Life Lessons from the Summit of Mt Rainier

When I was seventeen I had the privilege to not only attempt, but actually summit Mount Rainier, the fifth highest peak in the contiguous U.S. — but that ranking is a bit misleading. The highest peak, Mount Whitney, is likely the most grueling hike you can do in the contiguous U.S., but it's still a hike — no technical gear, no glacial ice, no crampons or ice axe. Rainier is a different animal entirely. Your starting point, the quixotically named Paradise, already sits at the same elevation as Denver — the Mile High City. From there you climb another 9,000 feet over eight miles of ice and glacial terrain. Nearly two vertical miles. For that reason, Rainier is widely considered the most sought-after summit in the contiguous U.S.

I want to be clear about just how much privilege — and no small amount of luck — it took to get me to that summit at such a formative age. I can also say in complete earnest that this is one of those experiences I could never put a price on. I went with a summer program for high school students — a month of backpacking, sea kayaking, river kayaking, and finally the Rainier ascent, all designed to maybe get us into good enough shape to have a shot at the mountain. There were eighteen of us in that group — only six would reach the summit.

This may all sound extravagant when you factor in the program fee, the airfare, and the gear list. My family wasn't wealthy, but my parents believed that doing something real, grounded, and out in the wilderness would have lasting value — so they found a way to make it work. It wasn't just extra money they had lying around for summer entertainment. It was an investment in a formative experience — one that compounded in unexpected ways. Learning to budget and bargain shop for food and gear on that trip shaped financial instincts I still carry today.

Upon arriving in Paradise we spent one full day training on the ice fields. Rainier is a mountaineering mountain, not hiking or technical climbing — you move across glacial terrain in crampons (metal spikes that clamp to your boots to grip the ice) while carrying an ice axe that doubles as a walking stick for stability and, if you fall, a braking mechanism. The "ice axe arrest" is exactly what it sounds like: you drive the spike of the axe into the ice with your full bodyweight to stop yourself should you fall or get knocked down. This roots you in place so you don't accidentally slide off an edge or into a crevasse — hidden cracks in the glacier that can drop a thousand feet. For extra safety — being newbies — we were also rigged on five man rope teams, each of us connected to the next person by a waist harness. If one of us fell, the weight of four other people would catch them even if they froze and forgot to ice axe arrest. Another life lesson that stuck with me: redundancy.

After our sole day of training, we set out early across the ice fields for Camp Muir — the high-altitude base camp nestled on a rocky saddle at 10,188 feet, featuring a historic stone shelter built in the early 1900s. Just stone walls and wooden bunks for your sleeping bags, but considerably more protected than a tent. The Camp Muir / Disappointment Cleaver route is the most accessible route on the mountain. You arrive at Muir in the afternoon, eat rehydrated mashed potatoes for dinner, bed down at 6PM and try to fall asleep while wind hammers the thin walls. Wake up around 1AM, leave everything behind except a big winter coat, your sleeping bag, and a fistful of candy bars for quick energy. Strap on your headlamp and climb 4,500 feet over four miles, resting at three safe points, and reaching the summit around dawn. Then hike all the way back down to Paradise by nightfall. Optionally, you can butt-ski (called 'glissading') down the ice fields at the end.

The reason for the 1AM start isn't arbitrary. If you're still up there in the afternoon, it can be straight up deadly. Once it rises, the sun turns the ice and snow covering the mountain to slush that shifts under your feet and leaves nothing for your crampons or your axe to grab onto. You want to climb on hard ice. At 1AM it's frozen solid as rock, and at dawn it's only just beginning to melt — but you need to get moving.

Despite the temperature being just below freezing, we were all hiking in t-shirts and shorts. While climbing your body is generating more than enough heat from the exertion — you just have to throw on your big warm parka the moment you stop to rest at a safe point. Otherwise your body temperature can drop drastically within minutes of stopping. The other function of a safe point is the ability to tap out. If you decide you just can't make it to the top, you crawl into your warm sleeping bag in the safe zone and wait for your team to continue their ascent and come back down for you. You rejoin them for the rest of the descent to Paradise. Lastly, eat a Snickers bar at each safe point. That's your fuel.

Rainier's weather can turn extremely dangerous with very little warning, and timing your climb with a safe weather window is probably the most difficult strategic factor on the mountain. One of our adult counselors had attempted Rainier six times and been turned back by weather every single time. Remember how important I said luck was? You can have the will, the fitness, and the experience — and still not get that summit.

