Photo by Jim Davidson & www.SpeakingofAdventure.com
The Willis Wall and the Liberty Ridge loom in this photo of Mount Rainier taken during a climb by Jim Davidson and Mike Price in 1992. After summiting, on June 21, 1992, Jim was descending Mt. Rainier with his climbing partner Mike Price when they both fell into a crevasse at Emmons Glacier. Jim survived and was able to climb out of the crevasse however his partner Mike was killed in the fall.
Video: A brief introduction to The Crevasse, a five-part series by Kevin Vaughan running in the Rocky Mountain News next week. Watch »
The biggest danger Jim Davidson and Mike Price would face on Mount Rainier lurked below the snowy surface on the vast glaciers they would have to cross during their climb and descent.
They knew that an untold number of fissures - some a couple of feet wide and 10 feet deep, some as wide as a car and more than 100 feet deep - sliced across those glaciers. They knew many of them were hidden beneath bridges of snow that formed and froze as those cracks slowly opened under the titanic force gravity exerted on the ice flows.
They had their plane tickets. Their trip was set. They would leave on June 17, 1992, and begin their climb the next morning.
But they had to prepare for the worst, so a couple of days before the flight, Mike showed up at Jim and Gloria's home in southwest Fort Collins. The two friends went out in the backyard, uncoiled a couple of hundred feet of rope, and set up a "Z" pulley system. The arrangement rests on a simple principle: Dividing one long section of rope into three smaller sections, separated by friction-reducing pulleys, greatly increased one man's leverage. When it's rigged up properly, the three sections of rope form a giant Z. Mike and Jim practiced because no climber in the world can haul his partner back up a cliff, or out of a crevasse, without aid.
Mike and Jim knew that if one of them plunged into a crevasse, and the other managed to flop on the ground and dig in with an ice pick and stop the fall, he'd have a real chance to pull his partner out if he could rig a Z pulley.
So out there on the grass, Mike and Jim practiced, using a black walnut tree and a section of the deck's railing as anchors.
Mike had spent a season in Antarctica 18 months before, where he was on a search-and-rescue team that pulled two men from a crevasse after their dozer crashed through a snow bridge.
He knew the details, so he led Jim as they put together a Z pulley the first time. Then they took it all apart, and Mike sat, observing quietly, as Jim did it on his own.
As Mike and Jim worked with the rope and talked about what they would do if they had to, Gloria stood on the deck watching, uneasy. It made her nervous to think that one of them could plummet into a giant glacial crack.
~~~
On a photograph of Rainier's north face, the line that cuts up Liberty Ridge is, in the description of climbers, "elegant" - a meandering route up and up, toward the snow-shrouded summit. The ridge is a cleaver-like rock formation jutting up between two walls. On one side is Willis Wall - 4,000 feet of volcanic rock, much of it falling away from the summit at a not-quite-vertical 70 to 80 degrees. On the other is Liberty Wall, smaller, but imposing nonetheless.
Above them both sits Liberty Cap, an ice field hundreds of feet thick covering the top of the volcanic mountain. That cap changes constantly with the seasons, repeatedly cleaving off building-sized slabs that rumble down the walls in an explosion of rock and ice.
Jim and Mike knew that climbing Liberty Ridge would not be easy. It would be a vertical mile of climbing, roped together, each man hauling roughly 50 pounds in his pack. It would mean picking their way through flows clogged with blocks of ice the size of trucks, climbing up a knife edge averaging roughly 45 degrees, facing some sections where it rose more steeply. It would mean sleeping out in the open at night, melting ice for a couple of hours in the morning so they would have water.
It would mean probably four days of hard work. And it would mean simul-climbing.
They were ready, experienced, mature. Jim was 29, Mike 34. And after the last of their gear tumbled from the baggage conveyor in Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, they jumped into a rental car and drove to Rainier, stopping first at the White River ranger station. There, they registered their climb, checked the conditions on the mountain, filled out index cards that rangers would use to notify their families if they got lost or hurt.
Then they drove to the White River campground, and late in the day they dumped out all their gear, talking about what to take and what to leave in the car - a blending of philosophy and confidence and gut instinct. Climbers call it "sorting the rack."
Some of it was easy. They packed oatmeal and bagels, granola, nuts and raisins, macaroni and cheese and quick-cooking noodles. They packed Gatorade and iodine tablets to purify their water. They packed a stove and fuel and sleeping bags and foam pads, but left the tent behind.
