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Photo by Drew Perine / The Associated Press
Treacherous night on Rainier
Rescuers climb Liberty Cap on Mount Rainier, towing one of two bodies recovered yesterday. A third body was retrieved Wednesday after the lone survivor in the group made his way down to find help.
Chris Solomon, Eric Sorensen and David Bowermaster
Seattle Times staff reporters
Friday, May 31, 2002
When 21-year-old Keeta Owens and three German friends set out to ascend Mount Rainier via the treacherous Liberty Ridge route Saturday, they were among 256 climbers on the mountain. The weather was serving up a Northwest mix of rain, snow and clear skies, but forecasts called for conditions to deteriorate.
The accuracy of those forecasts had dire consequences early Wednesday morning, when Owens and two of her fellow climbers perished in white-out conditions high on the 14,411-foot volcano.
"It was extraordinarily clear that this wasn't a time when you wanted to be on the mountain, and we need to find a way to communicate that information better," said Cliff Mass, a University of Washington meteorologist.
Owens and the two German men were students at Oregon State University. The fourth climber, a German woman, had been visiting. Names of the Germans have not been released, but the lone survivor was a 29-year-old man.
Owens had attended high school in Chugiak, Alaska, and was a senior in zoology, studying to be a veterinarian, said Donna Vanik, who rented Owens a room at her Lebanon, Ore., ranch in exchange for Owens' help caring for her horses.
"She was a wonderful young person," said Vanik. "A great athlete. A great kid."
She was licensed by the Oregon Racing Commission to exercise and groom horses and lead horses to the starting gate, said Carol Morgan, management assistant for the commission. She worked for a time at Portland Meadows racetrack.
The group had never climbed Rainier but reportedly had considerable ice- and rock-climbing experience.
Mike Gauthier, lead climbing ranger at Mount Rainier, spoke to the surviving climber only briefly and was loath to second-guess the group's decisions.
"I didn't detect any error, major bad decision or total screw-up," he said. "They did not strike me as novices."
The severity of the Liberty Ridge route, which cleaves the north side of Mount Rainier, demands climbing savvy, said Gauthier.
The climb traverses through crevasses that plunge into the darkness of the 900-foot-deep Carbon Glacier. The ridge itself is a 5,500-foot climb to Liberty Cap, the mountain's false summit.
Climbers' backs are to the Puget Sound lowlands. To the left, avalanches routinely sweep the enormous face of Willis Wall. "The backdrop's insane," Gauthier said.
Though details of the tragic climb remain sketchy, information from the survivor, relayed through Mount Rainier National Park officials, offers a glimpse of how things quickly went from bad to worse.
The first two days went smoothly and the group camped Sunday night at Thumb Rock, elevation 10,500 feet, on schedule to summit Monday.
But they made slow progress and were forced to camp in the lee of a snow-filled crevasse 1,000 feet below Liberty Cap, which is visible from Seattle as a bump just west of the main summit.
Tuesday began at 6:30 a.m. but was hard going because the steep slopes were sometimes icy, sometimes thigh deep with snow. It took nine hours to reach Liberty Cap.
The day's stormy weather grew worse, with ice lining goggles, jackets and zippers, the survivor told rangers. The group's global positioning system, or GPS — a handheld device that uses satellites to aid navigation — froze up.
Instead of trying to climb higher to the true summit, the group decided to start down via the Emmons Glacier, to the east.
They veered off course, however, and began descending a steep slope on the south side of Liberty Cap. With daylight waning, they realized their error and decided to dig platforms into the 35-degree slope to pitch tents.
One tent, then the other, broke apart in the high winds.
The group divided and dug snow caves for shelter, using the shredded tents as walls. The thick ice made digging difficult.
The survivor and one of the women crawled into one cave and slept, but were awakened by the second woman, telling them that the second man had somehow fallen and disappeared. She tried to enter the cave, but accidentally collapsed it on her companions.
During the next, confusing hours, the surviving man fell and came across the other man, dead. By then, the survivor was missing the outer shell of a plastic climbing boot, so he attached himself to the mountain with ice screws, wrapped himself in a sleeping bag he had found, and waited until morning to move.
Around daybreak he ascended past the Liberty Cap and dropped east onto the Winthrop Glacier. He hiked down until he met skiers and borrowed a cellphone to call for help. He told rangers he thought the women were still alive, but sometime during the night they, too, had fallen.
The bodies of the deceased climbers were found about 300 to 400 feet below the bivouac site. A small ice cliff was nearby, but it is unclear whether they went over it, said Nick Giguere, a climbing ranger who helped retrieve two of the bodies yesterday.
One body was recovered Wednesday. The two bodies retrieved yesterday lay a few hundred yards from each other.
There will be an investigation, but it may never be clear what exactly happened, said park spokeswoman Maria Gillett.
Copyright© 2002 by The Seattle Times Company