He finally got his summit on this trip, though the mountain had one more thing to say about it. A storm was moving in, but we could still make the summit if we pushed the start to 11PM — so that's what we did. Temperature was below freezing, winds around 35mph. By dawn they would reach 70mph. Hurricane force.

I remember hooking up to my team outside in the cold dark, mentally on autopilot, going through motions I'd been taught maybe 24 hours earlier. Groggy, maybe still half asleep, I looked up while waiting for my team to get situated — and it stopped me cold.

I grew up in the rural countryside and thought I knew what a night sky looked like. I didn't. The higher you climb, the less atmosphere exists for light to scatter through, and at 10,000 feet you escape the light pollution that blankets most of planet Earth. I don't think I've ever been more in awe of anything in my life. There was more star than darkness in that sky. The Milky Way wasn't a faint smear — it was a solid beam of light struck across the night. The only darkness I could see was the mountain itself, a pitch black silhouette with little lit-up ants crawling up its side — the distant headlamps of climbers who had already begun their ascent.

The Disappointment Cleaver route is evenly spaced — three safe points above Camp Muir, each separated by about a mile of hiking and 1,000 feet of elevation gain. What's striking is how drastically different each section feels in terrain despite that consistency. The first is mostly a dark walk across Ingraham Glacier, bringing you to the first safe point: Ingraham Flats.

Ingraham Flats is a busy rest point because it's also the last place you can camp in a tent instead of bunking at Camp Muir. Camping in a tent is a much more involved way to go since you have to dig a five-foot deep hole in the snow and pitch your tent below the snow line — it's the only way it doesn't blow away. The improvised snow wall becomes your windbreak. Eat a Snickers bar, chat up some Polish filmmakers, and head back into the darkness.

The next stretch is Disappointment Cleaver. I can safely say I have never visited a place more aptly named. The cleaver is a rocky, exposed ridge that splits two glaciers — Ingraham below, Emmons above — like a stone knife blade driven into the ice. The next hour is switchbacks up a fairly vertical ice and rock face, and when you finally crest the top, the sun is just beginning to break on the horizon — and then you look up at the 2,000 feet of mountain that was completely hidden from view while you were grinding your way up. Disappointing indeed.

The safe point at the top of Disappointment Cleaver sits at 12,300 feet. Altitude sickness doesn't hit as a gradual spectrum the way you'd expect. The reason is that oxygen availability drops exponentially with elevation, not linearly — at higher altitude the air is thinner, which means each breath delivers less oxygen to your lungs even though the percentage of oxygen in the air stays the same. You could see it immediately — there was a girl there sitting in her sleeping bag — tapped out — and her face was green. Not pale. Green. Like Lucky Charms green. We lost so many people at that safe point that we had to consolidate from three rope teams to two. Surprisingly, I felt fine — until about fifteen minutes into the next section.

It hit me like a brick. Fifteen minutes into crossing Emmons Glacier I collapsed to one knee. I was breathing — freezing air, lungs working overtime — but my body was sending drowning signals. Every instinct said I was suffocating even though I wasn't, not exactly. Our guide came back to check on me. We were in a stunning spot — sun low on the horizon, endless white snow in every direction, the land below so far away it looked like an airplane window view. Probably could see all the way to Oregon.

"I can't make it," I told him. I was completely certain. The safe point was only ten minutes back — I'd just unhook from the team, stroll back, crawl into my sleeping bag. Simple. Easy. My brain had it all figured out.

My brain wasn't logicing well at this point. Lack of oxygen.

The guide just had a bored look on his face as he took in the rising sun. He was shouting against the gale — somehow still managing to sound completely droll — "No. Can't let you do that. You'll die." He paused, glacier sunglasses still fixed on the horizon. Then his tone shifted: "Get up." Firm. Not impatient. Final.

Something clicked. At seventeen, I had never faced a situation where the consequence of not doing something — something painful, something I did not want to do, that I genuinely believed I could not do — was that I would actually die.

I understood, but I told him I genuinely could not do it — I couldn't even breathe. My body was in full revolt, somewhere between panic and suffocation. In response, the guide taught me what I consider to this day to be the most important lesson of my life.

He grabbed me by the arm, pulled me upright, got right in my face, and pointed down at my left foot. "Can you move that foot from there to there?" One measly step. I looked at him like he was insane. "Yeah. Sure. But—"

"Then do it." He was wearing wrap-around, rainbow-tinted glacier glasses, but I could feel his eyes. I moved my foot one step forward.

