Being a parent is

This showed up on my facebook feed as something I’d like to share from the past. Two years ago our kids skinned up to 10,000 feet on Mt. Rainier where there is a climbers high camp called Muir. In good weather it is a fairly casual day of backcountry skiing…assuming you are in top notch shape.

But Mt. Rainier has a bad habit of making it’s own weather, which means you can be traveling to or from Muir and bad things can happen. For example clouds can roll in from nowhere and you are suddenly in a white out with zero visibility. Or the winds can come up and turn the snow to ice…at which point you will wish desperately for crampons and an ice ax. There are also large cravasses if you ski too far to left or right…so map and compass navigation skills can be a life saver. In a worse case scenario you may have to dig a snow cave and spend a night waiting out a sudden storm…though one can usually see those coming on the weather forecast. If that happens, you’d better have a thick puffy coat in your pack.

When I posted this photo I had been working, but Sue sent me a text saying they were overdue by a couple hours. Ideally you get back from Muir before dusk. But she said Clint’s blue car was still sitting their in the parking lot. You can see it on the right. That got me worried and I started auto refreshing the web cam. As you can tell from the comments, we raised a couple kids who like adventures. I guess this is payback from when we used to make my mom nervous when Sue and I were climbing mountains…in the winter…miles and miles from the car.

Lisa and I tried to get to Muir a couple months ago but turned back when we hit a white out at 8500 feet. I hope to do it this year…assuming our politicians ever re-open the government.

Our kids go to Muir

Our kids go to Muir together