The twins, Ale and Tommy had been trying to convince me into joining them for a mountaineering trip for a while now. I just kept on telling them that I simply didn’t understand or didn’t find the joy on it if there was no skiing on the descending.
But as you may know me, I’m really easy into convincing for any adventure at all, so I decided to join them into climbing Mt. Rainier (no skiing) only if they join me some days before to skin up and ski down mt. Baker. They said they were going to think about the idea, but I just went ahead and booked the double adventure myself hoping for them to join me.
They day came and unfortunately the twins did not join me for the Skiing mountain of the trip. So I got there a few days earlier than them. It was my first time in Seattle, and the little I was able to see I loved it. I had breakfast at this delicious place called “the little hen” where I had the Benedict eggs with crab -delicious. Later I made some MUST stops at REI (the original one… crazy big) and at Starbucks Reserve (since Starbucks is originally from Seattle they have this “Starbucks reserve” concept where they have a full bakery/fast food restaurant inside the coffee shop).
I had around half day to myself to visit some national park/hike or to do something other than the city touristic stuff, so I decided to visit “Vane Creek Bridge” which is located at Olympic National Park and is only a mile long hike (kinda Instagram famous picture). Approximately a 2 hours drive from Seattle and inside the Olympic national park, the bridge is actually located inside a private property…. but I highly doubt someone will ever stop you from entering, since that the place is very remote and based on all the reviews I read online nobody has ever been stoped. It is a very sketchy climb up to the bridge, so if you are afraid of heights, then this is definitely not a plan for you. Then, once you have climbed around 5 meters up, you have to hold your breath and walk in a skinny beam with no support on either side to make it to the “safe” side where some 40 year old wood beams are in crossing the beams. Definitely felt an adrenaline rush.
Early next day my Mt. Baker trip started. I hired Mountain Madness as my guides for the overnight alpine skiing trip. At around 7am I met with my guide Doug and we did a quick pre trip gear check. New stuff for me in this trip was skiing crampons… I had no idea this existed but super cool tool when traversing steep terrain. Other than this, i have had some decent backcountry experiences lately, but no overnight camping in the snow, so I was honestly a little nervous about how this whole camping in snow was going to turn out.
After a 2.5 hour drive from Seattle to Mt Baker we parked right were the snow started, so we stared skinning right from car (which was pretty cool that there was no hiking involved).
It was pretty breathtaking and unique experience to start skinning up through the dense Pacific North West forest to end up above tree line just before entering glacier terrain. The first day skinning up was relatively easy and fast…. Not more than 5 hours took us to get up there above tree line, and it wasn’t that much of a technical terrain either.
As for the camping in snow it was actually very nice. Just be sure to have a winter rated sleeping bad and pad. It got so hot during the night that I actually had to sleep in my underwear.
Couple hints for winter camping….
- Fill your sleeping bag with EVERYTHING you would be using the next day and fill out a bottle with HOT water and place inside the sleeping bag to maintain heat inside…
- Make sure to pee as much as you can before going to bed… you surely don’t want to be going outside your tent in the middle of the freezing night to pee outside.
- As soon as you get to where you want to camp start melting water right away to both hidrate and start cooking ASAP to replenish everything you’ve burned on the way up. Even though you might not feel it, you have no idea how fast and easy you dehidrate at high altitudes.
As for the next day, we woke up at around 4:00am, had breakfast, went to the bathroom (leave no trace – IYKYK) and started skinning up by 5am. Visibility was not great since the beginning, but since it was so early in the morning I imagined that it would get better as we kept on moving higher. Pretty fast weather started getting pretty miserable but we kept on pushing. I asked Doug how bad the weather was in a scale from 1 to 10 and he replied 6, so I just kept on pushing without hesitating much.
Once we got to glacier/crevasse terrain we roped up and kept on pushing forward at a pretty decent pace (for someone from Miami) according to Doug (1500 feet per hour in elevation). Suddenly the weather turned from ok/not so good (6/10) to pretty bad (8.5-9/10). Visibility went basically to zero in less than a minute. Once Doug closed up the rope I realized the weather was nasty even for him. He then proceeded to tie a rope to one end of he’s skiing pole to throw it in front of us so we could be sure there were no crevasses in front us. It got so bad at a point that instead of going downhill we were going uphill, that’s how bad visibility was….. We turned around 200 meters short of submit, and maybe we should’ve turned around a little bit earlier but it is what it is. There were a couple of sketchy moments, but Doug got us back to camp safely.
Check out this two videos to see a little what I was trying to explain above:
Yes, it was disappointing having to turn around so short of submit after so many hours pushing towards the top, but nothing has felt as good as getting back to camp safe and sound. Also to our surprise we found some pretty decent snow on the way down, but visibility conditions were so bad that we could barely enjoy some turns.
To add to the story we got kinda lost on the way down once we got below tree line which added around a couple hours to the day. I was honestly more mentally exhausted than physically and couldn’t wait to get back to town and take a hot shower and have some burgers with fries or at leas some not dehydrated food.
Even though we didn’t get to summit Baker, this first overnight alpine mountaineering experience was everything I wanted to experience and was the perfect preparation for Mt. Rainier which started just two days after the Baker summit push.
