The "Short" day

Sunday morning we woke up just before the sun rise, and witnessed the odd phenomenon of a visible mountain shadow of the sun cutting through the air in front of us. Imagine the air in front of you being two different colors. Very cool. We ate a quick breakfast, put on our climbing gear, and headed up to a nearby incline in the Muir snow field to practice self arrest and rescue techniques. As I've described the ice axe and the self arrest process before, let me just say that when you are attempting it in early morning frozen hard pack snow, it's less like playing in the snow of your youth and more like being drug through an old parking lot on a rope behind a car. After that, Matt once again played the victim while I had to arrest his fall, set protection, and set up a system to rescue him. I actually pulled off a bomber system I was quite proud of, and both of us put our full weight into jumping against the rope on the anchors and they stood fast. My confidence was renewed. What you are looking at is a buried fluke anchor backed up by an adjacent bollard (snow/ice horn cut into the snow). The bollard isn't very big, but I bet it would have held on it's own.

After that, we went back to break camp, pack everything up, and move up to Ingraham Flats. This high camp doesn't enjoy any buildings or support, but does have enough flat glacier area for folks to camp on, and many share our view that they might as well camp as high as they can before a summit attempt. Besides, we were using Sunday to acclimate to altitude (more on this later as well) and practice, so a quick move up the mountain sounded logical.

Beyond Muir you travel roped up for protection as this is the zone where crevasses and other dangers come into play. Immediately departing from camp we had a brief crossing of a field of small crevasses that was littered with rock. When you see a lone rock sitting atop a field of glacial snow, you wonder to yourself, "where did that rock come from?" Then you look up to the shear rock wall immediately to your left and realize you are in a frequent fall zone, and that the faster you move the less danger you are in. That is exactly what we did. From there, it was through Cathedral Gap, or first move "around the back" of the mountain, moving from the southern side we'd come up around to the eastern side where the flats on the Ingraham glacier are. As the gap had melted out, it was slow and treacherous going, with every step half lost to sliding dirt and unstable rock. The ropes were essentially useless here as it would be impossible to arrest one's self or a partner's fall, so we traveled on a "short rope" where the following person coils the rope up for ease of travel and you both just pray you don't fall. From an absolute safety standpoint it would make more sense to unrope completely, but this takes more time than any team would want to spend.

After emerging from the gap, we found ourselves on the Ingraham glacier, with a gentle uphill toward the flats, and a totally new view of the mountain and our surroundings. We now had a breathtaking view of "Little Tahoma" a giant rock ridge jutting out of the side of Rainier, and had Mt. Baker to the North to gaze at through the crystal clear sky.

After climbing up to where the other tents on the flat were camped, we were directed by a nice camper to an excellent pre-existing site that had just been dug out, and we set up camp. This time I set up snow walls around the outside of the tent that rose just above the level of the rainfly to try to keep the force of the wind from flapping violently against the tent walls as it had at Muir. It was a great site and the only draw back was that we didn't have any rocks to use to guy out the lines for the rain fly of the tent, but with the windbreaks and the position of the pad cut into the slope, we figured the actual stakes would hold just fine. After melting 9 Liters of water and boiling water for dinner, we hastily ate and tried to turn in as soon as possible for our planned Midnight rise and 1 am departure for the summit.