Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

May 12, 2024

1733m

Mt. Rainier Area, WA

High Rock to the south of the mighty Mt. Rainer offers one of the highest reward-to-effort ratio and at the same time, boasts over 900 m prominence so for various reasons I wanted to bag it sooner than later, but the driving is a daunting task even for those based in Seattle, let alone from Vancouver, B.C. It’d be difficult to justify driving 10 hours for a 2-hour stroll but in winter or spring the hike is considerably longer due to the trail-head being inaccessible due to snow. I had seen a few recent updates on WTA that the road was currently snowed in 2 miles from the trail-head. The decision to finally pull the trigger was a spontaneous one made at the last minute. The weather had been nuclear hot for a number of days and this was the first major warming-up of the season, that despite some people were still out there climbing the bigger peaks I decided to give the snowpack a few days to settle. The weather, on the other hand, was too nice to justify driving eastwards again into the rainshadow zone to go away from the snow, so I eventually decided to explore the southern Washington instead. Travelling south is equivalent to travelling forward in time (more settled snowpack), and I knew from the recent updates that the snowshoes were no longer required.

I was able to sell the trip to Lulu and then Pan decided to come along as well, and at the very last minute I jacked up the ambition to pull through another all-nighter to kill two birds in one throw – the aurora and the sunrise. I’m not that following-the-trend type of person but this current aurora event has been quite special, and I missed out the Friday night’s show because I was completely not aware of it. The show on Saturday night was not supposed to be as intense, and the southwards travel was not the most correct direction but then I wanted to gamble on seeing the aurora with Mt. Rainier as the backdrop. Well, this gambling was not a win but we did get a glimpse of the show at one time, and the sunrise made this push totally worthwhile. I picked up Lulu and Pan at 8:30 pm in White Rock and drove us all the way there. I knew there was about 8 miles of gravel roads but I took a chance to take the Corolla instead of the Tacoma based on my research about that road. This turned out to be the correct decision. There were some pot-holes on the roads but any car could make it. A lot of people were out there waiting. We arrived at the snowline and parked behind several Jeeps and trucks, and started the plodding a mere 10 minutes later. The aurora watching could be as early as 2 am but the sunrise would be at 5:30 am, so I staffed in several sleeping bags and winter jackets into my trusty BD Speed 50L backpack to make sure everyone could at least shiver through the night up there.

We had brought snowshoes in the car but after seeing the vehicles and the abundant footprints we decided to leave them in the trunk. The snow was definitely sloppy but there was no post-holing if staying on the tracks. The 2 miles to the trail-head was very tedious but we made a few photography stops to break the monotonous plodding. The aurora was not visible in the naked eyes, but the 10-second elapsing in my iPhone 15 Pro got the job done. The truth was that we couldn’t see any Northern Light, but with the fancy camera/phone we were able to get a few pictures.

By the time we got to the actual trail-head we were already over halfway done, distance wise. The trail traverses the south side of High Rock’s SE Ridge and the bottom half was already melted out. We encountered two skiers boot-packing on their way down and they assured there’s no aurora show on the summit neither. I was rushing the pace until this point because the best chance of seeing the aurora was between 11 pm and 2 am, but their negative reviews made me not feel too bad. The upper south ridge was still covered in snow and required some minor route-finding, and we also took a short-cut straight up the SW Face to the summit at the end. We got there at 3 am, took a few photos and then settled for the shivering. I was able to rest reasonably well in my -7C sleeping bag and I used the gloves, jackets and backpack as the “mattress”. I gave my winter parka as well as the +2C sleeping bag to Lulu and Pan and they managed to make do as well. I might actually have caught a bit of sleep while waiting. By around 5 am there were already 10 people on the summit so I couldn’t bother to try to sleep again, and spent the next half an hour taking pictures. The views were definitely worthwhile.

It was eventually the time to head home. The descent was uneventful and I again, led us down at a reasonably fast pace because the hiking (especially on the road) was very boring. I searched for a secondary objective in my mental database but I did not have a lot of ideas, and eventually decided to not push myself too hard for once. Pan and I took turn driving home and we eventually got back to White Rock at 1 pm, a wee bit too early for a “day trip” in my book. The driving was definitely exhausting and that covered up the easiness of the hike.