Fuhrer Finger June 3-4, 2011

It's been way too long since I've been to Rainier - so long that it almost felt like the first time... all starry eyed looking out the car window at those colossal drainages - Tahoma, Kautz, Nisqually - and the trees! wow! and then right inside the NP gate in the deep shadows of the forest a shaft of light falls from above to illuminate a speckled faun licking it's hind quarters - woah, too much!  Like something I've seen but never seen; nature emulating a picture postcard...  my mind finds itself treating it like some sort of omen, though I have no idea of what...

With sooo many cascadian options, it's been easy to neglect Rainier and yet its been on the near horizon for a while now since Zack set the wheels of organizing a Führer Finger ski in motion a couple of months ago. We'd been waiting for a weather window to do this trip and here it was, as big and wide and bright as the sun. All that blue sky making Rainier so visually available from every angle, and all that oogling made me realize - that mountain is a whole range unto itself.  Sooo many options.  So immense, so beautiful, so full of contradictions... you could, for example, be on a ridge all bundled up against the icy blast of wind and yet, just a mere 20 feet away on the other side of the ridge, you could--literally and amazingly--be lounging in a t-shirt. That was our camp. Pretty sweet.


Zack demonstrating the indisputable efficacy of his sitz-pad attachment methodology



going up the Wilson Glacier

We (Zack, Mike, and I) started from the parking lot around noon on Friday, putting in a fresh skin track up the Wilson (we had a fourth person, Franklin, coming up later so we picked our path carefully). This was promptly obliterated by three climbers--and then the hordes, the hundreds, WAC and some other large group--so that by the time we skied out Saturday evening, that single track had turned into a well trampled highway. By contrast we met only two people all day on Saturday while on the Finger route. But the following of tracks became an inescapable theme, a comedy of errors... not so funny in the moment while following a boot pack across a steep icy slope whose bottom was a gaping blue maw (when we could have been cruising up the Nisqually Glacier checking out the run), but more so in hindsight... when laughter was an option.




We never did meet the people who put in the boot pack, just saw two headlights heading up as we rolled out of our sleeping bags around 2:30. Rounds of oatmeal, coffee, and packing saw us off by 4:30. Made it up to 13,000 where fierce winds, a decline in skiable snow, and the slowing effects of altitude (at least for me) became quite palpable. From there we skied down the Glacier a bit, but somehow ended back on the rib with the boot pack just west of the Nisqually... which funnels into the Wilson Headwall. So back up we went. Meanwhile, enter the two skiers, who had followed our tracks, also wanting to ski the Finger... sorry, wrong way. We soon found a passage back onto the Nisqually.  A small moat crossing (and minor mishap) later, found us all merrily on a most redemptive ski down. So good!



minor mishap upon re-entering the Nisqually Glacier... Muir highway in the distance...



Franklin, with several thousand feet of goodness still below



Fireman Mike, blazing



looking back at lower Finger from camp