We reached camp 2 early in the day and proceeded to laze about in the
sun. We saw some cool rockfall on the other side of the glacier including
one in which a boulder the size of a refrigerater bounced a hundred feet
into the air.
John chilling with the Tahoma Glacier in the distance.
Notes on scale: another party which had ascended the south side of
Tahoma Glacier is visible as four evenly spaced dots in the lower right
side of the picture.
(I ran out of film but John gave me a roll of black and white...)
Higher clouds were appearing here and there in the distance and eventually
a lenticular cloud began to form over the summit. We dug ledges in
the snow to sleep on and readied gear for the next morning, wondering what
the weather would do next.
High clouds begin to move in.
Finally a cloud wall of Biblical proportions rolled in. Matt and John retired to their tent and I crawled in my bivy sack. Soon I was hearing a tapping noise against my bivy and mentioned to Matt that it was snowing. Matt assured me it wasn't snow, that we were just inside a cloud. A little while later came the sound of John throwing up quite violently, another victom of altitude sickness. My alarm went off at midnight. It was snowing heavily and in a brief conversation between the bivy sack and the nearby tent we abandoned our summit aspirations.
The frequent sound of avalanches was mildly disturbing as we were camped
at the edge of a clift with a steep slope of snow above us. I put
in some earplugs and tried to get some sleep. A bag of Trader Joe's
ginger cookies were my only consolation. At around 5:30 am I was
awakened by Matt shaking my bivy sack. About five inches of snow
had accumulated. Matt offered a polite discussion of the physics
of new fallen snow that basically translated to "we need to get the hell
out of here, now."
Matt related a dream he'd had during the night - He was back at
school talking to a teacher who was into climbing. Matt was telling
him how he was high on Mt. Rainier when it started snowing heavily and
there was zero visibility. The teacher asked how he ever got down.
Then Matt realized he hadn't done it yet. Nooooooooooooooo!
Following Puyallup Cleaver we could still see the rocks through the
fog. Below Tokaloo Spire it became mostly guesswork. First
we got cliffed out on some steep slopes with new snow covering really slick
grass. We backtracked and climbed higher. Then we were on a
platuea area with near vertical dropoffs in every direction. We spent
about an hour and a half of going in circles, consulting the map and compass
forty times to try and figure out what was going on, and thinking we might
have to spend an extra night out until visibility improved. Finally
we found a way to drop down and got below the clouds.
Three very happy campers just after we found the trail again.