I met with the twins and Jonathan (twins friend) later that night after driving to Seattle from Baker, were we had a good dinner and drove the next day to our Airbnb in Ashford for our first Intro to mountaineering class. Little did we know we would have a legend as our guide, Dave Hann. Not only he is a mountaineering legend, but he is also super humble…. In his intro he mentioned he had been to the Himalayas just a couple times… so we figured out by then he was a descent guide, but it wasn’t until Jimmy Chin and Conrad Anker met with him and greeted him like they were best friends…. That’s when we googled him and realized the kind of guide we had.
After our first intro to mountaineering class we went for diner at the local Nepali restaurant (there are only a a couple restaurants in ashford so you cant miss it), we were sitted across Conrad. This is the moment we realized Mt. Rainier was no joke…. If you are climbing the same route and same day when this legends are…. then this place is no piece of cake.
Next day we had our second mountaineering class. We practice stuff such as crevasse rescue, self arrest, walking in ropes, crampons walking techniques, etc, etc. We finished kinda early and Levinton’s friend and I decided to go into Rainiers national park for a short run and also do some sightseeing in the park.
Later that night we arrange our bags for base camp and summit days. (Our Airbnb in ashford was amazing btw, with even a hot tub – Check out this home on Airbnb! https://abnb.me/CCLiQexPUhb). It was located 5 minutes away from the parks entrance and just a few hundred meters away from RMI headquarters (RMI is the main guiding company in rainier).
Base camp day came and we started walking at around 10:00am towards camp Muir. Here in camp Muir you have a couple small huts – one belonging to guiding companies and the others work as a first come first grab basis. You do have to sign in with the park rangers i believe. Because of COVID this year you needed to be vaccinated in order to be able and stay inside the huts, otherwise you had to camp outside in the tents (the twins and Jonathan had to stay outside).
Weather hadn’t been very nice for the past week or so. It had been one week since the last group had been able to reach the summit of Mt Rainier, so we were very anxious regarding if we were going to be able to make that push the next day… while we were making time before going to bed we encounter legends/TNF athletes Jimmy Chin, Conrad Anker, Hillary Nelson and Jim Morrison – along with their two kids skiing down rainier. They mentioned they will try to make summit tomorrow morning before us, so if they could we certainly would as well because of having Dave as a guide.
Summit push started at around 2am. It was really difficult for me to eat this day. That’s one thing for sure I got to get dialed before my next backcountry trip… the meals…. Anywho, I’ve been in beautiful star gazing places such as Marfa, Joshua Tree, Canaima, Yosemite and so on…. But I’ve never seen a sky such as the one we saw that day. Not even in movies or in pictures I’ve seen something like what I saw that day. It was just a surreal experience being in the middle of that glacier at 3am. Terrain isn’t that technical, so no previous experience is required to make this ascent. Push was around 6 hours to make it all the way to summit. Only a handful of people had to turn around half way through the climb because of how cold it was getting… i believe it got all the way down to -26C at one point, but that’s just me speculating a little. There are a couple of really sketchy “no fall” zones… unfortunately and fortunately one of the twins actually kinda fell in one of this “no fall zone” but we were super aware and immediately threw ourselves to the ground in order to self arrest, but anyway this wasn’t necessary because he did not travel any distance falling… Dave, who was leading the rope didn’t realize that right away, but when he did he got pissed and demanded us to be more careful.
Views at this point of the push were just surreal…. I actually felt like I was living in another planet. I personally didn’t have enough energy to take out my phone and take pictures.. I was basically hoping for others to take good pictures and then share them at the end of the trip… which is basically what happened.
The plan when going up is to take four short breaks before arriving to the summit, but your last chance to head back to Camp Muir if you are not felling 100% capable of is on the second rest. If you decide to continue pass the second rest you must have enough fuel and energy to go all the way up to the summit. On our second rest I had decided to stop… the weather was just too nasty for me and honestly my legs were fried from that baker attempt……
We finally made it to the top and we spent no more than 20 mins up there… and honestly I was so happy when they decided it was time to head back down instead of walking in top of the glacier… also, to be transparent just the thought that we were only have way through our day and that we still had to descend what we had climbed in two days was just too much to stand… I couldn’t believe what I had gotten myself into. Just decided to break the day into small sections and kept reminding myself to think in Alessandro for motivation to keep on moving. It was also nice to be able and see parts we weren’t able to see anything while going up because of how early it actually was… again it felt like being in a complete different planet
Although it was beautiful to see what we couldn’t see in the way up, it was also nerve racking to walk across those huge crevasses… it’s crazy not to be able to see the end of them once you are in top of them.
After I don’t know how many hours we got back to camp Muir. Again we met The North Face crew and shared a bunch of stories and we got the nickname of “The Miami Climbing Club” by Jimmy Chin!!!!! An anecdote for the books for sure…
Mountains are special. Mountains are humbling. Mountains are intimidating. They make us realize the enormity of the world. But once you scale a height, you never feel proud; you are always humbled because the mountain allowed you to climb it.
Agni Amrita
We started at around 2am that day and got back to the car at around 6pm. Unfortunately we had to rush back to Seattle because we had reserved some celebratory dinner at Shiro’s (an Omakaze sushi place in downtown Seattle) and weren’t able to enjoy some beers with our guides.
I kept on telling the twins how I was never going to climb again a mountain if we couldn’t or weren’t going to descend in skis, but now that a month has gone by I can’t stop thinking and planning about my next summit attempt.
MiBiCi Adventures 