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Satuday, September 3, 2022 8:00 am PDT

Hey y'all,

On summit of Baker at 7:45.Moderate winds and smoky skies. 100% of team on top.

Tatum, Roland, and Team

Friday September 4, 2022 9:00 pm PDT

Hey y'all, 

Yesterday we had perfect weather for our hike to camp without a cloud in the sky. We made camp at 6,100. Today we had a good school day with light winds and smoky skies.

Tatum, Roland, and Team

We had a great day at Mt. Erie on Tuesday for the first day of our Expedition Skills Seminar - Shuksan.  We went through gear, learned knots, anchors, belaying, and rappelling. We also did a bit of top rope climbing in boots to get ready for Shuksan. We then prepped and got ready to head onto the mountain for the next few days.  We had a great day with a bit of cloud cover to keep it cool. We then moved into camp at the toe of the Sulphide Glacier with some incredible views for the next several days! 

On Friday, we made our summit attempt with 100% of the group reaching the summit at 9,131'.  It was a long day and we arrived back in camp late.  Everybody is happy. We'll train on Saturday and check in then. 

RMI Guide Pete Van Deventer

Like most good climbing plans, I was told that the idea for the Climb for Five was hatched in a pub a while back. Already involved in the St. Baldrick's Foundation, a volunteer charity that raises money for childhood cancer research, the three climbers came up with the idea of tackling serious mountaineering objectives in an effort to raise money and awareness for St. Baldrick's by using the metaphor of climbing to illustrate the challenges and trials children go through while battling cancer. Hence, on Sunday September 18th, Patrick, Eric, Jon and I gathered under a thick layer of grey and drizzly clouds hanging over Rainier BaseCamp to tackle Mt. Rainier over the course of a 5 day Expedition Skills Seminar - Camp Muir. The days of near fifty degree temperatures and rain, coming down in sheets at times, did not do much to instill confidence in the conditions above. Yet within a half an hour of leaving the trail head at Paradise the clouds thinned and by the time we reached 7,600' on the Muir Snowfield we were standing in the sun above the low-lying maritime clouds. Above us Mt. Rainier stood proudly with a fresh layer of snow from the recent storm blanketing its' slopes. During the rest of the climb to Muir, Patrick further explained the concept for Climb for Five to me: St. Baldrick's chooses five Ambassador Kids every year, representing that for every 5 children that get childhood cancer only 4 survive. The Climb for Five honors those Ambassadors; each day of the climb is chosen to honor one of the kids and the climbers carried keepsakes from each of the kids with them throughout the climb. After a full day of training, learning the fundamentals of safe climbing and glacier travel techniques, exploring the Cowlitz Glacier outside of Camp Muir, and preparing ourselves for the climbing above, we set off on our summit bid under a beautifully starry sky early Wednesday morning. The new snow on the mountain smoothed over the rocky sections of the mountain and we made good progress across Cowlitz and Ingraham Glaciers and onto Disappointment Cleaver. Just before sunrise, breathing hard from the exertion at those altitudes, we reached the top of the Cleaver and added more clothes to fight the biting predawn winds. Continuing above the Cleaver the sun finally began to break above the horizon of eastern Washington and gave way to one of the most beautiful sunrises I have ever seen on the mountain. The unsettled layers of clouds filtered the light such that shades of pink, red, yellow, orange, green, and blue were simultaneously covering the mountain's glaciers and the surrounding landscape below. The array of colors around us contrasted sharply with the traditional monotones of high alpine environments of rock, ice, and snow. Unfortunately, those same unsettled clouds soon overtook the sun and by 13,500' we were enveloped in a cloud cap, covering us in a thick layer of rime ice and blowing just enough to add to the challenge of making the final 900' of climbing to the summit. Standing on top, buffeted by the wind and precipitation, Eric and Patrick unfurled the St. Baldrick's Banner and then pulled out a few keepsakes in memory of Arden, the Ambassador Kid for whom we were climbing that day. We then turned back and set our sights on descending. Like children battling cancer, reaching the summit is only half of the battle - the road to recovery once defeating the cancer is as long and as challenging as retracing one's route back down the mountain. We carefully picked our way back down Mt. Rainier's flanks, weaving our way amongst the seracs and around the gaping late-season crevasses that cover the mountain back to camp. The winds from higher on the mountain descended not long behind us and continued to blow for the next several days while we finished the rest of the Seminar: building snow anchors, practicing the rigging systems needed for crevasse rescue, and ice climbing on the Cowlitz Glacier before descending back to Ashford on Friday. Taking part in the Climb for Five was a special experience for me and I feel fortunate to be involved. Having lost a sister to cancer as a kid, I share the same with the climbers of the Climb for Five and the entire climb struck a chord with me and I look forward to future climbs with this team. Thanks to Patrick, Eric, Jon, and St. Baldrick's for pursuing this endeavor, RMI is proud to be a part of it. RMI Guide Linden Mallory

