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


	Blisters and baggage: an up-close-and-personal view of keye's heel on day three(left), and a partial sample of all the crap we brought along Michael Darter

AFTER spending our second evening on Rainier listening to The Doug's alpine homily on the importance of dialing one's shit, we pushed back our summit bid by a full day and submitted ourselves to a crash "glacier clinic" in which Ingersoll provided crack instruction on snow anchors, crevasse rescue, and emergency rope-team protocol. Then we turned in for a few hours of rest, serenading one another to sleep with some remarkably bold concertos of tent flatulence, courtesy of the rehydrated vegetable soup.

At midnight we arose, roped up into two five-man teams, and wound our way through the frigid dark along the base of Gibraltar Rock, ten headlamps bobbing beneath hulking black cliffs. Our summit route, the Ingraham Direct, would take us right through the middle of the Ingraham Glacier. We stumbled over the exposed volcanic rock, crampons flashing sparks, and plowed our way to the base of the Ingraham Headwall, whose silhouette was limned by a dense scrim of stars.

Ingersoll, at the head of the lead rope team, started boldly up the steep pitch, which required us to use our front points for purchase, then led us over the lip into a labyrinth of towering ice blocks—the intestines of the glacier. Moving through the ice maze in the dark was precarious business—corridors would close out; snowbridges were fragile. At one point, Peruzzi stepped through a crust of snow covering a crevasse and plunged in up to his waist, legs dangling in space. "You should be more careful!" scolded Ingersoll.

I had summited Rainier for the first time in 1998, and I hadn't forgotten what the last 1,000 feet feels like. It hurts—an endless, bitter predawn trudge up a 30-degree ice ramp, during which you're pummeled by wind, exhausted, dehydrated, and reeling from the altitude. Five steps. Rest. Five more steps. Rest. Repeat ad nauseam. And then, almost suddenly, you're there, hitched up along the boulders that border Rainier's summit caldera. We arrived at just after 6 a.m. and stayed only long enough for Keyes and Hansen to trundle over to the opposite end of the caldera so they could perch on Rainier's highest point, roughly 200 feet above where the rest of us were slumped in exhaustion. For the rest of the trip they swaggeringly billed themselves as the only two "official summiters."

During our descent we stopped for a rest at Ingraham Flats, lounging in the broiling late-morning sun to snack on cheese. Back at Muir, as we broke camp and strapped on our skis and boards to head down the final 5,000 feet—a brutal task, given our advanced state of fatigue—we realized we were completely out of water and, thanks to our extended stay at Muir, had no fuel to melt snow. We were pondering this problem when a hiker materialized holding two plastic gallon jugs of water. "I haul these up because the extra weight is good training," he said. "I was just going to pour them out. You guys look like you might want 'em."

Someone (I'm pretty sure it was me) let out a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

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