The Andy Aupperlee Explosion 5000

It is 5:30 AM on Saturday, July 16th, 2011. Richard and Aaron, who arrived about 30 minutes earlier, are sitting in the living room while Ryan is scrambling to pack some last minute gear. I’m seated at the dining room table, talking to Aaron and Richard, enjoying a glass of juice. A specific kind of anticipation permeates the room at this early hour; the kind of excitement that arises on the brink of an ambitious adventure like the one we are about to undertake. Richard’s phone rings. “Oh, hi Gus.” On the phone is Gus Radcliffe, the fifth member of our climbing team. He’s on the other side of Seattle with Katy, the sixth member, preparing to rendezvous with us for the ride to Mount Rainier.

“Hold on, Gus. I’m going to put you on speaker phone.” Richard addresses the room, “Gus wants to talk go/no-go right now.”

“So I’ve been checking out the weather, and, well, things have turned since last night.” Gus continues in the pragmatic and logical tone for which he is known. “It’s raining up to about 10,000 feet, and after that it’s snowing. Also, there are thunderstorms on the mountain. I don’t want to be stuck on Mount Rainier in a thunderstorm.”

We all know the answer. None of us want to admit it right away. This is not the weekend to make a summit bid on Mount Rainier.

“Yeah. It does sound nasty,” Richard agrees. “Give us a few minutes and we’ll call you back.”

Before we pull the plug on this trip, a trip we’ve been planning for weeks, we go through every weather and safety consideration several times. The 6 AM consensus of Ryan, Gus, Aaron and I is that Mount Rainier is a no-go. The adrenaline has already started flowing though, and alternative outlets for our enthusiasm are considered.

Richard leads the charge. “I don’t know about you guys… but I’ve got a car full of mountaineering gear, 20 oz of coffee and am ready to get after it. Anything else we can climb?”

Aaron gets out the laptop and starts searching around the Cascade Mountains for a peak with decent weather.

“Baker?”

“Socked in.”

“Adams?”

“Looks nasty.”

“Shuksan?”

“Same as Baker.”

Aaron stumbles onto some page that details a trip a group of climbers took up Pumpkin Mountain when their Rainier climb was aborted. WTF is Pumpkin Mountain? We all laughed about this for a minute.

Richard chimes in, “what about Shasta? If we left now, we could be there in 10 hours.”

We quickly come to the conclusion that Mount Shasta is a bad idea. Not only is it in Northern California, it’s also a mountain that none of us are familiar with and we have not prepared for.

“Oh man!” Richard is excited now. “What about Olympus? I’d love to climb Mount Olympus!”

Aaron googles the weather. Looks like rain, which makes the 18 mile approach just to get to the base of Olympus less appealing.

With the catalog of Cascade peaks exhausted, we call Gus back and let him know we agree to shut down the climb. It is now 6:30 AM. The four of us are still pretty restless, so I ask if anyone would like to have a beer before heading back home. Not surprisingly, everyone is in the mood for one. With ice axes, backpacks, crampons, harnesses, ropes and piles of other gear sitting next to us, we enjoy an early morning libation and continue to joke about Pumpkin Mountain (WTF?!).

Even though this is absolutely the right call, it is extremely disappointing to me. A decade earlier, in October 2001, I attempted to summit Mount Rainier with Chris Brown and Adam Snider. We chose an ambitious route (especially for the fall), and spent 7 days on the mountain before reaching a max elevation of 13,500 feet. With less than a thousand vertical feet to the summit of 14,411′, we encountered a 36-hour snowstorm that destroyed our tent. When the sky finally cleared, there was so much new snow we could hardly move. After enduring life threatening conditions and days of rock, snow and ice; we turned around without tagging the summit. We spent the next day and half descending, sleeping in a snow cave, and becoming delirious (dehydration, lack of food, and probably some hypothermia). Those who know me have probably heard this story. Facebookers may have come across some photos, and a few have even seen the film I shot up on the mountain. Over the years this failed attempt on Rainier has grown into a folktale of sorts. These days, I am asked to tell the story more than I volunteer the account. Although I am grateful for having such an epic yarn to spin, I always wanted that summit.

On the eve of moving to Seattle from Chicago in summer of 2007, I wrote a note announcing my intentions to head west. “Additionally, being situated in Seattle places me in close proximity to an old nemesis: Mount Rainier. Columbia Crest and I have a date six years in the making.” For the next four years, every clear day in Seattle reminded me of my unfinished business with that mountain.

Two weeks later I’m arriving at Gus’s house at 6 AM on a Saturday morning. After loading several bags of mountaineering gear into Gus’s Subaru, we’re headed south on I-5 towards Mount Rainier. Not everyone from the original crew was able to participate in the make-up climb; this trip is just going to be Gus, Katy and me. The weather forecast is promising: clear on Saturday, some clouds moving in on Sunday and then clearing up again on Monday (the day we intend to summit). We parked the car at the White River Campground (4,400′) under sunny skies and geared up. At this point, the only thing between me and Columbia Crest (the summit) is 10,000 vertical feet. Game on.

The trail winds through the woods for just over 3 miles before the trees start to break up and a view of Rainier is possible. After making it through the sub-alpine we arrived at Glacier Basin (6,000′). After a light lunch, we climbed through the basin to the Inter Glacier.