Good morning, this is Alex Van Steen from the Carstensz Expedition. And my oh my, what a day we had yesterday. And here is the great word: RMI has summitted Carstensz Pyramid! We had a long day but everybody, despite being exhausted, did, really, really well. We all have a little bit of an altitude hack and the desire to head the other direction, but we are just loving this experience. I wish I could send photos via this dispatch, but they will be posted later. We've got lots of photos, and lots more stories. Stay tuned. Thanks, good-bye.

On The Map

RMI Guides Grayson Swingle and Ben Liken reported the Five-Day climbing teams enjoyed a beautiful sunrise this morning. The team spent two nights at Camp Muir and enjoyed lots of hands-on training and practice to enhance their glacier travel skills all while ascending to Camp Muir in wonderful spring conditions. The team will descend to Basecamp and celebrate their accomplishments before everyone begins their next adventure home.

Hey, this is Dave Hahn calling in from the summit of Mount Vinson 16,067 feet above sea level. And I'm up here. It's 5:25 in the evening. I'm with three wonderful climbers: T.A., Mindy and Vlado, and we picked a beautiful day to be up here. It's calm, it's sunny, it's wonderful. This is my 29th time on top- likely a record of some sort and what an enjoyable day. What an enjoyable week's its been. Here's T.A.: Hey, this is T.A. calling from the summit of Mt. Vinson and the view is absolutely... absolutely awesome! Special hello to everyone in Newfoundland and another special hello to Rain and Zander up there in Edmonton. Take care everybody. [Mindy] The view is... I've never dreamed about it. Without Dave and the team I couldn't dream I could make it. Dave you are a lasting reward. I made a good choice with RMI. Without the team I couldn't have made it. Total team work. This is Vlado from Slovakia calling from the highest point in Antarctica. Beautiful time, we are having a great time. Alright, well that's us from the top of the Vinson Massif, highest point in Antarctica. We have gotten very lucky. Very lucky and we appreciate all the help people have given us a long the way. Thanks a lot and we'll keep you informed. I'll send out a dispatch from our high camp tonight because we are going to get down nice and safe. We are all doing strong and well. It's going to be a nice day, a day to remember. RMI Guide Dave Hahn

On The Map

The clear, beautiful skies made for a cool and frosty night down at Ixtaccihuatl Basecamp. The team woke up to flakes of snow hitting our face, courtesy of the moisture from our breath. We ate our breakfast, packed our bags and were on our way.
The sun was strong, but a cool wind kept our temperature regulated quite perfectly as the team worked their way up. Our months of hard work and preparation paid off as the team was strong as ever. Making the move from 13,000ft to 15,400ft is no small feat, especially with the heavy loads of the day. We made short work of it though, getting to our high camp in around four hours flat. Now we need to move into camp, relax for a bit, and talk logistics for the day ahead. I’m proud of the way the team performed today and it makes me as hopeful as ever for our summit day tomorrow.

RMI Guide Dominic Cifelli

Namaste! 

Greetings from Nepal!

The team has finally arrived after some incredibly long flights and a 12hr time change.We spent our first day get acquainted and discussing the necessities to our upcoming adventure.

We then headed out to visit a few famous temples here in Kathmandu. First up was the Swayambhunath, also known as the "Monkey Temple", that overlooks most of Kathmandu. Then we visited the massive Boudhanath Stupa, which is one of the largest in the world. We wrapped up the evening with getting all our gear packed and an amazing meal at a restaurant call “Le Sherpa”. 

