9/4/2026 Change of Fun - Skiing Mount Rainier

The top of the Emmons Glacier is benign by snow-walking standards. A planar rectangle of snow, surface unperturbed by just about anything. That surface under our feet is goldilocks firm, neither icy nor unconsolidated snow of any sort. We are walking, not climbing. A pole in one hand, casually sauntering in orbit of the track beaten in by the clients and their guides on their summit climb. That track is, of course, not exactly where we want to walk, but it still serves as a convenient handrail. No dead ends or scary crevasses this way. I suppose I’ve kind of mastered the snow travel thing.

But the exposure grows as the angle lessens. After interminable French step switchbacks to the top of the rectangle, our handrail jogs right and right and right, beyond the bounds of our simple snow climb. Having thus far crossed essentially no holes or bridges, the track pushes us towards a hanging snowfield over several thousand feet of jumbled icefall. That maze is navigable, perhaps, but not by me, not today, and certainly not while falling at speed. Ben and I saunter our way above semi-certain doom. We elect to take a siesta, and I plop onto the snow, all muscles limp above the icefall. Too much mellow snow below me to trigger a worry.

Ben is more of an alpine guy. I am more of a skier guy. He climbs hard ice, complex mountains, and 5.12 without much effort. He has recently bent skiing to his will and, without fanfare or really the passage of time, become a 5.12 skier. I am more of a skier, but only by virtue of being less of a climber. And because the winter holds scarce time for rock or alpine endeavors. It is, as we walk up the Emmons, early June, and I am complaining about an early end to corn season. I am a whiny little pig boy.

Rainer's summit rim, like the other volcanoes, makes the thing less of a peak than a denuded neck atop a proud mountain body. The neckline, windswept and whiffing of volcano, frustrates me as we trudge along the wind-sculpted sastrugi and gravel, skis on our backs. Reflexively, I wince at my oafishness as I destroy these minute, repetitive ice sculptures and grind through the dumb little rocks that compose these volcanoes. At least there are plenty more.

We had seen a handful of skiers chattering down our goldilocks surface as we walked up, perhaps finally comprehending the icefall that their crampons had let them ignore on the way up. The skiing looked as we walked, even for an optimist, not really very good. The ramp presented a confluence of difficulty and consequence. Low angle though. And not our ultimate destination. Though we hardly knew our ultimate destination for the day as we watched those skiers chatter by, letting their fear of consequence magnify the difficulty as they learned farther over on the comically easy pitch above a mighty fall. They all made it through, despite their best efforts.

I had hoped Ben would be rope gunning me on one of the classic ice routes on Rainier: Liberty Ridge, Ptarmigan Ridge, or the like, carrying skis to descend the Emmons back to the car. A proud day in my book. But the rangers told us Liberty Ridge was 5-0 against all comers this year. A team of rangers had bailed mid-route a few days earlier under unrelenting rockfall. You cannot fault the ranger for wanting to scare two random guys straight. We both knew the route’s reputation: a once-classic, now a victim of climate change, and taking out its anger on anyone who gets close. That’s not how you heal from trauma, but no one really asked for my thoughts. Limited success on the equally dangerous Ptarmigan.

So we took the ranger’s bait and changed our whole plan right there in the parking lot. Ben argued that these faded beauties were not worth the risk; perhaps we were just born at the wrong time. One tactic for these routes is soloing at warp speed to ‘mitigate’ the rockfall risk, a solution I was skeptical of. No one can out-skin an avalanche, right? I didn’t want to let go of my dreams of climbing Liberty Ridge, but if Mom doesn’t want to drive to the mall, you don’t get a ride to the mall.

Pivoting is tough for the stubborn, immediately reframing the day or week you had already imagined for yourself, holding the evaporating experience to be tightly in your grubby hands. Liberty Ridge had been a load-bearing wall in my summer plans, a new experience beyond more perfect volcano corn. More perfect than Utah’s anyway. More growth on the heels of some ticklish new experiences in Alaska last spring. Instead, I was pulling just-sharpened ice gear from my already-packed overnight bag. A big alpine ice route would wait another year.

We were hours from another trailhead – Rainier is quite large – and with the afternoon soon to be over, we would be pivoting to another plan from our current location. We sat on a curb at the ranger station, all dressed up and ready to go, struggling to research alternatives on the weak NPS wifi. Most of the skiing left on Rainier by mid June these days is either benign or far from it. Not much responsible risk on the menu. Just Liberty Ridge or the Emmons.

One possible plan did pique our interest: up the Emmons and down the Central Mowich Face in a big lollipop to Glacier Basin. The Mowich was unknown to us, but had credentials: Jason Hummel and my friend Stephen think it’s rad. But that stupid Park wifi meant no photos, and no beta beyond a July 2017 double thumbs up from a stranger. North facing, so hopefully not too beaten by the long, sunny days. We both had a suspicion it would dead-end in ice or rock, and we would be forced to reascend and return to the Emmons. We would not be able to see it until we dropped in. What the hell.