But figuring out some of the gear was more difficult. Too much, and the packs are too heavy and the danger goes up. Too little, and the danger goes up if you get into trouble.
Jim and Mike talked and thought and looked up at the mountain and decided to travel light, taking a minimal amount of climbing gear. They decided to take only six ice screws. It would be four days before the consequences of that decision would come into focus.
~~~
On an electrical tower or on a cliff, fear would tingle in Jim's mind - sometimes just a fleeting few seconds of apprehension, sometimes a prolonged stretch of anxiety intermingled with primal I-could-die terror.
When that happened, the grace of Jim's movements escaped him. One minute, he would be relaxed, his motions fluid, almost poetic. Then it would slip away, hands and arms and legs jerking from perch to perch, his mind fighting an internal battle to regain control of the climb, his heart pounding harder, his breathing quick - short, fast knives of air in and out. And grunts.
It would be as if his confidence and physical skills drained away just when he needed them most. And each time that happened, his head became a battleground as two voices - a frightened self-doubter and a confident cheerleader - screamed at each other. He would come to think of them as Emotion and Logic, with a capital E and a capital L. Although he would hear other voices when things got hairy - those of his wife, Gloria, his dad, old climbing buddies - it would most often be the battle between Emotion and Logic that gripped him.
"Oh my God. If I fall, I could really get hurt. If I fall, I could die," Emotion would scream. "My protection's no good. I can't do this."
A moment would pass.
"Yes, you could fall," Logic would yell. "But you probably won't. You've been up rock tougher than this before. Your protection is good enough. Your partner has the other end of the rope. Stop thinking about falling and start thinking about climbing."
It was different for Mike. No matter how difficult it got, he stayed calm. And for Jim, he was a reassuring voice when things were toughest. Mike would sense that Jim was struggling, and he'd say, "C'mon Jim, you can do it," and the tension would be broken.
~~~
Jim and Mike rose early that Thursday morning, June 18, 1992, boiled water on an old brass Svea stove, shoveled down oatmeal, and set out, wearing shorts and T-shirts and carrying packs brimming with supplies and gear. They followed a hiking trail through the woods for a couple of miles, cut off and walked through the forest, easily crossed just below the smooth, white surface of the tiny Inter Glacier, reaching a rock outcropping called St. Elmo's Pass.
Jim and Mike dropped their packs. It was time to gear up. They pulled on their plastic climbing boots and their crampons - metal brackets strapped to the soles ringed with sharp steel spikes, two of them sticking straight out from their toes to help them climb steep ice.
They slipped on more clothing, their helmets, their harnesses - one around the waist, another across the chest. They pulled out their ice tools. Each man carried two, an ice ax and an ice hammer, and they were nearly identical. Each one looked sort of like a miner's pick - long, straight black handles with a steel blade sticking out of one side of the head. They would use the picks to dig into the ice and pull themselves up as they climbed. On the other side of one tool's head was a hammer, which they could use to drive in ice screws. On the other side of the other tool was an adze, sort of a curving sideways ax head they could use to chop out ice to make a flat spot, or to cut through slop on the surface to get to the hard ice underneath.
They pulled out 165 feet of rope, divided it in thirds, and tied it to their waist harnesses. Roughly 55 feet of rope would separate them, and each would carry another coil of about the same length on one of his shoulders.
From there, Jim and Mike walked across a low, relatively flat section of Winthrop Glacier slit again and again by crevasses, then reached rocky ground. They went up and onto a rock outcropping called Curtis Ridge. The sun warmed them as they stepped out onto a rock, surveying Carbon Glacier. Nearly six miles long, and more than 700 feet thick, it was a stunning sight - blocks of ice, some the size of a refrigerator, some the size of a skyscraper, crammed one after another up and down the valley.
From the high spot, Jim and Mike tried to pick a route across the muted whitish blue surface of the glacier, one that would keep them away from obvious crevasses, one that would avoid the dead ends they would never see down among the ice blocks.
It was about three in the afternoon. They had roughly seven hours of light left. They were tired, but not exhausted, and they wanted to take advantage of the weather.
Mike took the lead. Jim fed out the rope as he watched his partner pick his way across the tumbled mess of ice.
Mike reached the end of the rope, sunk an ice screw, clipped his rope into it with a carabiner, and pulled in the line as Jim followed his footprints across.
