Observation Rock, North Face - October 22nd, 2000

The setup

How did this all start?
Several weeks ago, I noticed that the North Face of Observation Rock was listed as an intermediate ice trip for the Mountaineers. An ice climb, eh? I had skied up around O Rock a year previous, and recall seeing a steep, somewhat icy slope. But it seemed kind of small and dorky - "intermediate ice"? Really?

I checked the map, and found some slides of it. From the map, it looked about 400ft high. I showed the slides to Jeff and Matt, and ended up convincing them (both eager to plant their tools in some ice) to go check it out, on Saturday October 14th.

I was hoping to get their beta, and, if they had good things to report, go and solo it on Sunday.

Mt. Rainier with a cloud cap. Observation Rock is the prominent crag on the left. Below and right of the summit is the rectangular north face (blends in with the triangular upper scree slopes).

 

The (almost) search & rescue

Late Saturday night, Matt and Jeff had not yet returned. This was pretty worrisome, since it should have been an easy day trip. Terry and I both spent relatively sleepness nights, wondering what had happened.

Sunday morning, still no sign of them, so starting at 6am, I made some phone calls and reported them as missing. I had been planning to leave Seattle by 6am anyway to go do the climb, but now I had to stay home and talk to the several levels of police, park "dispatchers" and park rangers. I wanted to be at the park searching for my friends!

The park was of course first going to go check the trailhead to see if Matt's truck was still there. This seemed to be taking a long time. I finally got on the phone with "'Gator", the park's head climbing ranger (finally another climber to talk to... rather than someone who just wants me to stay at home and let them take care of it). 'Gator was starting to get the ball rolling, and we made arrangements for me to rendez-vous at the Carbon River ranger station, and hopefully by then he would have assembled a preliminary search team. He was also well aware that the weather was forecast to turn fowl by the end of the day (I couldn't help thinking about the Hartonas search last November on the Muir snowfield, where searchers, myself included, missed the one good weather day, and ended up searching fruitlessly for another week in horrendous whiteout conditions).

View towards spray park from the top of the North Face. The top of the face is very odd - it goes from 60 degree ice to flat (bottom of photo) in a span of just a few feet. The "Toilet Bowl" is clearly visible down below, with our approach tracks on the right. 10/22

 

I said I'd leave as soon as we heard back from the trailhead check. 15 minutes later, 'Gator calls back and says the truck was not at the trailhead, but was seen heading back down. Phew! Ok, no search! 15 minutes later, Jeff calls from a pay phone in Wilkeson. Turns out Matt left his car headlights on Saturday morning, and they came back to a dead battery. No one was left at the trailhead to give them a boost, so they had to spend a cold night there. They built a fire in the parking lot, and tried to stay warm with that. In Matt's words:

"when we got to the parking lot, at 10:30 or 11 [in the morning], it was too bright to notice my headlights were still on. modern cars can't be push-started when the battery is completely dead (alternator vs. generator problem). it gets cold at night, up there, now. fortunately the ranger station had firewood, now everything i own smells like smoke. how was the night? "it's two-forty"... roll, shiver, doze... "what time is it now?... five after three"... repeat until 8:30."

Despite the expensive collect call, I quizzed Jeff about the climb. He said they got up one pitch, using fixed belays, and then bailed because of time. They rapped off a bollard. It had taken them two hours to climb one pitch. Yeesh! Jeff didn't think it was a good idea to solo it. I thought about it for a while, and about how late it was getting, but decided to head down there anyway and take a look for myself. When I had described to 'Gator earlier that morning where Matt and Jeff had gone, I followed it with "there is an ice climb on the north side of Observation Rock, right?" (remember, I still wasn't sure whether there really was a worthy climb there). I suppose he thought, from the original report I made to the police, that they had gone waterfall ice climbing, and wanted to clear things up. 'Gator had replied "well, I hesitate to call that an ice climb", but noted that they could certainly still get seriously hurt on a 30-40 degree snow slope.

Dave and Greg on the icy 60-degree upper section of the face.