From the true summit, the Liberty Cap and the top of the Mowich look far away, never mind that the summit plateau drops off like the ice wall at the edge of our flat earth. Yearning to kill the anticipation of looking over that rollover onto our line, I point my skis straight off the gentle summit knoll into the sastrugi that look so small from the top. My ass is immediately below my knees, bobbing off my skis as my arms drift above my head into the universal sign of skier distress. My skis travel over the strips of wind-beaten snow like a bike tire across a railroad crossing covered in calcified boils. The lumpy sastrugi is now a blur beneath me, but at least the icefalls are not close. I am on the flats, but there is no stopping until I do, falling heavily on one of my fancy carbon poles. Crack. Oooh. My fancy pole is now pretty bendable but not shattered.

Ben, ever circumspect, pulls up with as much judgment as I’ve ever felt from him. Big oops. I feel dumber than dumb. All that risk and no reward to show for it. Plus, my pole is cracked for our big descent. A handful of Voile straps and an ice screw make for a passable splint as we nose out to the ice wall. We walk by the top out for Liberty Ridge in the last few feet before it is time to ski again, and holy Hannah, does it look bigger than I thought. Big tough guy Spencer would have struggled big time. Though I am already struggling in a weird way. I feel too loose and loopy for the serious skiing ahead. Still no cell service up here, so our only beta is my memory of a photo I saw the week before. Some sort of leaning ramp through a sprinkling of maybe that would go cliffs into an open face with a rocky bergshrund below.

My turns off the top, gentle above a sturdy layer of clouds on a narrowing ridge, are rock hard and bouncy. It is impossible to see beyond the ridge without committing to the crevasses we continue to spot once we have passed them. It’s maybe 5pm, and we have yet to find the Mowich. We near the end of the ridge and, looking down one more 5000’ face, I see some features that remind me of the photo I saw. And a lot of grey ice. Slowly, foolishly, we begin to weave through the grey, leaving no tracks, telling ourselves we can always just climb back out. As the ridge above disappears in the rollover, I finally remember the mysterious rhythm of this sort of skiing: slow, continuous, and downwards. A low boil at its most intense. My broken pole recedes into memory as my skis schuss in a fine mist of shavings. Ben asks whether to keep going, to expect better snow. Having never departed, I am glad to be in my wheelhouse. I am mom now. Load up, kids, because we are headed to Jamba Juice.

My expertise cliffs us out almost immediately. Sitting alongside rotten rock and snow, a terrifically exposed and firm ramp away from what looks like a passage through the cliffs, I ask Ben to take the lead in building a snow anchor for us to rappel on. I have built and played with snow anchors. Weighted them, but never trusted them. It is time to trust my picket in this tongue of rotten snow. I stand to the side watching him work and pierce a peanut butter packet in my hip pocket against the alcove I am using to shelter from falling ice. The peanut butter, perfect brown baby shit, really, creeps out of my pocket and onto my hands, gloves, pants, and shirt. Too busy watching to notice. But then it’s over so quickly, and I am at the stopper knots at the bottom of our rope, cursing the peanut butter, memory shortened by the sun sinking in the sky with so much skiing left below us.

Soon, that skiing too is gone, finally the perfect corn I hunted, and we sit below and aside the Mowich, rock stained in long smears of brown like my stupid jacket. From our evening siesta spot, the north side of Rainier looks tired: grey and brown snow peeling off an immense, squat, crumbling tower. Our line already obscured by yet more mountain. Basking in our not failure. Helluva job.

We sat, of course, at the extent of our planning. Hard part done. Just contour around the mountain for a few miles, gawk at the ridges too dangerous for us to climb, and tuck in for a late ramen dinner, sleeping on dry ground at camp. We set off for our victory lap around the north side of Rainier, and my skins immediately fail, sodden since 4am. They take one, two, three, four, five, six Voile straps, reducing my splinted pole to a spear. Our easy contour in the deepening gloom immediately ends. We slip through steep isothermal mush until we are rewarded with treadmill scree. This menu irritates even unflappable Ben.

As the moon rises, the mank firms up, allowing fast but fearsome gliding through breakable crust. I lose the end of my broken pole again and again, snagged in the crust. We transition eight, maybe nine more times. Leashes on. Off. Skinning, rocks, skiing, endless shuffling. The peanut butter coats my Voile straps as I stuff them into my jacket for each rock band. This is easy, but there are still holes to find, more than the Emmons, and knees to twist. Is peanut butter bad for skins? The darkness prevents any thought from escaping the beam of my headlamp. These flat glaciers and easy contouring take all of my focus as I slip again on my deficient skin, carbon crackling in my splint.

Atop the last ridge, we look down at our future for the last time on this long day. A weak moon fails to illuminate that pockmarked and sun-cupped future, but we manage. Camp is good. Ramen is good. Rest is good. Rather ruined in the parking lot the next day, we met one of Ben’s friends. He mitigated rockfall on Liberty at warp speed and skied the Emmons, probably crossing our tracks back to camp on his way up only a few hours after we made them. I had a flash of last week’s dreams, but my greasy hands did not quite clench them in time.

I wish to acknowledge the Cowlitz, Muckleshoot, Nisqually, Puyallup, Squaxin Island, Yakama, and Coast Salish peoples, their elders past and present, their future generations, and all Indigenous peoples who have called this place home, since time immemorial. I offer gratitude for the land itself and the original caretakers of it who were forcibly removed.