Over the next few hours, they repeated the process over and over. A couple of times, they'd find themselves in an alleyway between house-sized chunks of ice, with no way out.
"Crap," one of them would mutter, and they'd retreat and find a new route.
As they moved, they consciously veered away from Willis Wall.
The sun dipped low in the sky, and although they were almost across the glacier Jim and Mike knew they needed to shut it down for the day and find a place to sleep. On a relatively flat spot between two crevasses - one 10 feet on one side of them, one 50 feet on the other side - they poked around with their tools, decided it was safe, spread out their foam pads and sleeping bags, and fired up the stove.
After dinner, they lay in their bags in the twilight, looking out past their toes as the glacier stretched out below them for five miles, satisfied with the progress they'd made. As it grew darker, stars exploded across the sky, and every so often they'd hear rocks and ice crash down Willis Wall off in the distance.
Their muscles ached, and their shoulders hurt where the pack straps dug in, but they felt pretty good even as the cold seeped up from the glacier, through their foam pads, and chilled them.
~~~
After a restless night, Mike and Jim rose at first light. The first task - melting snow for water - consumed them for a couple of hours. They drank tea and cocoa and ate oatmeal and crammed their sleeping bags back into their stuff sacks, invigorated by the crisp morning air, by thoughts of what lay ahead.
Around 7 a.m., they set out.
After crossing the last section of Carbon Glacier, they reached Liberty Ridge. They wanted to take a shortcut by climbing up onto the ridge instead of heading downhill to its very toe. Staring up, Mike and Jim saw a hillside covered with dirty ice - volcanic dust and pebbles imbedded in frozen muck. Mike took the lead, raising one of his ice picks as he set out, stopping a little way up and forcing an ice screw into the hillside. Mike moved a few more feet and then stopped, lifting his second ice tool off his belt.
It's getting steeper now, Jim thought, watching from below.
Mike climbed a little higher, rammed another screw into junk that was more frozen mud than ice. He turned back to look at Jim.
"No falling here," Mike yelled.
Mike was the perfect partner. His calm was reassuring in the most difficult spots. His shout unsettled Jim. For Mike to holler that, he must be concerned, and Jim knew it must be really shaky up there.
The rope tightened at Jim's waist, urging him up, and he kicked his crampons in and swung his ice tools and followed Mike's trail. They were simul-climbing, and it was scary, because this ridge was really a mudsicle, not the rock-hard ice where they felt most safe, where the sharpened tips of their crampons and ice picks bit firmly. Mike went another 20 or 30 feet, then stopped again.
"Do ... not ... fall," he shouted back, and the anxiety coursing through Jim ticked up a couple of more notches.
They made it another 50 feet before Mike stopped again. By then, Jim had angled over to one side and jammed his body into a little cave, preparing to end the simul-climbing and put Mike on belay.
"You wanna keep going, or you wanna come down?" Jim shouted.
"I better come down," Mike answered. "We'll talk."
A few minutes later, they knew they had to back off this section of the ridge - it was really just frozen mud, and by climbing it they may as well have begged for trouble. They'd already lost an hour, and they'd have to retreat and work their way around the ridge and approach it from a different point. But it was better than risking a big fall.
It was probably somewhere in that frozen muddy hillside that they broke a tooth off an ice screw. They still had six ice screws, but only five were fully functional.
~~~
It was late morning. Mike and Jim had lost valuable time, and they felt a hint of disappointment as they cut downhill, around the toe of the ridge and worked their way up the glacier on the west side. They were headed for a spot called Thumb Rock.
The snow was better, and Jim and Mike climbed again, sinking ice screws here and there for protection, moving in tandem as they zig-zagged their way up, swapping the lead back and forth.
The afternoon sun baked the mountain, and rocks broke free from the ice and tumbled. Jim was out front when he heard a clatter above him, and even though it was risky - climbers are supposed to keep their helmets pointed uphill - he raised his head and saw a rock the size of a basketball tumbling toward them off to his right.
"Rock," Jim shouted. And then, as it bounded toward Mike, "Right - cut right."
Mike moved. The rock bounced over the rope between them, crashing out of sight, and they got going again. A little later, Mike, out front, stopped suddenly.
"My foot's in a little crevasse," he said.
