three little monkeys: Mt. Rainier Trip Day #8 & #9 (Thumb Rock, Curtis Camp)

So at 2 in the morning we wake up for some more fun - consistent 50mph winds with 70Mph gusts (verified later by climbing rangers that were on a nearby ridge). Eight hours earlier we watched a large chunk of ice from the bergschrund above, rip down the Willis Wall as shown in the video on Day #7 post. Also, if one looks closely in the video on the Day #7 posting, at about 8 o'clock you may notice that there is another climber who starts taking pictures of the event. We talked with this climber to see if he was going to be climbing with us later or if he was heading out. He told us that he and his partner tried to climb the route the night before and were struck by rocks, breaking his helmet in half and injuring his partner; they were heading home.

Despite all these events described above, we choose to break camp and climb on. We roped up to navigate the Carbon Glacier and I took the lead. After a few hours of wandering through the crevasses like a lab rat on a quest for cheese, we came to this:

It is a snow bridge with at least a 100' drop on each side. On the other side of this six foot long snow bridge is the end of the maze... very tempting. We pounded in a snow picket and when I was assured that I was on belay, I started to walk towards the snow bridge. Just as I started to walk over this snow structure another climber in our party suggested we try to find another way. I didn't need any convincing to go look around for something else, so we started back into the glacier field. We ended up having to climb down into a crevasse and up the other side to eventually get out of the glacier field and in an area without crevasse danger. Unfortunately, this new spot was a prime avalanche path, so we quickly climbed out of this area.

With the ice and rock fall all around us we decided to get on the ridge as early as possible. Instead of climbing straight up the side of the ridge to the high camp, as the climbers yesterday had done, we decided to get on the ridge from the beginning and stay high on the ridge to the high camp. This proved to be a wise decision for avoiding many falling rocks, however, the wind was crazy scary on the ridge.

Here are some pictures of camp #2 Thumb Rock (10,800').

Mt. Rainier Trip Day #9 (Curtis Alpine Camp)

We didn't sleep much at this camp all night long.We could hear rock and ice fall, and the wind never let up. Once again at 2AM we wake up and start the same routine -- cook something to eat quickly, tear down camp, repack everything, and head off into the darkness.

As we climbed higher we eventually came to the bergschrund that we would have to climb up over. This year it was about 45' high and so we roped up again and got our ice screws and other protection ready.

Here is what the view down looked like just before climbing up the ice cliff.

After climbing the ice cap we only had another 1000' to go -- this is when things got a little scary. The ice was really bad ice: when we would kick our front points into the ice or use our ice axes the ice would mostly shatter and break off into plate sized pieces. It was very steep and we knew that we just couldn't fall, there would be no way to self arrest before falling off the ice cliff.

Here I am at the top of Liberty Cap 14,100' and not even halfway done with the climb for the day.

After the Liberty Cap summit we walked over to the Columbia Crest Summit 14,400' and then started down the Emmons Glacier. Here is a spooky crevasse that we had to jump over. We had no idea how deep this was until we had already jumped, but it gave us all butterflies in our stomaches when we were in mid flight over this and saw how deep it was.