Rainier’s foreboding north face
By Skip CardTacoma News Tribune
Feb. 27, 2001
MOUNT RAINIER, Wash.
Mount Rainier’s Willis Wall — a 4,000-foot mountain face frequently bombarded by avalanches and menaced by a sinister overhanging ice cliff — isn’t such a popular hangout anymore. No brave soul has attempted any of Willis Wall’s five known routes in at least 10 years, maybe longer, Mount Rainier rangers say. While climbers on other parts of the mountain cope with crowds and bottlenecks, Willis Wall’s reputation as the most dangerous place on the peak has helped the forbidding face stand alone and aloof. Forty years ago, things were different. In the early 1960s, as the Northwest’s best mountaineers began to chart routes up a side of Mount Rainier some predicted would never be climbed, Willis Wall was the most talked-about spot in the national park. “On Rainier, it was the last big unclimbed face. And everybody knew it had a lot of risk associated with it because of avalanche conditions that prevailed much of the year,” said Jim Wickwire, a Seattle climber who made several pioneering climbs on Willis Wall. “If it hasn’t been climbed in 10 or 11 years,” Wickwire said, “it means the reputation is relatively intact.” Anyone who sees Willis Wall hardly needs to be convinced of its danger. The wall encompasses the avalanche-scarred stretch of Mount Rainier’s north face between Curtis Ridge and Liberty Ridge. It rises from the Carbon Glacier some 4,000 feet to meet ice cliffs spilling from 14,112-foot Liberty Cap, the lowest of the three prominent nobs on the mountain’s broad summit. Chunks of ice and rock frequently careen down the wall in warm weather and scatter debris down its 50-degree sides. In 1999, the body of a climber who tumbled onto the wall from Liberty Ridge was pushed 50 feet downhill and buried beneath several feet of avalanche debris in just one night. The wall took its name from Bailey Willis, a turn-of-the- century geologist who spent years charting the north side of what he called Mount Tacoma. Willis was convinced no one would ever climb the face and survive, and for nearly six decades National Park Service rangers shared his view and prohibited attempts. “There’s no way to effectively manage the rock fall, the risk. You’re always under it, no matter where you are on the Willis Wall,” said John Krambrink, former chief ranger at Mount Rainier. “You are exposed all the time until you get to the top.” By the late 1950s, however, rangers started to relax the rules. Climbers charted potential routes up the wall’s east, west and central ribs, three ridges of rock that jut from the wall. An East Coast climber named Charlie Bell claimed an unauthorized solo ascent of the West Rib in June 1961, and Ed Cooper and Mike Swayne climbed the east edge of the wall in 1962. Dave Mahre, who grew up dreaming of mountains while working on his family’s Yakima-area ranch, was among the first to ascend Willis Wall directly. The danger was part of the wall’s allure for Mahre, then age 35. “Everybody had said it was suicide and it would never be climbed,” recalled Mahre, now 73. “But I was cocky. I felt I could climb with anybody at that time.” Mahre said he observed the wall’s hazards for six years while he mapped a climbing route. “You could see rocks as big as a boxcar come off that thing, and I’ve seen chunks of ice from Liberty Cap that slid halfway down the wall before they started to break up — that’s how big they were,” Mahre recalled. Mahre chose a route up the wall’s East Rib. His epic 21-hour climb in June 1963 with Wickwire, Fred Dunham and Don Anderson marked the first time anyone climbed directly up the wall’s face without veering to one side to avoid the overhanging ice cliff at the top. Near the top, the four had to crawl on hands and knees along a narrow rock ledge known as the Traverse of Angels, and a storm that cut visibility to 50 feet enveloped them as they reached the ice cliff. Anderson was stricken with high-altitude pulmonary edema at the summit, and the group was forced to descend quickly down a more familiar route. “Willis Wall is not something you would like to climb back down,” Mahre said. “You don’t want to have your back turned to what’s behind you.” Mahre never repeated the climb. “Once is enough,” he said.
For more information, visit www.nps.gov/mora/climb/climb.htm for climbing updates from the official Web site of Mount Rainier National Park.
