Lace, Sam, and I headed out to Mt. Rainer Friday night after I went to see Sex and the City. What an awesome movie - couldn't stop laughing! Anyway, we got down there pretty late and setup tents to camp out for the night outside of Mt. Rainer with a lot of the students. It was Lace and I's plan to head up to base camp and sleep there the next night with 10 of the instructors who were already up there.
6:30 a.m. Lace, Andy, and I headed up to base camp. Pretty easy hike and the weather was decent - not too hot not too cold. We setup camp as quickly as we could before the rope teams of students made it up so we could get to our stations. I was helping work at the crevasse station where we were lowering students into a large crevasse and they had to prusik out as if they had fallen in.
The weather Saturday was nice coming in as I said before but it didn't take long before we got all 4 seasons in one day. Cloudy, sunny, snow, sleet, rain, snow, sunny, cloudy, foggy, and so on and so forth. It was really pretty ridiculous. After all the students headed off the mountain and back to camp the 11 other instructors and I sat down to relax and eat dinner. The weather was really nice and sunny. We could see the top of Mt. Adams over the cloud cover in the distance.
We had good weather all night as well as the next morning. In fact, it looked like it was going to be sunny all day Sunday when we got up. However, we were dead wrong. It was white out conditions all day until noon and then in addition to white out we got heavy snow/rain fall. Jef, Lace, and I were the lead team out to set wands for the others to find their way out. We had to circumvent some rock fall we had heard that sounded pretty severe so we were looking for a safer route to the moraine. White out the whole way out - soaking wet.
I'm sunburned as all get out and I think I'm getting a cold but it was fun at times...
A few pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/erinrifkin/Snow2MtRainer
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