A Year in Paradise by Flyod Schmoe

Author:Flyod Schmoe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mountaineers Books

Summit and crater of Mount Rainier from about 20,000 feet. The elevation at the summit is 14,410 feet. Steam jets about the edges of the crater keep the rim bare of snow and form caverns under the snow where climbers can take shelter. Camp Comfort is the rock at bottom center. (Photo by National Park Service)

Poorly equipped and inexperienced as they were, it was a valiant effort and Kautz Glacier with Wapowety Cleaver beyond justly honor the two leaders of the expedition.

It was thirteen years later before another attempt, this time successful, was made on the old mountain. It was mid-August of 1870 when General Hazard Stevens and P. V. Van Trump, with a Cowlitz Indian named Sluiskin as a guide, made a final camp at the edge of the meadow just a hundred yards from where we sat. Hazard Stevens was the son of the first governor of Washington Territory, and served in the Civil War as an officer on his father’s staff. The father was killed while leading the charge at Chantilly and the son was severely wounded. He was mustered out at the end of the war as a brigadier general of volunteers and returned to Washington Territory, where he took up farming near Olympia. His neighbor, Van Trump, was an experienced mountaineer. (Van Trump made a second ascent in 1883 with James Longmire, and at the time to which I am referring he was still living, and telling the story of his adventures at every opportunity. Until only five years before this time, he had been a National Park Ranger living at Indian Henry’s Ranger Station.)

Sluiskin, who had actually never been so far up the mountain before, refused to take any responsibility beyond the snow line, and he warned Stevens and Van Trump that “there are demons who dwell in a lake of fire at the summit and no one can make the ascent and live. If you should escape the perils of rock and ice,” he told them, “and reach the great snowy dome a bitterly cold and furious tempest will sweep you off into space like a withered leaf, and if by some miracle you should survive all these perils, the mighty demon of Tahoma will surely throw you into the fiery lake. Don’t go,” he urged them.

In spite of Sluiskin’s pessimism the two pushed on, but only after Sluiskin had demanded and received a “signed paper” absolving him from all blame for their death.

Equipped with crampons and ice axes and skilled in climbing, the two reached the summit after eleven grueling hours. It was then so late that they were forced to spend the night in a steam cave which they discovered under the snow within the summit crater. When they returned safely to camp near the end of the second day they found Sluiskin just packing to leave the mountain with the story of their death. He was very happy to see them nevertheless, and feasted them on broiled marmot, four of which he had taken from the vicinity of Marmot Rock and prepared as food for his return trip.

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