 

The solo attempt

I figured the truth lay somewhere in between, and so left the house, and arrived at the Mowich Lake trailhead just before 11:30 Sunday morning, October 15th. As I reached Spray Park, the weather began to deteriorate. There was an evil-looking cloud cap kind of thing downwind from Rainier. The sky was getting hazy. Then clouds rose from the valleys, and obscured my surroundings. I decided not to attempt the face - but at least to go check it out.

However, at 2:30, I reached the base of the climb, and the weather had turned nice again. The haze had cleared, the evil cloud was gone. Visibility was once again good. However, I was still somewhat freaked out by the whole missing Jeff and Matt incident. (I had even brought Terry's cell phone with me for comfort, but could not get any service).

Snow-dusted trees in Spray Park, morning of October 22

 

I decided to head up the face. The angle looked like about 40 degrees for the first half, then 50 or steeper above that. Certainly doable solo in good conditions, I thought. However, as soon as I got on the face, I discovered that it was hard water ice, very brittle, dinner-plating, sometimes hard to get pick placements, overall not too secure. Fine for the 40 degree part, but I did not want to commit myself to the steeper upper sections if conditions were similar up there. Once up high, it would be difficult to back down. So after ascending about 80 feet, I slowly down climbed off the face, somewhat defeated, but feeling it was wise to succumb to reason this time.

But it was still a beautiful day on the north side of Rainier. And I returned safe and sound to my truck, and to Seattle.

The real story

During the next week, the allure of Observation Rock grew. Dave had heard that neither Jeff, Matt or me had been able to make it up. A nice moderate alpine ice face; the seed grew in Dave's head, and he tried to convince me to go back. I began to wonder about this O Rock thing - really, it is just a short little face with a long approach, and you don't even reach a summit! You just reach a plateau below the summit, also reachable by off-trail hiking, and then it's just a scree slog up to the peak. Not very aesthetic, really.

As luck would have it, by Thursday Dave had convinced me to give it another shot, and convinced Greg ditch his plans and accompany us. However, there had been some heavy precipitation this week, most of it at high freezing levels, but some of it as snow at the Spray Park elevation (6000ft). How much snow would there be at O Rock? Avalanche danger?

Cold morning at the Mowich Lake trailhead.

 

Saturday night we arrived at the snow-dusted Mowich Lake parking lot, drove down a narrow rock-lined track and parked next to a picnic table. In the darkness we could make out two other cars and tents nearby. It was a very cold night - we each had respect for Matt and Jeff, who didn't have the luxury of sleeping bags and tents the previous weekend! That night we drank some nice room-temperature beer to warm up, and finished off the Subway sandwiches bought on the way here. They now have and special sauces, and fancy breads (samples are prominently displayed so that customers can poke theirs fingers into them). Dave tried to convince me that the fancy sauces "made the subs". I retorted that the fancy breads were fake (take regular bread, sprinkle some oregano on the outside, and - ooooooo - fancy bread!) They now also have things called "Fruizzies", which are - it is not hard to guess - ice and fruit blended together. We tried hard to imagine the "holy crap! The competition is killing us, we need to do something" executive company meeting at Subway, where the seed was sewn to renew the company with fancy drinks, breads and sauces.

We woke up early, and discovered we had parked right next to the trail. After a slow start, we hit the trail. Up in Spray Park, there was about 4 inches of new snow - not bad. It was a cold, crisp, clear, beautiful winterlike morning. Quite different from the cloudy, 10000ft freezing level predicted by the weatherman! The trees were frosted, the snow-covered meadows were crunchy, the little ponds were frozen hard, and there were all sorts of fresh animal tracks in the dry snow. In one spot, small grassy plants were sticking out of the snow, and each one had an identical ice twin next to, but completely separate, from it. We postulated that the rime ice must have grown on each blade (to an inch in thickness), and then the sun warmed the dark-coloured plant, melting the ice next to it, and leaving its free-standing ice twin.

We all felt sluggish and weak as we trudged up the snowfield, past the "toilet bowl" (the affectionate name given to the large brown silty toilet-bowl-shaped pond at the base of the Flett Glacier), to the base of the climb. The new snow did make things a little slower, but we were just altogether unenergetic. I think it took us over four hours this time.

