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Martin climbing across Broadway
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Martin having made it down safely from the summit of Palmrya Peak, Telluride
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Martin in the Notch Couloir, with Chasm Lake far below. This is the last photo from this trip. We made up to the Notch, but it was getting late, so we skipped the summit and instead dropped down the other side of the Notch and headed back by way of Clark's Arrow and The Loft. We got back to the car at 8:30pm after a 14-hour day.
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A final view of Mt. Rainier as seen from our flight from Seattle back to Denver.
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Back at the parking lot at White River. I’d gotten quite sunburnt on our long summit day and was now turning a bright lobster red.
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Martin back at tree-line at Glacier Basin. Liberty Cap is just visible in the upper center.
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Chris and some other climbers descending the Inter Glacier below Camp Schurman. This is perfect bum-slide terrain and descent is quite rapid.
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One of the rules of climbing the Liberty Ridge is that literally everything has to be carried up and over the summit. The park rangers provide one with “blue bags” for this purpose. Fortunately there’s a disposal bin at Camp Schurman where one can lighten one’s pack.
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Martin, Kurt and Chris at Emmons Flats. The rangers’ shelter at Camp Schurman is just visible on the right-hand side of the photo.
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Chris and Kurt starting on the descent, with Mt. St. Helen’s on the horizon. Kurt was very tired and it was close to midnight before we reached the tent sites at Emmons Flats above Camp Schurman. (It was so late that other climbers were starting to wake up and prepare for the next day’s climb up the Emmons Glacier.) Fortunately the Emmons Glacier descent is much easier than the Liberty Ridge and there was a good track for us to follow.
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Chris and Kurt at the summit of Liberty Cap (14,112’) after 13 hours of climbing. Kurt had become quite dehydrated and was now moving quite slowly.
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Chris taking a break at one of the few level spots that we encountered.
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Kurt approaching the “Black Pyramid”, with the Curtis Ridge behind him.
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Chris setting out the following morning. Chris is an avid ski-mountaineer and did an excellent job of kicking steps for us. With the benefit of hindsight it would have been better to have started a couple of hours earlier, but we’d arrived at Thumb Rock quite late the previous evening and we wanted to have a decent night’s rest before the 4,000’ climb to the summit.
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Kurt and Chris at Thumb Rock. Luckily someone else had dug out a tent platform in the snow, because there wasn’t much level ground here.
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Chris negotiating a snow-bridge on the Carbon Glacier.
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Kurt and Chris at the edge of the Curtis Ridge, about to descend to the Carbon Glacier. The Liberty Ridge is the obvious line in the center of this photo. Thumb Rock is situated half-way up, where the bare rock of the lower ridge gives way to snow and ice (if you look carefully you can see the shadow cast by Thumb Rock).
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The sky cleared during the night and we rose the next morning to be greeted by our first view of the Liberty Ridge.
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Kurt and Chris at our first night’s camp, a pleasant spot on the broad lower shoulder of the Curtis Ridge.
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At St. Elmo’s Pass the clouds parted for a few minutes to give us a glimpse of the summit.
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Kurt and Chris toiling up the slopes above Glacier Basin on the way to St. Elmo’s Pass. It was overcast for much of the day, but there wasn’t any snow or rain.
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Kurt and Chris at the White River parking lot.
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Looking back at the mountain from the Glacier Basin trail.
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Chris and me in our tent at Emmons Flats the following morning. I’m looking very cheerful despite having slept only a few hours – the wind had picked up speed and the tent had flapped noisily all night long.
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Martin and Chris at the summit of Liberty Cap. About a mile away in the background is Rainier’s main summit, Columbia Crest (14,410’). Under good conditions it’s just an easy walk to get there, but it was now quite late and a fierce wind was blowing, so we decided to bypass the main summit and descend to Camp Schurman.
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Martin placing an ice-screw as he traverses beneath the seracs.
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This overhanging bergschrund was the final obstacle between us and the summit. Getting past here involved a traverse beneath seracs to reach the ice ramp glistening in the sun in the center of the photo, then a final pitch up the ice in the upper-right. You can see the footprints of climbers that had been here ahead of us.
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Above the “Black Pyramid” much of the snow cover gave way to bare glacial ice, so we took out the rope and started placing ice-screws. Here’s Martin leading the way.
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To the left of the Liberty Ridge is the Willis Wall, which is periodically swept by collapsing seracs. Fortunately the Liberty Ridge is out of the way of such danger.