"Good! Now what about that one?" He pointed to my right foot. I nodded. "Awesome. Do it." I moved the other foot forward.

He slapped me so hard on the back I almost fell over. "Good. Now do that again, and once you've done that, do it again. I better not see you look up at that mountain. There is no mountain. You hear me? There is only that next step. You don't get to think about anything else until that is done — and once you're there, do it again."

For the next forty-five minutes, as I worked my way toward the final safe point, I discovered that every time I took a step, I still had just enough in me to take the next one when it came time.

And then we were there. High Break — the last safe point before the summit, somewhere around 13,400 feet. Only a gradual glacial slope ahead, but absolutely no cover from the hurricane force winds or the now fully risen sun. Did you know you can get sunburn inside your nose? The sunlight reflects off the snow directly upward — and your nostrils, it turns out, are lined with some of the most sensitive skin on your body. Every aspect of that place was trying to repel us — and yet my oxygen-deprived brain had somehow settled into a mode of "this is fine." I was still dying, obviously. But it was all good.

The last section climbs the final snow dome to the crater rim. By this point the serious technical hazards are mostly behind you — no more crevasse fields, no more near-vertical rock faces. What's left is just the altitude, the wind, and the accumulated weight of everything your body has already been through.

The summit. Once over the crater rim you can drop your packs in the wind-sheltered — albeit mildly unsettling — crater that is the mouth of what the USGS ranks the 3rd most dangerous volcano in the United States. It's only a couple of football fields walk across the caldera to Columbia Crest, the highest point on the mountain, where there is an actual book you can sign. While you queue up to sign with what I can only assume is an astronaut pen capable of working in literally any conditions, you can casually look out at endless land in every direction — so far below you that your brain can't quite process it. It doesn't seem real. Like a hazy dream sequence where you are king of the world.

A funny aspect of the experience was that you feel absolutely no sense of achievement standing up there. Over the next few days I talked with the others and they all reported the same thing. We were completely in awe of where we were — but I think we were simply too physically and mentally shattered to process the reality of what we'd just done. Thus the dream state.

The descent takes roughly six hours and goes by faster than you'd expect. It's still technical — you have to stay careful and focused — but relative to the effort of the ascent it genuinely does feel like a walk in the park. One catch: if you're not keen on heights, descending Disappointment Cleaver will be a harrowing experience. Remember how light doesn't carry as far in the darkness at high altitudes? Ascending the Cleaver you can't see more than a few feet beyond your headlamp — the scale of the switchbacks on a sheer rock face stays mercifully hidden. Descending in full daylight, nothing is hidden.

Sliding down the ice fields below Camp Muir is a highlight of the descent. I think it's because you've finally passed all the dangerous parts — and for this last stretch you can drop the seriousness and just have a little fun glissading your way back to Paradise.

I will forever be grateful to my parents — not just for financially prioritizing formative experiences like this for both me and my brother instead of, say, a new car or a boat — but for how they made it happen. They didn't sign me up and hand me a duffel bag. My father had strong feelings about video games and had made clear my summer would consist of something more constructive than staring at a screen — an admittedly minimal bar that was still a long way from "go climb a mountain." At the time this felt deeply unjust, as Morrowind had just come out (there's my age, for the gamers), but as incredible as that game was, there is a difference between experiences that are fun and experiences that send ripples through the entirety of your life.

The crucial point is this: they didn't send me. They found a pamphlet, suggested the program, let me find a trip that looked interesting, and then encouraged me until I believed I could maybe actually summit Mount Rainier. But they never said "you are going." And I want you to understand that would have made a difference — a significant one. When I was broken on that mountain, convinced I was dying, it was my choice that had put me there. Not theirs. Mine. Which meant I had to be my own person, make my own decisions, and navigate my way out of my own dire situation. The mountain gave me no other option.

The lesson I carry from all of it — from the training, the darkness, the guide, the glacier, the forty-five minutes of one step at a time — is that growth lives on the other side of genuine difficulty. Ice cream is wonderful. Sunsets are wonderful. But remember to put yourself in hard situations from time to time. Uncomfortable ones. Ones that require something real from you. And if you're lucky enough to be raising children, nudge them toward those situations too — not by force, but by belief. Believe they can do hard things loudly enough that eventually they believe it themselves. Then let them choose.

That's what my parents did. That's what the guide did. That's what the mountain does, if you let it.