Today the team left Kathmandu and flew to Lukla, our starting point to the trek. Thankfully it was a rather uneventful flight to one of the world’s most famous airports. After arriving had breakfast then waited at a tea house for all the porters to be chosen and then hit the trail. We hiked for about 3 hours to reach our first camp of the trip in a small village called Phakding. The weather was perfect, and everyone did great on the hike. 

Team is doing well and oh so happy to be in the mountains!

RMI Guides Casey, Hannah, and Team

RMI Guides Peter Whittaker and Ed Viesturs led a team of climbers to the summit of Mt. Rainier morning. The Four Day Summit Climb July 23 - 26 led by RMI Guides Casey Grom and Lindsey Mann also reached the top today. Both teams reported light winds and a beautiful day. The climbers will descend to Camp Muir and then continue down to Paradise later this afternoon. In the North Cascades, RMI Guides Andres Marin, Eric Frank and Geoff Schellens led their team to the summit of Forbidden Peak. All team members reached the summit yesterday. They will break camp and descend to the trail head today. Congratulations to the summit teams!

I believed I'd imagined Kent Harvey's call to me at ten minutes to four in the morning. I didn't have any alarm set; it was a rest day coming on and I was sound asleep in my tent. So fully unconscious that Kent called me several times and when I finally responded, I had no idea where I was or what was going on. It was dark, and as he suggested that something had happened that I might want to be concerned with, I finished rubbing my eyes and zipped open my door. The beauty of the scene seemed unreal and impossible. The moon had set, and the sun wasn't close to being up, but there was starlight on the Khumbu Icefall, Nuptse and the great bulk of Everest's West Shoulder. Kent was saying that he'd just seen a fairly large avalanche come down the Shoulder-sending a cloud of debris across the Icefall-and he was concerned that climbers may have been caught. I listened to him, but I was having trouble taking my eyes from the bright planet perfectly framed above the Icefall and bracketed by the mountains. I did manage to look down and left enough finally to see several small strings of headlamps, just where I knew the avalanche had to have come down. I turned on my radio, taking a guess that my friends at IMG had people in the area. I listened to Mark Tucker calmly and carefully check in with his Sherpa team to find out that they were ok...another near miss; and his Sherpa team was able to tell him that the only other team in the area was also ok and that everybody was going on with their climb. I related this to Kent...stared at the planet again for some time and then went back to sleep in my warm down bag. In the morning, we all looked up at the troublesome serac on the West Shoulder to gauge its stability. The same huge fin of ice had been threatening all week. It had sent down the major avalanche we'd earlier reported which caught some of our team on their way to basecamp while I was pushing up to Camp II. In the morning light, it appeared hideously undercut and I don't believe any of us expected it to last through another day. I went so far as to take "before" photos of it. But to my knowledge, no Everest climbers did anything different yesterday morning because of the serac. It wasn't like the Icefall route would be closed by any proclamation; there wasn't some safer way to go instead. This isn't the only mountain we frequent that has chunks of glacier ready to fall, and I for one have mistakenly pronounced dozens of crazily tilted hotel-sized ice-blocks in danger of imminent collapse only to watch them hang on for months. But this serac sent down a handful of lesser slides as the morning progressed...enough to keep our attention focused...and our cameras ready. I wanted the thing to come down. I certainly didn't want to walk under it again in its decaying state. At 10:35 AM it did come down. I was sitting in my tent doorway, and I didn't need to fully look at Everest's West Shoulder to know that this was the big one. In this valley of avalanches, the quality of noise was easily different and distinct for this particular slide. I fumbled with my camera and began shooting. I didn't see the tiny dots representing climbers in the avalanche path. Partly because they may not have been visible down in the rough terrain of the Khumbu Icefall, and partly because I was totally mesmerized by the power and majesty of the white explosion I was witnessing. I kept taking pictures as the cloud engulfed basecamp. I knew it was only a cloud...we were nowhere near close enough to be hit with actual debris, but it was ominous and disturbing even so. It rolled over us like a volcanic ash-cloud, blotting out the sun and rocking the tents back and forth in its wind while pelting us with a "snow" of overly large ice crystals. And then, quite quickly, it was gone and what remained of any mist in the air was quickly burning off in the bright sun. I assumed that it had been a lucky day...that what needed to happen had happened and that nobody had been affected. It is possible that I went on in this belief for a full twenty minutes before word began to filter around that people had been caught in the