Jim took two steps downhill, pulling the slack out of the rope, dropped to his belly, dug in with his ice picks, and said, "Go ahead." Mike pulled his foot free. The crevasse was small, maybe two feet across and 30 feet deep, hidden beneath a snow bridge, and they stepped across it easily.
But it was a reminder that they were crossing ice sheets pocked with thousands of cracks - some obvious and open, some covered by snow bridges that concealed the danger. As they climbed, they scanned the glacier's surface constantly, looking for a swale that might be a clue to a sagging snow bridge, or a tell-tale sprinkling of dust that settled in a low spot they might not otherwise notice.
Early in the afternoon, they reached Thumb Rock, where a lot of climbers attempting the Liberty Ridge route camp on their second night. Mike and Jim surveyed the clear sky, assessed their fatigue, and decided to push on. They still had at least seven hours of daylight ahead of them.
As they looked around, they saw a pile of gear. A sleeping bag. A stove. Food. An uneasy feeling came over them - it was obviously left there on purpose, but why only one sleeping bag?
Still, they moved on, Jim leading them up a short, steep gulley. It was warm now, and the snow softened and sucked at their feet with each step as though they were walking in shin-deep wet sand, sapping them. They needed the temperature to drop, needed the snow to freeze up again, so they decided to stop and wait for the shadows of late afternoon to settle over the mountainside.
One of them fished out the stove. They boiled water, shared soup and tea, and rested for a couple of hours.
At this point, high on the shoulder of Liberty Ridge, they were maybe a mile from Willis Wall. They stared, mesmerized, at the explosions of falling ice so powerful that tiny white crystals powdered them.
As the sun began its descent, the mountaintop threw them into shadow. The snow firmed up and sometime around 5 o'clock they were moving again, a sort of second shift to the day.
They crossed exposed rock, and Jim was able to place a couple of spring-loaded, retractable cams into cracks and take the lead. He came around a corner, looked up and saw a sheet of ice that was more than 500 feet wide and stretched up high above him - so high he couldn't see the end of it. That ice sheet lay at an angle of around 45 degrees, with a few sections that were steeper.
"Holy smokes," Jim said as he stared up.
"What?" Mike asked from below him.
"You'll see when you get here," Jim answered.
A few minutes later, Mike reached him, and though he was wearing big round sunglasses Jim saw his eyebrows arch up when he looked at the sheet of ice angling up above them.
"Whoa," Mike said.
"Yeah, that's what I said," Jim answered.
"Looks hard, looks fun," Mike said.
"Yeah, it looks like pretty good ice," Jim said.
There was nothing flat anywhere, so they kept going, sinking the tips of their ice tools into the frozen ramp, fighting the heavy packs as they shifted back and forth. There would be no simul-climbing here - a fall might mean a sickening slide before a deadly 2,500-foot plunge.
Mike and Jim had no choice but to belay every pitch, as tedious and time-consuming as it was. One man would set up an anchor, then feed out the rope as the other climbed out about 150 feet, twisting in an ice screw every 40 feet or so. Then the leader would dig in, set up an anchor, and slowly work the rope back through his harness as his partner climbed up to him, pulling the ice screws as he reached them.
One hour passed. Then two. It was hard glaze ice, and their crampons and their picks bit into it solidly.
Around 7 p.m., Jim looked up and, for an instant, didn't believe what he was seeing. A single climber with no rope was making his way down toward them. He moved slowly, backing down the steep, frozen mountainside, kicking in his crampons and swinging in his axes, one at a time.
As he drew closer, Jim moved about 3 feet to his left. He was afraid the guy might fall, might slide right down and knock him over like a bowling pin.
Finally, the man reached Jim.
"Hi, how's it going?" the man asked.
"Good," Jim answered. "How about you?"
"Tired."
"Where you coming from?" Jim asked.
"The top."
"The top of the mountain?" Jim asked.
"No, no, the top of the Liberty Cap" - a sort of false summit at 14,000 feet.
"Where's your partner?" Jim asked.
"Well, I don't have one," the man said. "He was gonna come with me but he got sick and he couldn't come, so I'm soloing."
Jim couldn't believe it. He and Mike offered the man food and something to drink - he refused - and they shuddered at his estimate that the ice field stretched up for another 1,000 feet.
That's the thing about meeting someone going the other direction. It can be invigorating - you're almost there. Or depressing - you've got a long way to go.
"You'll never reach the top before dark," the man said.
