yet), it wasn't making us cold (unless we stopped moving), we had food, water, and enough clothing, and visibility was still clear. So although the wind was weighing on us physically and psychologically, there wasn't any reason at the present to abort the climb. We both felt good, so we continued on.

You may notice there are no pictures for this section of the climb, and for good reason. As we continued to ascend the switch backs on the glacier, it was a constant battle to remain upright, and every third step was to brace against falling down. We quickened our pace and finally caught site of the crater ridge at the top. The route put us into the crater at the low side, we dropped our packs and caught our breath. The summit lay a few hundred feet across the crater and up the far ridge. We dropped everything and set across, determined not be denied the very top when we'd come this far. The crater itself offered some respite from the wind, though that disappeared as soon as we crested the ridge on the far side. Here the wind was the strongest either of us had ever experienced (Matt later told me he'd been in verified 50 mph winds on a different climb). To say we had to lean into the wind to walk would be a gross understatement. We frequently had to dive to the ground to keep from being swept off our feet. Moving along the ridgeline to what we could only assume was the highpoint, we were faced with a predicament, as the wind was blowing straight at us over the lip of the crater. We would have taken shelter just inside the lip of the crater had it not been riddled with ice crevasses. Our only choice was to battle the wind on the outer side of the crater ridge. Laying next to each other and screaming in each other's ears to be heard, I told Matt I thought there was a register at the high point. We agreed there must be a metal box anchored to the rock, and spotted a square shape at what looked to be the highpoint. We stumbled, fell and crawled our way over to it, foot by foot, wind howling in our ears, slapping our hoods against our helmets, invading every tiny seem in our clothing and chilling us to the bone. When we finally arrived we were greeted by an almost perfectly square rock. I was dumbfounded! Where was the highpoint? How could it not be marked at all? In vain I searched the rocky ground for half buried box, a flag, anything.

Finally my eyes fell across something round, perfectly round. I did a double take. It was the US Geological Survey Benchmark for the summit, the only permanent sign marking the fact that were 14,410 ft above sea level. It looked like a copper relic from another century, and blended in with the surrounding rock so well I'm surprised I found it. We took each other's picture with our heads next to it, did a high-five (laying down) and decided to get the hell out of there.

Once back inside the crater we realized we'd burned 45 minutes getting to the benchmark. It was nearing 9 am and we needed to beat the sun and the incoming weather down the mountain.

And so up had finally turned to down...