My little brother suggested months ago that maybe I could take him on a climb sometime, and I immediately knew exactly what we ought to do: Mount Adams. It’s a 12,276 ft volcano, and yet there is a completely non-technical route that avoids the glaciers, and so climbing Mt. Adams is essentially a very intense day hike. A very intense day hike.
I suppose crampons and an ice axe are “required” to climb Mt. Adams, but I never really used my ice axe, and my brother never put on his crampons. All the same, someone was rather seriously injured the night before our climb — the search-and-rescue operation headquartered fifty feet from our tent kept us up and delayed our alpine start by an hour and a half, and certainly cast a bit of a cautious pall over everyone’s climb the next day. I also yelled at several people breaking the first rule of glissading. So while you do not need mountaineering experience to climb Mt. Adams, I am still reluctant to recommend it unless you take someone who knows what they’re doing along with you.
Anyway, see the mountain hulking over my brother in this picture? We have already climbed around 2500 feet in elevation (mostly in the dark) to get to this point.
Oh, and the high point in that picture? That’s not even where we’re headed. Mt. Adams has a soul-crushing false summit at 11,657 feet, where the wind was blowing so hard my head looks flat.
We met a lot of people who turned back at the false summit. I can understand why, because this was yet to come:
But here we are! At the summit! Thank goodness I was having a rough day and moving slowly, because if we’d gotten to the summit just an hour earlier, it would have been completely socked in.
And here I am, doing some kind of weird dance or… something on top of the second highest mountain in Washington state. Number one and number three are visible in the background.
(To give you a sense of scale, the third highest mountain in Washington, Little Tahoma, is that rocky little nubbin on the right flank of Rainier. It’s only about 100 feet shorter than Mt. Hood, and even the false summit on Adams is hundreds of feet taller than both Little Tahoma and Mt. Hood. Basically, Mt. Rainier and Mt. Adams are enormous.)
On our way down, we met a guy named Jeremy who was on his way up. He has a blog where he wrote about his climb, too! (My brother was the guy who shared a Kit-Kat with Jeremy, which makes me the other of the “two really cool people” he met.)
A stretch that took us over two hours to climb up took us approximately ten minutes to get back down. This, of course, is the whole reason you climb Mt. Adams and might even think about doing it again:
What an awesome weekend. Congratulations to my brother on his first mountain! (And congratulations to Jeremy, too!) As much as I love climbing because I love being outside, or because I love being active, or because I love the feeling of accomplishment, my primary motivation is always spending time working toward a difficult goal with fun people, and this weekend was pretty much the embodiment of everything I love about the mountains.
