In the spring and summer, when the vast majority of Rainier’s 10,000 or so annual climbers attempt to reach the summit, the weather begins to mellow, avalanche danger lessens, and crevasses remain mostly covered. But ideally the mountain should still be frozen hard. A firm snowpack provides crampons and ice axes with the best purchase, allowing climbers to stick to steep slopes without sliding, while reducing the danger of ice and rockslides. Accidents and falls increase when climbing on loose dirt, slush, and rock, as well as when navigating exposed blue glacier ice, which is normally covered in snow and otherwise extremely slick.
Yet high-mountain areas, known as the cryosphere, are warming up to twice as fast as the global average. Rainier has lost half its ice since 1896, with most of that loss occurring in recent years; three of its 29 glaciers have disappeared since 2021. Researchers last fall went as far as to assert that the 14,410-foot mountain is now 10 feet shorter than it was in 1998 due to a rocky outcropping replacing its former highest point, a mound of ice that has since melted away.
For the guides working on Rainier, the weather in April and May sets the stage for the rest of the season, when spring storms ideally dump the snow needed for the summer climbs. “It doesn’t really matter what happens in December, January, February,” Spitzer told me, since winter snow is dry and blows off the summit rather than accumulates. Alpine Ascents had guides on the summit of Rainier last week who reported that the upper mountain has a lot of snow, but Spitzer cautioned that the character of the season ahead is still uncertain. “It’s been really dry in April,” he noted.
And it’s not looking good for May, either. Temperatures in the Puget Sound region are 20 to 25 degrees above average to start the month, a kind of final exclamation point on the wickedly warm winter and ongoing snow drought across the West. The Cascade mountain basins have only around 29% of their historic median snow-water equivalent, the metric used to measure snowpack and provide insight into runoff, water availability, and the fire season ahead. Tom Vogl, the CEO of the Mountaineers, a Seattle-based alpine club that offers local climbing courses, told me that “100%, with almost no uncertainty, we’re going to have a shorter climbing season on Washington peaks this year.”
In Oregon and northern California, where Lassen Peak sits at the southern end of the Cascades’ volcanic backbone, the snow-water equivalent median is as low as 1% in places. “Mount Hood is a mess right now,” Graham Zimmerman, a professional alpinist and the athlete alliance manager at Protect Our Winters, told me.
Zimmerman was on Oregon’s highest peak in February to climb Arachnophobia, a challenging route, and he told me that on “significant sections of the south side of the mountain, up high on the final summit, we were walking on dirt.” Though Zimmerman isn’t a guide himself, many of his friends are, and for “the core season up there in June, it’s going to be pretty intense,” he predicted. “There’s not going to be a lot of ice, it’s going to be pretty dirty, and when those mountains start to thaw out, they get pretty dang crumbly, and that’s going to create a risk for those going up there.”
Think of a mountain like a scoop of Rocky Road in an ice cream cone. Fresh out of the freezer, the scoop holds its shape because everything is frozen in place — but as it starts to melt, marshmallows and nuts begin to slough down the sides.
Except on a mountain, it’s not marshmallows and nuts but avalanches and rockfall. In addition to being a life-or-death hazard in the moment — and top-of-mind for the risk-averse concessioners guiding otherwise oblivious novice clients — the debris on a warming mountain can close routes to the peak, crowding the ones that remain. “When you have a bunch of people on a route, it doesn’t make things safer,” Zimmerman said. “It makes things more dangerous because people knock stuff onto each other, and because it slows things down.”
Even as the season shortens due to inadequate snowpack, more and more people are trying to climb on an ever-smaller number of viable days. That puts additional pressure on the guides, whose clients take time off from work and pay thousands of dollars for the chance to summit within a predetermined window, even as conditions overall become more dangerous.
This strain is particularly visible in the Himalayas, where photos of the conga line headed to the top of Everest go viral every few years. This season, icefall from a glacier closed the route to the world’s highest point for more than a week, with more icefall anticipated, adding to concerns about queues.
Iconic climbs in the Alps are also a mess due to warming weather and snow shortages. Spitzer, of Alpine Ascents, used to guide on Mont Blanc from June through September, but these days, many guides in the Alps stop around July 15 and resume again in mid- to late-August, when the mountains start to firm up again, because the height of summer in Europe is so hot. “The mountains are dynamic right now,” Spitzer said, and “it’s not just here in Washington. We’re seeing it globally.”
This raises, perhaps, the question of “so what?” Mountaineering is a niche, expensive, and often elite pastime. But a low summer snowpack has knock-on effects: “We expect to see pretty significant impacts on [gateway] communities, not just from the perspective of water availability but also how that relates to guiding businesses, water sports, water recreation, and the outdoor industry, which is really big in the West,” Erin Sprague, the CEO of Protect Our Winters, told me. Rafting guides, for example, could also see abbreviated seasons, hurting their bottom line. Outdoor retailers like REI could see sales slump if it’s a particularly bad fire year, keeping people off the trails.
That’s not to mention that 75% of the West gets its water from snowpack, meaning what happens in the mountains will impact even those for whom sweat, bugs, chance bear encounters, and walking uphill for hours sounds like personal torment.
“It’s not just about mountaineers and climbers who experience the glaciers in a more direct way for recreational purposes — it literally touches every person who lives in the Northwest,” Vogl, the Mountaineers CEO, told me. “This should matter.”
It does to me. In 2021, a few weeks after the Pacific Northwest heat dome, I summited Mount Rainier with my dad on the 50th anniversary of his first climb of the mountain when he was 14. In 1971, August 12 had been the peak of the Cascade climbing season; in 2021, we climbed in a haze of wildfire smoke and almost didn’t make it to the summit because of the warm conditions on the mountain. (Vogl, who was leading a trip on the other side of Rainier around the same time, said exposed blue ice and running water were directly responsible for an accident in his group that resulted in a broken femur and required a helicopter evacuation.) Stripped down to my base layers during the descent from the peak, I watched a boulder the size of a minivan come off a rock across the glacier from where we were climbing. In other spots, we had to balance across ladders laid over crevasses so deep you couldn’t see their bottom.
Last fall, I gave birth to my daughter, and I’ve been thinking about what the mountain will look like in August 2071, on the 100th anniversary of her grandfather’s first summit and the 50th of mine. When I asked Vogl what he thought, I expected something optimistic from the CEO of an organization focused on getting people outdoors. But he sounded crestfallen. “Some of the climbs that I’ve done with my kids, I doubt that they’ll be able to do them with their kids because the conditions are going to change so dramatically,” he said.
I also asked Zimmerman, the accomplished alpinist, what he thought about the future of his sport. He meditated on the question throughout our conversation, only to circle back to it at the end. “I don’t think that people are going to stop climbing,” he finally said. “But I think that people are going to need to come to terms with the fact that we’re living in a changing climate.”
“We’re going to have to continue to adapt, to be smart, to really focus on situational awareness while we’re out there,” he went on. The sense of adventure and risk inherent to climbing won’t just be about first ascents and “going to places where people haven’t necessarily been before,” he predicted — because “even the places we have been are changing.”
SEI/Wood Mackenzie
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