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What lies beneath?
What lies beneath?
...for the souls that climb Rainier! Upon this glacier, on the morning of June 22, 1981, the CRACK of an icy serac broke loose and fell as much as 1,000 feet before exploding on the glacier's surface.
Car-sized chunks of ice & snow flew in all directions, crashing down on a group of climbers in what became the the worst climbing accident in American alpine history. "The climbers did nothing wrong. They could have done nothing differently. Glaciers move all the time. There's no way to predict when something will break loose. The climbers were NOT in a particularly dangerous position. The weather was NOT poor, though it had been a cool, wet June with lots of new snow. The climbers had stopped as a group on a shoulder of Disappointment Clever, while three guides went ahead to check the conditions of the glacier. They decided that the "snow conditions" and the deteriorating weather made continuing the climb UNWISE. The guides were returning to the group when the ice wall fell, splashing a lateral avalanche of snow and ice at the climbers."
Eleven climbers were plunged into crevasses or simply buried under 70 feet of ice and snow. There was no hope of ever recovering the bodies. All that was found, according to one report, was a pack, an ice ax and a headlamp.
Despite that terrible accident, Mount Rainier is remarkably accident-free, considering the number of people who have climbed on it, former guide and park ranger Dee Molenaar points out in "The Challenge of Rainier," his chonicle of Rainier's climbing history. Photo taken August 21, 1984
lcarreau
on Jan 6, 2008 11:12 am
