Rob and I headed to Mount Rainier confident that we’d be able break out above the clouds into the glorious sunshine. Well, at least I was confident. I kept telling him, “In all my hikes up to Camp Muir, I’ve never not broken out!”

We hit the trail just before 11:00 am, and soon had to stop to put on our snowshows. There was about a foot of fresh snow to plow through. Some of the steeper sections were crusty ice, and the cleats on the snowshoes were a necessity. The wind whipped harder as we slogged higher, and intermittent sleet stung our faces.

We both kept tabs on our GPS units, and they eventually showed us wandering too far to the right. I distrusted the data, and kept heading up what I thought was the correct ridgeline. I heard Rob yell at me from below, and turned around to see him waving his map. By that time I was reluctantly concluding that we were indeed off-course, but the slope was too steep for me to turn around, so I continued to the top of the ridge and waited for Rob. I extended one of my hiking poles to Rob, he used it to pull himself up onto the ridge, and we dashed behind a boulder to escape the driving gale. “I don’t think we’ll be breaking out today,” I yelled to Rob, stating the obvious. We turned and rushed back down the ridgeline. I had a terrible time seeing through the blowing sleet, and judging the steepness of the slope was impossible. Everything was just too white. I removed my snowshoes, dug my heels in, and gingerly descended the steep slope, inevitably thinking back to my slip on Granite Mountain two years ago.

Rob fed us jellybeans to keep us going, and we happily used the “track back” feature of our GPS units to keep us on the route. Even though we only made it halfway to Muir, it turned out to be quite an adventure!

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