The guides on Mount Rainier lovingly referred to these early few weeks as June-uary. Summer is just around the corner but storms and below zero temperatures still blast the upper mountain with disconcerting frequency.
It was our first foray into mountaineering. A spontaneous idea the previous fall lead to months of stuffing every heavy object in our apartment into a pack and huffing up every hill available around Boulder. Summiting the 14,410 foot icon of the Pacific Northwest wouldn’t be easy, but if some 10,000 climbers make a summit bid each year, we figured why not us too.