In his mind, Jim wondered if the guy could be wrong. He seemed on the edge of delusion, parched, hungry. But he also was skilled enough to have solo-climbed a treacherous route.
Jim felt a surge of fear, and he and Mike aimed for a rock outcropping called Black Pyramid, angling to the right across the ice with dusk coming fast.
Jim could see what looked like a little flat bench of rock hugging the side of the mountain. He waited for Mike to reach him.
"Why'd you stop?" Mike asked. "We still had slack."
"I think there's a flat spot over there," Jim answered.
It was so dark by then that they dug into their packs for their headlamps.
"Well, where is it?" Mike asked.
"It's kinda off to the right," Jim told him. "It's over to the right, about 75 feet out."
Jim settled in, using an ice screw and one of his tools as anchors.
"Let's hope you're right," Mike said, flicking on his headlamp and heading into the darkness. As Jim slowly fed out the rope, the light from Mike's headlamp bounced off the ice. He moved in the middle of the glow, a ghostly image in a netherworld of ice, cold, and blackness. Jim turned off his own headlamp to save batteries. The fear inside him clicked up.
As Mike slowly moved farther away, it got harder to see his light. Then it disappeared. Two minutes went by. Then five. Then eight. Jim's anxiety built.
"I got it," Mike finally shouted from somewhere off in the dark, and Jim calmed down and began making his way across the ice toward Mike.
When he got there, the spot wasn't great - the ice crept downhill. It wasn't big - about the size of a picnic table. They would not be able to cook anything, and they would have to sleep in their harnesses, roped to ice screws.
But it was 11 p.m., and exhaustion overwhelmed their bodies as they crawled uncomfortably into their sleeping bags. Through the night, they fought a constant battle, waking every so often to find themselves sliding down the ice at the end of their safety ropes, worming back up the hill and resting, fitfully, a little more.
~~~
Jim opened his eyes in the early morning light. Below him to his right was the ice field they'd come up and the junk they'd crawled over in the dark on their way to this spot.
"Whoa," Jim heard Mike say just then, and for a moment he assumed they were both looking at the same thing.
Then Jim turned and saw that Mike was looking off to his left. Jim shimmied over to Mike, took a breath. They were looking right down the Liberty Wall.
"Holy smokes," Jim said.
In the dark and dehydration of the night before, they'd stumbled onto a little almost flat spot just a few feet from the sheer drop-off down the wall.
"Mike," Jim said, "I've slept out in a few places, but I never slept anywhere like this."
"I've slept out on 100 bivouacs, in Antarctica and Alaska and all over the West, and I've never slept anyplace like this," Mike said.
Nerves jangled and muscles ached. There was no place to put the stove, and they headed out, headachy and dehydrated, low on water.
Mike led first, then Jim. They swapped the lead a couple of more times, moving like molasses, hunger racking them. By 10 a.m., they had run out of water. Jim and Mike battled the altitude and the lack of water, feeling like they had hangovers, like their legs and packs were heavier than they had ever been. Finally, they got to an easier spot, lit the stove, and started melting ice. They ate, replenished their bodies, filled their water bottles.
The worst of the climb was over. They were about 1,400 feet below the summit.
By early afternoon, they had started up the last section of the glacier below Liberty Cap. Mike took the lead for a while.
Finally, they approached the last steep section, topped by a dead-vertical ice wall that was 10 feet high in places, 40 feet high in others. They looked around, hoping they could cut around it, but there was no safe way. Mike found a spot where the wall was maybe 20 feet high, swung his tools and kicked his crampons and started up, moving smoothly. He reached the top, pulled himself up and over and onto solid ground, scooted back from the edge and chopped out a flat spot in the ice so he could use his body as an anchor.
The rope snapped tight, and Jim started climbing, his nose pressed tight against the ice as he struggled up. He reached the top, sunk one of his picks, then another, pulled himself up, got a leg on top. He muscled his way over the lip.
"Welcome to the Liberty Cap," Mike said, a big grin breaking across his face.
Jim panted like a dog on a 100-degree day. All the tough work was behind them - what lay ahead was all relatively low-angle climbing to the summit.
Jim started feeling better. Mike started deteriorating, the toll of leading for so long wearing on him.
"Sorry man," Mike said as they were getting ready to go, "I just can't kick steps any more."
