A TYPICAL CLIMB

Sunday morning one staff member would wait in the Camp Sheppard parking lot to greet the scouts when they arrived and direct them to the dining hall where the group gear awaited them. The leaders for that trip would divvy up the food and group gear such as tents, ropes and stoves. Scouts had to provide their own crampons and ice axe (REI rentals). On the mountain each rope team would consist of one Camp Sheppard staff member and two scouts. If the group had an extra person we could squeeze four people onto a rope and if they were short a person we would add a first year Staff, to give them experience and to fill out the ropes.

When the gear was distributed and packs were loaded, every one piled into the bus and headed for the mountain. If the weather report looked threatening, Max would stop at a vista along the way and have everybody get out and look at the mountain. "It may be the only chance you get!" Then on to the trailhead at Fryingpan Creek.

\It is a pretty four-mile hike through the forest up to Summerland. At Summerland we leave the trail and start the 1500 ft. climb over rock and snow to Meany Crest. We would stop at the first steep snowfield with a good runout to practice ice axe arrest. Every one puts on their rain gear and practices sliding down the slope and stopping with their ice axe. The CS staff taught how to hold the ice axe while walking and how to roll into the arrest position if you fell backwards forwards or sideways. Snow conditions and time permitting, each scout would get tied into a rope, and then, as they walked up the slope, they would get a tug, pulling them over backwards. This simulated a real fall and forced them to go through the mechanics of self-arrest under the off-balance conditions of a fall.

After the ice axe arrest practice we would climb to a level spot for lunch. After lunch we continued up to Meany Crest. Meany Crest is a round, flat knob, sticking out of the Fryingpan Glacier 60 x 60 yd with some large boulders in the southwest corner. The boulders made an excellent windbreak for cooking and camping. We set the FM radio on top of one of the boulders so we could listen to Dr. Demento and National Lampoon Radio Hour while we cooked and ate dinner.

Monday morning we would hike the mile up to Whitman Crest, traverse the Whitman Glacier to Tahoma Gap and drop down onto the Ingraham Glacier. Most of the time we would rope up to traverse the Whitman Glacier. The glacier was particularly flat on our traverse and we could see the compression bulges above and the expansion crevasses below us so it was generally felt that this part of the glacier was safe to travel unroped. Camp Sheppard always roped up for the Whitman Glacier primarily to impress upon the scouts that we took glaciers seriously, and also to keep an errant scatter-brained scout from wandering off the path in the snow and falling into a crevasse. Stopping for lunch in Tahoma Gap you look up the ridge to the top of Little Tahoma, down to the left is the Ingraham Glacier and turning around to look south you see a panorama of the southern Cascades. This is a good place to scope out the route up the mountain, through the three icefalls of the lower Ingraham, onto Disappointment Cleaver and up to the summit. The snow on the Whitman Glacier side of the gap is level enough for several tents and we camped there several times when a whiteout or foul weather kept us off the Ingraham Glacier. My first lunch at Tahoma Gap was on the staff climb of my second year. As we dined on pilot biscuits and root beer barrels, gray-blue butterflies were flying up the ridge towards Little Tahoma. The whole time we ate, thousands of butterflies were flying by in some strange migration. This was my first time climbing Mt Rainier and I assumed every new wonder I saw was normal in this alpine world. When I described this sight to other experienced climbers, none of them had ever seen such a sight. In the many climbs with Camp Sheppard in the following years I never again saw butterflies flying up a mountain ridge.

Down to the first bowl on the Ingraham from Tahoma Gap was about a mile. Once into the bowl we would find a safe spot to set up camp, usually toward the back of the bowl away from the mawing crevasses at the downhill edge of the bowl. Setting up camp involved leveling out a sleeping platform and digging a cook pit so the stoves would be out of the wind and the cooks would be able to stand while cooking. If the weather were foul or threatening everyone would sleep in tents. Otherwise we would set up one or more tents and those that wished would sleep inside and the rest of us slept under the stars. Occasionally, when we had a very promising weather report, we would not set up any tents and everybody slept outside. While camp was being set up a couple staff members would rope up and look for a crevasse suitable for crevasse rescue practice. The crevasse needed to be 15+ ft. wide with straight walls, no overhang at the lip and 50 ft. or so of clear solid glacier next to it. At a safe site we would set up the anchors for the practice and lay out the ropes. When all was ready, the scouts would come over and one by one get lowered into the crevasse on a rope. They were lowered about 25 ft. where they had to step into their prusiks and climb several feet up the rope. The rest of the party would then haul on the rope and pull them out.

FM radio reception on this side of the mountain was poor so dinner was eaten without musical accompaniment. There was a six-o-clock radio check every morning. We carried an ESAR radio and checked in with Max every morning noon and night. It was expected we would be packed up and ready to move by six every morning and nobody wanted to admit over the radio that they hadnÕt gotten up on time.