David von Oheimb's Photo Gallery:
Mount Rainier, Washington, USA, 2-3 Jul 2006

This was my second attempt to scale this massive mountain, via the popular Paradise - Camp Muir - Disappointment Cleaver route. The first one had been in May 2005.
Unfortunately, the summit was in a lenticular cloud, and to my disappointment it did not disappear by the time my two climbing partners and I reached the vicinity of the summit. Up there it was just awful: strong cold wind and extremely poor visibility. So after reaching about 4200 meters¹ of elevation, just 200 meters below the summit, I decided it did not make much sense to go any further. So I turned back, leaving the summit for a later attempt with better weather. Yet my rope partners wanted to continue to the top, and I did not want to hold them off, nor wait for them. In that moment, RMI guide Victor passed by from above, leading a party on three ropes. He was kind enough to left me join their first rope for the way down to Camp Muir, which worked perfectly. Right after my return to Paradise, apparently just to tease me, the lenticular cloud dissolved for about two hours.
I decided that next time I'd do the mountain single-push (car-to-car, without camping), starting in the night and avoiding carrying all that heavy camping gear half way up the mountain. Sleeping up there is not that comfortable and relaxing anyway. This plan actually worked out fine on my third attempt.

¹ To those folks who still adhere to measuring length in multiples of the boot size of their medieval ancestors, sorry for the inconvenience applying a conversion factor of 10 over 3.

Landing at the Seattle-Tacoma airport on 25 June 2006
Longing looks while hiking Granite Mountain on 1 July 2006
Reaching Paradise (1647m)	The nasty lenticular cloud			Late take-off, at 3 pm
Ascent to Camp Muir		Mount Adams	Mount Adams
		Muir Snowfield		The RMI hut, shortly after 7 pm
Camp Muir (3105m)	My rope partners Alex and Viktor, melting snow for making tea	My bivvy
Ascent towards the summit (4392m), starting at 3 am	A chain of headlamps on Disappointment Cleaver			Ingraham Glacier
	Little Tahoma
		Emmons Glacier		Turning back, shortly after 8 am
Descent to Camp Muir (3 hours)	The RMI party			Cowlitz Galcier
Descent to Paradise (1.5 hours)
Views from Paradise (after return at 2 pm)
Mirror Lake etc.
Lunch with fine views at the Puyallup Hangar Inn at Pierce County Airport