Mount Rainier, Washington, USA
August 2005
 

Heading down:  We set off down Mount Rainier from the Crater at 10:05am.  In the photo above you can see the degree of the downgrade we had to switchback down.  The snow was still quite hard up there and our picks did not go in more than an inch or so.  If we had needed to self arrest or even place a picket for protection this would have been very difficult because the snow was just packed so hard.
 

There were huge crevasses all around us.  It was actually scary to think we passed all those monsters in the dark.  We had to jump over some of the crevasses and here and there we crosses a snow bridge.  In the photo above, if you follow the path in the direction Robert is facing you can see one of the crevasses we had to jump over on our march down.
 

When we got to the top of Disappointment Cleaver we had to strip a few layers off as we were getting too hot.  The four man team that were behind us arrived just as we started to descend the Cleaver.  They said they would hold back until we were clear of the Cleaver.  We had one two man team directly in front of us so we stuck close to them so that we did not drop any rocks on them.  The descent felt worse than the ascent as we kept on slipping in the loose gravel with our crampons on.
 

Then another march across Ingraham Glacier and down Cathedral Rocks to Cowlitz Glacier.  The glacier was striated with impressive looking crevasses.  By this time we were both very tired and Robert's feet were very painful with blisters but we did a somewhat quick march across the glacier and up to Muir.  We got back to camp at 2:20pm, 4 hours and 15 minutes after leaving the Crater.

We dropped our gear and went to sleep for a couple of hours.  There were other teams who had summitted with us who were packing up to head down to Paradise.  We were going to spend the night and head down in the morning so we hung around chatting about our hike to the top.

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