avalanche. I began putting on my climbing boots and quickly loading my pack...by then, word had it that it was an acquaintance of mine of several years and many mountains. My friend had been caught along with his client and the Sherpa working with them. I saw Willie and Damian Benegas going past our camp, both speaking into their radios. There were a number of Sherpas moving toward the start of the Icefall route, including Tendi and LamaBabu from our own team. Seth Waterfall was ready before me and stood patiently as I finished up my climbing harness, then we started walking fast and I joined the ongoing radio scramble to get men and equipment to the accident scene. Since IMG's Sherpas and clients were descending the route at the time and were very lucky to come through unscathed, they were among the first to report the situation via radio, and so all other teams migrated to the IMG frequency. This seemed right since Mark Tucker and Ang Jangbu Sherpa at the IMG basecamp had shifted into their familiar role in bilingual crisis management. Seth and I checked in and learned that HimEx was offering up a full rescue pack cached near the start of the route. Russell Brice came on the radio, directing us to the gear. We loaded up heavy packs full of oxygen, sleeping bags, medical equipment, and rescue hardware and began climbing. We listened as various expedition leaders, guides and Sherpas reported in and offered up a mountain of resources. This from supposedly competing companies-none of whom had any reason to think that their own staff or customers were involved or injured. We began to feel the sense of community that is so often overlooked or ignored in modern media coverage of the Everest "scene." And we began to feel the intense sun that we normally avoid working under at midday. The glacier surface was brilliant in its new coat of "snow" from the avalanche and seemed to be reflecting 100% of the sun's radiation onto the skin I hadn't had time to protect in my dash out of BC. Within minutes under the big packs, we were covered in sweat. It turned out that a descending Indian team was instrumental, along with IMG's Sherpas, in getting my friend and his client out of a crevasse that the avalanche had pushed them into, but now the radio chatter was focusing on the Sherpa that had been with them. He was missing. Willie and Damian Benegas (Argentinian-American brothers leading two different Everest teams) were among the first Western professionals on the scene, and we relied on their reports of the situation as we continued to climb. My friend, badly hypothermic and shaken, was being placed on a stretcher as Seth and I arrived in the blast zone. We dove into the medical supplies we carried in an effort to help stabilize him. Seth concentrated his efforts then on escorting the remarkably unscathed client down. Willie Benegas and a strong team of Sherpas worked to get the stretcher down, as I then went up to join Damian and perhaps 20 Sherpas who were searching for the missing man. After 15 minutes or so, I was encouraged to hear Willie describing my friend as "combative" enough that they could no longer carry him on the litter. He preferred to walk, as it turned out, and of course that was a fine outcome. At the "point-last-seen" I was amazed at the bravery and high energy of the searching climbers. Damian and a British guide were roped up and jumping crevasses in an effort to reach islands of glacier that might offer better views. The Sherpas had fixed ropes down a series of steep, debris-strewn ice gullies and were exploring every crevasse and alcove along their path. I kept looking up at the origin of the avalanche, where it appeared that a tooth had been broken from some massive jaw. Unfortunately, there were still other teeth, and the searchers were clearly in a terrible position should a second slide follow the path of the first. I checked my watch and my radio to confirm that two-and-a-half hours had passed since the avalanche. I began asking the team to suspend the search. The missing man's boot, with crampon still attached, had been found close enough to his last known whereabouts that we were each haunted to imagine the power of the wind that had hit him. His pack was eventually retrieved some 100 meters distant. The clues only made it more difficult to quit. The Sherpas all agreed that there was now no chance of finding a buried man alive. They agreed that it was time to quit and move to safety. But they wouldn't. Nobody wanted to be the first to leave. Tendi and LamaBabu continued to twist in ice screws and rappel into crevasses..."Just this last one." But they couldn't find the 31-year-old father of two. Knowing how many of them were also fathers, I insisted that they quit-eventually they listened to me, to their own leaders and their own valid concerns. We walked down through the ice rolls and ridges of the lower glacier without much talking. Dozens of good folk had come out from basecamp and stood on the ice ridges with water and tea for the search teams. Upon reaching basecamp, the teams melted back into a tent village composed of twenty different expeditions, but not without a number of quiet handshakes and a hundred expressions of thanks. To each other...to a missing man's sacrifice...to the good luck of survivors.