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Unfortunately much of the snow cover had melted from the lower ridge, and underneath the snow the ridge consists of horribly loose volcanic rubble. This nasty-looking slope is what we had to climb up and across in order to gain the ridge crest. We stood here for a few minutes contemplating the debris that had evidently fallen from above, then unroped and crossed one by one, moving as quickly as we could. I was halfway across when Chris shouted out and I looked up to see beach-ball sized rocks tumbling down towards me. I jumped out of the way as fast as I could, but not quite fast enough to avoid some glancing blows. Fortunately the only damage was a couple of minor bruises and a broken wrist-watch strap.
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Martin approaching the summit of Mt. Alice; McHenry's Peak in the background
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The Hourglass Ridge on Mt. Alice. There's a bit of third-class scrambling where the ridge narrows in the center of the photo.
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Early in the morning on the way to Mt. Alice. We were expecting a long day – it's a 20-mile round trip and 5,000' of elevation gain from the winter trailhead.
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Skiing at Silverton
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Martin and Rick at Silverton
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Rick at Telluride
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Rick at Telluride
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Rick at Telluride; Mt. Wilson in the background
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At the top of Palmyra Peak, Telluride. It's an hour-long hike with 1,500' of elevation gain to get to this point, but the reward is a snow-filled couloir that drops straight from the summit.
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Rick at Telluride
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Bill Wright on the summit of Mt. Alice; Chief's Head, Longs Peak and Mt. Meeker in the background
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Bill Wright on the summit of Mt. Alice
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Gordon leading up into the Notch Couloir. We were hoping there would be some good ice up here, but all we found was a nasty mix of unconsolidated snow on top of bare rock.
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Gordon Laurens crossing a frozen Chasm Lake. Our route took us up Lamb's Slide (snow gully that's hidden from view behind a rock buttress), across Broadway (snow-covered ledge in the upper center) and up into the Notch Couloir (snow-filled gully leading to the notch in the skyline).
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View from Lion Lake, near Mt. Alice
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Gordon Laurens at Chasm View, on the way to climb the Notch Couloir on Longs Peak.![Image-019.jpg](_data/i/galleries/2009_Feb_Mar/Image-019-me.jpg "Image-019.jpg (7954 visits) The East face of Mt. Alice. We went up the right-hand skyline (the "Hourglass Ridge").")
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The East face of Mt. Alice. We went up the right-hand skyline (the "Hourglass Ridge").
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Alex at Arapahoe Basin
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Google Earth image of Mt. Rainier. The approach to the Liberty Ridge starts at the White River trailhead (4,300’), off to the left of this image. We hiked up the Glacier Basin trail to St. Elmo’s Pass (7,400’), dropped down and crossed the Winthrop Glacier to the lower Curtis Ridge, where we made our first night’s camp at about 7,000’. From there we headed to the Carbon Glacier and up to the start of the Liberty Ridge. There’s an exposed bivouac site half-way up the ridge at Thumb Rock (10,300’), where we spent the second night. The climb ends at Liberty Cap (14,112’), from where we descended the Emmons Glacier to spend a night at Camp Schurman (9,500’). On the fourth day we descended the Inter Glacier and hiked out via the Glacier Basin trail.
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Panoramic view of Mt. Sneffels and the Dallas Divide between Telluride and Ouray (click on the arrows at the bottom of the photo to scroll left or right)
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Martin climbing across Broadway
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Martin climbing across Broadway
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Kurt and me following Chris above the bergschrund, with the Carbon Glacier many thousands of feet below. From here we had one last pitch of technical climbing, which looked like it would be a short, easy ice bulge. I grabbed a few ice-screws and started leading, but I should have remembered that “ice is always steeper than it looks” – the angle turned out to be 60-65 degrees, and it was over a full rope-length of climbing before I reached easier-angled snow below the summit.
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Martin leading up to the start of the traverse beneath the seracs.
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Martin climbing up snow slopes on the upper ridge.
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Martin approaching the “Black Pyramid” on the upper ridge, with the Carbon Glacier far below.
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Another view of our tent at Thumb Rock.
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Martin leading the way on the Carbon Glacier. It can be a challenge to find a route around the crevasses, but fortunately another group had been up there a few days earlier and we were able to follow the remnants of their footprints.
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Martin and Kurt negotiating crevasses on the Winthrop Glacier.
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Martin and Kurt on the snowfield at Glacier Basin.