We Fell into a Burning Ring of Fire

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Outside magazine, March 2001

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We Fell into a Burning Ring of Fire
Eight friends. Four volcanoes. Nine days. A primer on self-guided ski mountaineering.

By Nick Heil


	What goes up...: Heil leading his crew through the cinder on Monitor Ridge, Mount St. Helens Michael Darter

MY COMPANIONS and I are sitting shoulder to shoulder in the snow at Mount Rainier's Camp Muir (elevation 10,188 feet), hunched over plastic mugs containing a lukewarm paste of rehydrated vegetable soup. It is late spring, when the climbing and skiing in Washington and Oregon's Cascade Range are reputed to be at their finest, but for the past 48 hours an alpine gale has been scouring Rainier's upper flanks with the relentlessness of an industrial sandblaster. This is Phase One of a weeklong ski-mountaineering trip, the purpose of which is to knock off four of the most significant Cascade volcanoes—Mounts Rainier, Adams, Hood, and St. Helens—in descending order of magnitude. It's an ambitious goal, to be sure, but one we had hoped was at least marginally within our grasp.

At the moment, however, that hope is dwindling. It has been puking snow all spring, and we've arrived to find the Cascades mantled in a thick maritime snowpack that's unstable at best, downright lethal at worst. Fourteen days ago, three climbers on Rainier were seriously injured by falling ice. And later that same morning, a 29-year-old woman slipped and fell 2,500 feet to her death on Hood. Further complicating things is the creeping realization that we lack both the skills and the knowledge required to climb the glaciers and technical terrain that separate our current camp from Rainier's summit, 4,222 feet above—a deficiency that's being hammered home by a voluble authority figure, clad in a red one-piece ski suit, whom we've begun referring to as...The Doug.

Doug Ingersoll, 38, boasts the kind of perma-tan you'd expect from a backcountry ski icon or a professional mountain guide (both of which, in fact, he is). Since meeting up with us two days ago at the base of Rainier, Ingersoll has been burnishing his role as alpha male by barraging us with anecdotes about his skiing virility (in 1998 he participated in the first ski descent of a 4,000-foot pitch on Rainier called the Mowich Face) and his sexual dexterity (he once won a contest at a party by corkscrewing his "unit" before a panel of female judges, a stunt he dubbed "twist-a-peenie"). Right now, though, Ingersoll has cast off his breezy schtick and adopted the droop-jowled gravity of an Arkansas hanging judge.

"Look, mountaineering is all about having your shit dialed," he intones, standing before us on the Muir Snowfield. "If you don't have your shit dialed up here, you're putting yourself really low on the food chain. And at the moment..." Here, Ingersoll pauses and cocks one of his eyebrows theatrically. "To be honest, you guys are pretty much at the bottom of the fuckin' food chain."

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