After about an hour of sleep we hear guide, and cook, Dave yelling at everyone to get moving. It's 10:45. Hot drinks and gear arrangement take the next hour or so. Everyone has stripped their packs of hoods and all non-essential gear, leaving only clothing, two quarts of liquid, and snack food. (I take my cell phone in case we get lucky.)

By 12:15 am we are in our harnesses, roped, cramponed and headlamped up, and ready to go up in two four-person rope teams. The summit is a mere 5000' feet away at 14,411'.

The projected route is pretty much just straight up the Emmons Glacier to the Columbia Crest, traversing where necessary. The first two rest breaks of about 10 minutes after each hour segment of climbing are sufficient to get a small amount of water and some candy down and make minor gear adjustments. (I started out in nothing but my Patagonia lightweight, long-sleeved underwear and my Arc'Teryx single-ply nylon wind shell on top, while others had many more layers of clothing, and I was still okay in that gear until sometime around 11,000'.) Up to about 3:30 am, the bright lights of the Puget Sound lowlands look just as they do from an airplane making its final descent.

At the third break, I spend the entire time trying to change out the halogen bulb in my lamp in a cramped position on a 40-degree slope and never get any water or food down. Our rope team also leaves several minutes after the first rope team, putting substantial distance between the two teams for the rest of the ascent. I finally put on my down vest at about 11,000'. That was the last clothing change I made.

Daybreak on the Emmons at about 4:30am is pretty, but because of fatigue and the gap between teams, I don't get out my camera to snap it. In fact, my camera doesn't come out of my pack the entire ascent. As it gets lighter, my problem with the tracks abates but it seems the slopes get progressively steeper, and my inexperience with using crampons efficiently becomes increasingly an energy-consuming factor.

By about 6am or so, we are between 12,000' and 12,500'. At that point our rope team is starting to lose touch with the first team, partly because I am getting slower. During the prior two breaks, I had no time or energy to get out food or water, and I am starting to feel uneasy, symptoms that I later realize are part of the HACE (High Altitude Cerebral Edema) syndrome. I am having fuzziness of vision and a sense of disorientation, which steadily progresses to lurching from side to side, and ultimately to essentially complete blindness (except for sensation of light) in my right eye. Not wanting to screw up a potential summit attempt for my colleagues, since the weather is still okay at that point, I continue to lurch up the mountain for another 1100-1200' of elevation gain.

Somewhere between 7:30 and 8am, the weather hits — close to a whiteout with wind gusts of 40-50 mph. This is what Derrick, one of the guides, later describes as "full-on" conditions. It is at about 13,400' that I realize I am likely not going to make it in my condition without some food and water and a good 30-minute blow, but conditions at that time are not going to allow such an interlude. We nevertheless continue to trudge on up.

Garry Musy, behind me in position #3, is well aware of my increasingly precarious condition. At 13,580' (by my altimeter), I lose footing, largely because of the HACE, I think, and the team and I go into serious ice-axe arrest positions for the first time. I get back up the slope, and am attempting to recover and adjust gear when my ice axe gets away and starts sliding back down the slope. HACE affects judgment, and I stupidly almost go after the axe; 13,000' up on Mt. Rainier is not a good place to be without your ice axe.

At this point, Dave has gone up further ahead to check on the status of the first rope team. They have gotten up to 13,820' before Dale, the head guide, calls off the ascent because of now really vicious weather conditions. My pal on the first team, John Howell, later describes a death-defying moment at the edge of a crevasse where the team turned around.

As the first team comes back down to our position, Dave has Ryan, the official photographer who is in the #4 position on my rope team, head down the slope to retrieve my axe. Ryan tethers it to my harness as I am pretty rummy by now. At this point I realize I have ripped out my left hamstring in the earlier slip and fall, but now both teams are heading back down, with the guides screaming at us that we have to get down quickly.

After a few hundred feet of descent, I fall again because of my blown leg and aggravate it further. At that point I question whether I am actually going to be able to get down the mountain with my leg, disorientation, and partial blindness.

The weather by this time is really dangerous. In nearly a full whiteout, and with no depth perception because of the loss of vision on the right, I can't tell up from down. To help with the leg, I offload my pack to Dave, and Dale rigs another line from him to my harness so he and Dave can arrest any further falls I might take. Since the rope teams are now in the reverse order going down the mountain, my pal John, who had been at the back of the first team, is now in the lead, and is having great difficulty in navigating the trail and following the instructions being screamed at him from the guides in the rear. He later realizes he has no depth perception either because he's also lost the vision in his right eye.

So it is a good hour and a half of harrowing descent, essentially blind and with 40-50 mph gusts of wind intermittently flattening us against the slope.

Somewhere down about 11,000', I think, the weather clears somewhat and we get a bit of a blow, and finally take off our crampons. Shortly after that we get to stretches of the mountain where we are able to glissade down, erasing big chunks of elevation in three or four minutes that had taken us 45-60 minutes to climb. About noon, Camp Schurman hovers into view, and then it is just a long trudge out down more gentle slopes until we collapse at the camp almost exactly 12 hours after we left.

Within an hour and a half, the nasty weather on top has fully enveloped Camp Schurman. We secure our gear and crawl into the tents, hoping they won't just blow away as they have done before. There is no way anything can be cooked, or water melted for drinking, in the kitchen area, but somehow Dave manages to make some macaroni and cheese and bring it around to the tents at about 5pm. We stay in the tents from 2 that afternoon until 6am Friday morning, constantly battered by high winds, rain, sleet and snow.

All of us in the tent experience violent muscle cramps in various places, and my left leg aches like a son of a bitch. It takes two hours back at Camp Schurman for my right eye to finally clear. John's does not clear until the following morning.

Fortunately the trip down from Schurman is even faster. We glissade for long stretches and are back down to Glacier Basin at 5900' by about 10am, ready for the relatively routine three-mile hike from there to the White River Campground at 4350' where the adventure had started on the prior Tuesday morning. The pain is not over, however, it is compounded by the last part of the hike out. Nothing is worse than hiking downhill on hard trail in rigid double plastic climbing boots. Your toes are slammed into the forepart of the boot with each step, and an hour-and-a-half later I can barely feel my toes on either foot. Five days later the toes on my left foot are still numb.

Every eighth or tenth person you talk to who has actually summitted Rainier has a tale of great weather — nearly shorts and T-shirt to the top — and great vistas. Since we didn't make it to the top (no one made it, I hear, for about five days around the time of our climb), I'm actually glad, in retrospect, that I got to experience the "full-on" conditions of the mountain. Had we gotten to the top, we would have seen nothing, and would have spent five minutes signing the register before getting the hell out. So from a global experience standpoint we certainly weren't cheated.

I now look forward to comparatively civilized backpacking adventures in the Cascades, and elsewhere, for the foreseeable future... in comfortable boots.

— Jay Causey, Seattle, Washington