Jim led as they ground their way to the highest point on the Liberty Cap at 14,112 feet. They snapped a few pictures, ate a little, then started moving to the east, toward the true summit that lay three-quarters of a mile away - and several hundred feet above them.
Mike really felt cruddy - lightheaded, nauseated - and they moved slowly. Every step was an ordeal, and when they reached a saddle between Liberty Cap and the true summit they decided to knock off for the day - they'd never make the top and descend before dark. They dropped their packs, pulled out their sleeping bags, and settled in even as the sun still burned in the western sky.
Mike dozed for a while, wiped out. Jim felt pretty good.
It was the kind of partnership they enjoyed. When Jim was struggling, Mike could pick him up, could take the lead. Now Mike needed help, and Jim went to work with the stove, melting snow. An hour later, Mike woke up, started eating and drinking, feeling better.
By the time the sun slipped below the horizon, Mike was joking again.
~~~
Jim and Mike awoke on what they expected to be their last day on the mountain. It was Sunday morning, June 21, 1992, the summer solstice, the day the tilt of Earth's axis would mean the sun was as far north as it would get. The sunniest day of the year. They debated whether to haul all their gear up to the summit, or leave most of it behind, then come back for it.
Jim was ready to take it all and begin their descent immediately after a little time on top. Mike wanted to go to the summit unencumbered by the weight of their gear.
"What do we want to lug these packs uphill for?" he asked, and eventually he won out. They tied their packs together and started up the last of the climb - 800 feet of low-angle snow to the top - with their cameras and a little food and water, a few ice screws and pieces of gear clanking at their waists.
They reached the top sometime around 8 a.m., and for a time they had the summit to themselves.
Flush with accomplishment, they hugged. Off to the northeast, below them, they could see climbers making their way up Emmons Glacier, one of the traditional routes used by many to ascend Rainier.
The temperature hung in the 40s, and the wind whipped. They'd enjoyed almost perfect weather, unaware how much the sun had altered the surface of the glaciers in recent days.
Another climber got to the top, and he chatted with Jim and Mike. It was the 100th time he'd made it to the summit, he told them, and they asked the man to take their picture.
Jim stood on Mike's right, his left arm around his partner's shoulders. Mike wrapped his right arm around Jim's shoulders. Neither wore a helmet. A snow fluke, a belay plate, and an ice screw hung from each man's harness.
Mike wore a small Outward Bound pin on the front of his fuzzy blue fleece undershirt. On the pin was the organization's motto, adapted from Tennyson's poem, Ulysses: "To serve, to strive, and not to yield."
Weariness creased their faces, but so did joy - they had made it, and they had only a relatively easy eight-hour trek down Emmons Glacier to the woods and their rental car. Clouds skittered across a blue sky, and snow-streaked Mount Adams loomed in the distance. And though it was bright and sunny, they kept their hoods up, the wind stretching out the drawstrings on Jim's jacket.
A plane droned overhead, and the man told Jim and Mike that some of his friends were aboard. They realized the man probably wanted to be alone for an aerial shot, so they retreated off to one side a few dozen yards away and sat in the snow.
They pinched crumbs of granola out of the bottom of a sandwich bag, chewed on stale bagels, and talked.
"I wouldn't have done this route with almost anybody else I know, including instructors," Mike said, talking about his fellow teachers at Outward Bound.
"Really, not even the other instructors?" Jim asked, stunned.
"Well," Mike answered, "a lot of them are good mountain people, but that kind of terrain we were on, with the simul-climbing, I couldn't do that kind of committed simul-climbing with most people I know."
Jim's eyes lifted.
Wow. I thought of myself as an avid amateur, and Mike is including me in the inner circle.
"I couldn't have done this route with anybody else I know," Jim said, finally.
After maybe a half-hour on top, they trudged back to the saddle where their packs lay.
They re-rigged the rope, checking each other's knots and harnesses, making sure they were buckled properly.
"Ready to go?" Jim asked.
"Yep," Mike answered, "ready to go."
They started across the upper reaches of Winthrop Glacier. The main trail loomed off to the east and below them, and Jim felt a tick of apprehension as they worked across snow that nobody else had walked on.
After 25 minutes, they reached the main trail - a highway of footprints used by dozens of climbers a day on one of the most popular routes up Rainier.
Awaiting them now was an eight-hour descent - down along Emmons Glacier, down through an area known as The Corridor.
It was an area thought to be relatively crevasse free.
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