ICEFALL

One problem that was common to all trips was encouraging the troops to get out of bed, pack up and get on the trail. Max and the staff agreed that one hour in the morning was a reasonable goal. We knew an hour was not too difficult from our own experiences. Nevertheless, it was a challenge to get weary young scouts up and 1-2 hours was not uncommon. Things can happen though, that can inspire a group to pack up fast, very fast.

Chuck was leading a climb on Rainier and we were camping on the Ingraham Glacier just above Disappointment Cleaver. We started at Fryingpan Creek, taught ice axe arrest at Summerland and hiked up to Meany Crest the first night. The second day we hiked up to Whitman Crest, traversed the Whitman Glacier and dropped onto the Ingraham Glacier at Tahoma Gap. We camped in the first bowl off the Ingraham Glacier and set up the crevasse rescue practice. We were up early the next morning to find our way up to the base of the Cleaver before the day warmed up and softened the snow bridges over the crevasses. The following day we climbed up the Cleaver and found a relatively level spot on the glacier, just above the top of the Cleaver, that appeared stable. The glacier splits at the Cleaver and into two streams that flow down the east and the west sides. The flow on the west side is a steep cascading jumble of seracs crevasses. Our camp was on a flat part of the glacier with no seracs above us and no crevasses opening towards us.

After dinner Joe and I were in the cook pit helping with the clean-up, Chuck and several of the scouts were settling down in a tent just above the cook pit and Tom and Scott were supervising the smoothing out of a sleeping platform next to the cook pit on the west side. Tom came to me and said there was a hole in one corner of the sleeping platform. I was not real concerned, we were camped on a flat spot of the glacier with no crevasses near our site and we were directly above the Cleaver, so the glacier wasn't stretching out to fall down the mountain below us. I told Tom to probe it with an ice axe and see how big it was. WOOMPF! As the ice axe went into the hole, an area half the size of a football field, fifteen yards up the mountain, dropped out of sight and moments later a cloud of snow and ice came rushing up out of the hole. Chuck popped out of his tent and I went to look at the hole probed by the ice axe. Someone said it looked bigger now and I was beginning to doubt the security of the sleeping platform. Chuck sat at the door of the tent to put on his boots and found himself straddling a crack that ran right under the tent and through the cook pit. He stood up and told everybody to get packed and rope-up while he and I scouted out a safer campsite. Chuck and I roped up, and scooted down to the rocks of the cleaver and found a spot where twelve scouts could sleep without sliding down the mountain in the night (any port in a storm). Within 15 minutes of the woompf! we returned and found everyone roped up, with his pack on, ready to go. Every other trip I have been on it has been really hard to motivate people to pack up and get ready to go.