Approaching the face through fresh snow. Above Observation Rock, in the background, you can see the summit of Rainier in a cloudcap.

 

Dave greedily laid claim to leading the upper face. I was going to do the bottom, and we'd switch leads in the middle. Conditions were vastly different this weekend. Instead of the hard brittle water ice for the first 50 feet, it was deep (18 inches), windblown snow that had piled up at the bottom. Soon though, it was back to ice, topped with just a few inches of powder. Nonetheless, it was very straightforward. We simul-climbed two pitches, placing a few screws to a belay in mid-face, where I brought Greg and Dave up. Easy, except it was a bit disconcerting to hear a loud, "wide-sounding" crack in the ice as I finished putting in the first ice screw for the belay. Nothing seemed to come of it though. Next, Dave took the lead up the steeper mushroom-shaped pattern of ice on the top half. The climbing became more interesting here. Certainly not difficult, but very strenuous, as we all had to pause on our front-points while Dave placed screws, or I removed them. A good calf workout, to be sure. Dave checked the angle of the upper face with his clinometer - 60 degrees! Not bad...

Dave approaches the mid-face belay.

 

We topped out on a flat ice plateau, exhausted. When we gathered the energy, we slogged up the remaining 400ft of snow and ice-covered scree to the summit of Observation Rock. From our perch, we had stunning closeup views of the north side of Rainier. We pointed out the Liberty Ridge route to Greg, and we all got a good look at Ptarmigan Ridge and the Mowich Face. Also, throughout this whole area surrounding O Rock, there are wide, mini ice faces in abundance, usually about 2 pitches high.

Looking across the way to O Rock's little neighbour, Echo Rock, we saw two people making their way up. A short time later, we saw them running full speed down the little snowfield at the base. They were movin' fast!!! I expected to see little dumbells in their hands and earphones on their heads...

We began the descent, elated at the great little climb, and the stellar fall day. Once we hit the snowfield that led back to Spray Park, Greg and I were wishing very hard that we had our skis. It would have been supreme! A layer of dry powder covered the old snow, probably dense enough lower down to prevent your skis from hitting the icy stuff. It would have been soooo sweeet!

Greg descending from Observation Rock. One of the many "mini ice faces" can be seen in right center.

 

We filled up out water bottles with cloudy effluent from the "Toilet Bowl", and continued down to Spray Park and back to the car by a quarter past five. There, we noticed that a log had been placed across the pretty rock-lined road we had driven on. There were no more cars or tents in our area. I guess we weren't supposed to be here. As Greg began taking down his tent (after the frosty night, he left it up during the day for it to dry - but it didn't), two rangers appeared, at about the worst possible moment. At first, they were nice, and talked about the day, asked us where we had been. They mentioned that there was almost no one left up in Spray Park at the moment - they seemed satisfied that their day was at a close. We told them we saw many many people heading up, as we were coming down, most dressed in cotton with no packs. They didn't really seem interested. Then we got busted. We tried to explain that the log wasn't there last night. "Well, it was supposed to be!" was the reply. We got off with a stern warning about $150 fines for several rules that we were breaking.

We rushed back to Seattle, since Dave had a prior engagement which he was already going to be late for. In Buckley, we stopped for gas. The gas station wouldn't take debit or credit cards, because their printer was malfunctioning. Hmm. Then, a gas pump started leaking profusely, and gas started spilling everywhere. Greg overheard the cashier's casual response as someone ran in to tell her about it. "Oh, it must be that pump again.".

We hurriedly left the explosive situation as someone dumped a white substance over the spill. Once on the road again, we saw dark plumes of smoke, illuminated from beneath (i.e. as if by fire), another mile or two in front of us. We passed by a side road that headed to the flames - big flames, something big burning, and lots of people trying to leave. Some fire trucks and abulances whizzed by. We unanimously agreed that we should high-tail it out of this crazy town, and to that effect, Greg stepped on the gas, and we headed off into the sunset towards Seattle.