Mt. Rainier, WA

July 2018

I texted my mom on a Tuesday and four days later we were skinning up Mt. Rainier with crampons and climbing axes. She turned sixty in April.

The two of us started an annual mother-son adventure six years ago. It felt like the right way for an outdoors woman and her adult son to bond. We take the conversations most families have daily over the phone, and pack them into a two-man tent once a year. We named the outing Motherboy after Lucille and Buster Bluth’s mother-son gala in “Arrested Development”. The dynamic fits us. Instead of an open backed dress, Buster zips up her vents and pockets.

The basic formula for Motherboy is to combine hiking or climbing with an absurd mode of transportation. Adventure ideas have involved open sea jet skis, dirt bikes, and a bush plane (hers). Blisters are mandatory.

This year it was splitboarding. She laughed down my idea to skin all the way to Rainier’s summit. Impossible this time of year due to the snowmelt. In late season, the poor snow conditions get more extreme the higher up you go. But when I suggested touring to Camp Muir and hiking to the summit as a compromise, she couldn’t say no. Her climbing bag was already packed for a trip up Mt. Shuksan.

She’s climbed her whole life. My grandparents thought it was important for their kids to gruel. She guided on Rainier in college and for my grandmother’s 51st birthday, they summited together. She brought me to the summit of Mt. Rainier when I was sixteen and again at age nineteen. It took me thirteen more years to forget how hard it was.

The night before we left, I slept four hours after staying up late relearning to tie my climbing knots. We got to Paradise Ranger Station just in time to snag the last permit.

The first five miles of hiking and splitboarding were a breeze. It wasn’t until we got closer to Camp Muir that skinning in and out of the bombed out sun cups lost its novelty. We barely managed a tie with the out of shape day hikers.

If the knee deep sun cups on the Muir snowfield were our first clue the route to the top was gnarlier than normal, our tent neighbors leaving for the summit at 11PM was the second. We heard them tying into their rope line hours earlier than what it typically takes for a summit push. At 2:30AM we were the last ones to leave camp and ninety minutes behind our own schedule.

The rubble from rockfall on Disappointment Cleaver was heavy and I was thankful for a full moon. My headlamp barely lit the ground in front of me. In my rush, I’d left my extra headlamp batteries behind. But not being able to see into the deeper crevasses or the boulders tipped above us turned out to be comforting. I was grateful again for our late departure when we reached the rocky crux of the cleaver and the sky began to tease a sunrise. Calling it a goat trail would be generous. The route ascended nearly vertical up a barely consolidated rock face and we were navigating it in crampons.

We were so far behind the other groups and the melting, moving mountain had shifted so many of the markers, that our only way of knowing for sure we were on the right course was when other teams turned back. Two thirds were abandoning their summit attempt. Some quit only a thousand feet from the top. It wasn’t comforting.

My mom is an experienced climber and backcountry skier, but this was her first time combining the two sports. Climbing in her ski-touring boots was wearing on her legs. I was nervous when she started to complain about the extra leverage it took to place her crampons in the ice. She’d never complained on Motherboy about anything — that was my job. When she started making jokes to strangers, I got alarmed. Some people are funniest when they’re dying. Going slower allowed me to take more photos and give her a chance to rest.

A guide returning from the top said a snowbridge over a crevasse at 13,000 ft was melting fast and in precarious shape. The early starters were trying to make it back over before it collapsed. His group had turned around rather than risk it.

He wasn’t exaggerating. The snowbridge turned out to be a sequence of five bridges over a lattice of crevasses. We gripped our axes and crossed, knuckles white beneath our gloves. They all held.

Once we’d passed that last excuse, we were committed. If we turned around then, we couldn’t claim the mantle of making the responsible choice anyway. So we pushed on.

The two servings of freeze dried Chili Mac I had for dinner hit me at 13,500 ft. I was lucky to win the race against my harness and bibs. On the glacier the National Park Service’s pack-it-in-pack-it-out rule applies to everything and I wish to God there’d been some wind as I scooped my previous night’s dinner into a plastic bag.

The last thousand vertical feet were a straight, uphill trudge that got easier as the excitement built. I told myself the slight nausea was anticipation and not altitude sickness.

I’ve never witnessed my mom give up on anything and this year wouldn’t be any different. When we reached the summit, her 8th time on the peak, she celebrated by taking a nap. It’s easy for me to forget I’m on an active volcano until I’m in a crater with steam coming out of the ground. No nap for me. I unclipped my harness and marched across the rim to sign the register.

The other thing we forgot at basecamp was our stove to melt snow for drinking water. We ran out at the peak and had a thirsty walk down. My buzz at gaining the summit lasted about a thousand vertical feet and I knew my feet were bleeding after another 3,000. By the time we reached Muir, my knees were wobbly. I collapsed in the hot tent and fell asleep with a snowball in my bare hand.

Bringing the snowboard seemed less clever when I thought about the mogul field of sun cups ahead of us. My mom wasn’t happy about skiing with her forty-six pound pack either. I wrung out my socks and stuffed my bloody feet back into my boots. Cranking blisters into snowboard bindings took a special kind of willpower that only seems necessary on Motherboy.

Once again snowboarding proved the best anesthetic. The late afternoon sun had turned the boot pack into a slushy snake run and I forgot I even had feet until we reached the bottom of the glacier. During the last three miles to Paradise, chirping marmots and an alpenglow sunset cheered us. By the time we reached the car, I was already looking forward to picking my scabs.

[Shoutout to Mike T. at C3 Worldwide for loaning me a Capita/Union split setup for the weekend. The Expedition Series binding lives up to the hype.]