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Mount Rainier looms in the distance beyond Seattle. On a clear day, you can see the majestic nearly three-mile-tall volcano, taller than a sky scraper in perspective, its upper slopes clad in a permanent layer of white. With no other mountains around it, it stands proud, tall, and massive in its isolation. The Native Americans of the Northwest called it Tahoma, the mother of waters, for the Nisqually River that rises there from the annual spring melt of accumulated snow on Rainier’s southern flanks. In the summer of 1999, I joined a charity climb of the mountain, raising money for Washington State’s National Parks Fund. On a beautiful day at the beginning of August, we started our ascent, climbing from the parking lot at 5,000 feet to our base camp at 10,000 feet, where the treacherous glaciers begin. On the upper slopes of a mountain like Rainier, the safest time to climb is in the wee hours of morning, when the cold of night has frozen snows to their hardest, reducing the risk of a melt-triggered avalanche, or the collapse of the feet-thick layer of snow below you that might cover a deep and deadly crack in the hard ice glacier. And so we bedded down before the sun set, and awoke at midnight to don our gear for the push to the summit at more than 14,000 feet. Mountaineering gear is an object lesson in the progress of technology. In the lodge at the bottom of Rainier there are pictures of the early explorers who first reached the summit of this mountain. They’re clad in heavy woolen clothing, prone to getting wet and soggy. They bear stout wooden staves to keep their balance. On their feet are leather shoes. Thick hemp ropes and harnesses connected them to one another. Gas-lit lamps provided their illumination . An expedition might take a week or more to reach the top. By contrast, my team and I slid into light, waterproof Gore-Tex gear. In our hands were light, strong ice axes made of aluminum, titanium, or carbon fiber. A braided nylon rope the thickness of my finger and strong enough to ten the reducer 137 T h e R e d u c e r bear the weight of a small car connected us. Small battery-powered headlamps were attached to our helmets, providing bright hands-free light. Our boots were hard rigid plastic, with a soft insulated inner boot that kept our feet perfectly warm and dry. To those boots we strapped steel crampons—artificial metal claws for our feet that would give us purchase on even slippery ice, devices so useful and effective that serious pre-crampon mountain climbers considered them “not sporting” due to the advantage they brought. Where early explorers had taken a week to climb the mountain, we would take less than a day from bottom to top. By 12:30 AM we were fully geared up, our water bottles filled, a protein bar in our bellies. The dangerous part of the climb began. The moon was full. We crossed a long crevasse-broken field, occasionally stepping or jumping over cracks three or four feet wide but hundreds of feet deep. Crossing our trail ahead we could see the marks left in the snow by boulders that had fallen from the upper mountain. Some of them lay where they’d come to a stop, barely off our path. Looking downhill I could see a layer of cloud a thousand feet below us, lapping at the mountain like a sea. Then, at 11,000 feet, something started to go wrong. The light from my headlamp dimmed slightly and started to fade. By 11,500 feet, it was gone. I’d made an amateur mistake. I hadn’t put a fresh set of batteries in the lamp. And I didn’t have any spares. I was lucky that the moon was full that night. It provided enough light to continue. I pressed on with the climb, saw the sunrise, reached the summit, and got back down in one piece. On a new moon night, or if there had been high clouds, my climb would have ended unsuccessfully. I would have put my team and myself at risk. When I came back to Rainier in 2006 to climb the mountain again, I triple-checked that my headlamp had fresh batteries in it. A set of spares were in my pack...

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