After spending all afternoon climbing, we reached Camp Curtis which sits atop the Inter Glacier at 9,000 feet. We setup camp here with plans to move to Camp Schurman the next morning. Our campsite featured gorgeous vistas of Little Tahoma, prominent peaks such as Mount Baker, Glacier Peak and an expansive view of the North Cascades.

The team posed in front of the summit before calling it a night on Camp Curtis.

Full screen 360 of Camp Curtis here.

Despite the serene twilight hours, once night fell a strong wind blew in. Gusts of up to 30 to 50 MPH rocked the tent all night. Nothing like trying to catch a few Z’s while the walls you’re sleeping in violently move back and forth. While this didn’t make me legitimately nervous, it did cause enough anxiety for me to hardly get any sleep. I got up several times throughout the night to make sure my backpack or boots hadn’t blown away.

The next morning a large group of mix-gendered Alaskans rolled in. What’s with the blow-up doll? It was a bachelor party, obviously.

After a short traverse, we reached Camp Schurman at 9,500 feet. The plan for Sunday was to setup camp and relax. Camp Schurman would serve as the high camp for our summit bid on Monday morning. As we climbed to Schurman, we passed climbers on their descent. A lot of the groups we spoke to turned around at 12,000 feet or so. The strong winds from the night before ruined a lot of summit attempts; that and near white-out conditions made climbing the high alpine on early Sunday morning difficult. We’d expected this, and timed our climb so that we’d be summiting on early Monday morning when the weather was more favorable.

Full screen 360 of Camp Schurman here.

Katy and I slept in the tent. Gus, being the alpine rockstar that he is, slept in a bivy. Although no one really slept. We lounged around on Sunday afternoon and used the stove to melt snow to fill our Nalgene bottles. I even tried to read a book. The prospect of being only 5,000 vertical feet from success made me pretty restless. Although we could have used the rest, falling asleep wasn’t an easy task. We agreed that we should move up our “wake-up time” from midnight to 10 PM on Sunday night.

I slipped into my down mummy sleeping bag at 6 PM and shut my eyes. To help me relax, I pulled out the iPhone and listened to Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy all the way through. Still wide awake. I turned to the ultimate sleep inducing medication: NPR. Specifically, This American Life. While always fascinating, something about those voices induces REM. Somewhere in the middle of “When Patents Attack!” I caught 10 minutes of real sleep. This is the most quality rest I’d gotten since the Friday night before I left. Only moments later Gus poked his head through the tent door: “time to go!” Was it 10 PM already? I pleaded for another 13 minutes.

“If all you’re asking for is another 13 minutes, I think you can get up right now.”

“Ahh… yeah, okay,” I agreed.

“What’s so significant about 13 minutes anyway?”

I somewhat embarrassingly admitted that I had 13 minutes left on “When Patents Attack!” and wanted to finish the podcast before getting up. This did not draw any sympathy from my fellow climbers.

With our headlamps on, we prepared for the summit bid. We left the tent and all non-essential gear at Camp Schurman. Roped up and with crampons affixed, we began our alpine start up the Emmons Glacier at 11:30 PM. Despite a moderately annoying period of wind, the night climb went smoothly. We were close to a new moon which allowed the full magnificence of the Milky Way to blanket us from above. As dawn broke it became clear to us that we timed our summit bid perfectly. We could see for hundreds of miles in all directions.

Somewhere above 12,000 feet things started to get progressively more difficult. Altitude sickness set in and I lost my appetite. No more Lara Bars for a while. The consequences of a mis-step into a crevasse became starkly visible in the daylight. We carefully navigated around bottomless fractures of deep blue ice. By 13,000 feet the slog to the summit assumed the step-step-rest rhythm. The effects of getting only 5-6 hours of quality sleep in the last 72 hours wore on me. Even though an exhaustion unique to being in the high alpine consumed me; I never doubted our team’s ability to achieve our objective.

At 9 AM we reached the top of the Winthrop Glacier. A short walk up some gravel and we’d be on the summit. Gus and Katy took a few extra minutes to rest, but I was eager to ditch my pack and stand on the summit. Those last few steps took every bit of concentration I could muster. The altitude sickness had gotten worse. If I ran on batteries, there would have been a blinking red indicator on my helmet that read “please supply external power now!”

Minutes later I reached the edge of Columbia Crest. Mount Adams and Mount St. Helens came into view. I greeted some other climbers at the top and all my exhaustion and sickness vanished. I felt GREAT. I nearly sprinted up the little trail to the true summit. There, in that moment, standing on the summit was unlike anything I ever experienced. A mix of emotions came over me, but none more prominent than genuine happiness. I made a few phone calls, including ones to Adam and Chris who I climbed the same mountain with 10 years earlier.

I walked back to the edge of Columbia Crest and found Gus and Katy waiting for me there. We located the summit log, signed our names and began the descent. While not as grueling as the ascent, climbing down the mountain was certainly not uneventful. We reached Camp Schurman at around 3 or 4 PM. After tearing down camp and using the outhouse we embarked on the last 5,000 vertical feet to the car. Somewhere past Glacier Basin the sun set, and I walked the last two miles of the wooded trail in the dark. A wave of relief washed over me at 10 PM when my headlamp shined on the license plate to Gus’s Subaru. 10 years in the making and 24 hours after leaving for the summit, I was done.

As always… more photos on Flickr.