Rainier via Emmons

Mt Rainier via Emmons

Thomas and Peter climbing the Emmons Glacier

June 12/13, 2026

Eric Gilbertson, Peter Steele, Thomas Coleman

11:30pm – 6pm, 20 miles, 11kft gain

I decided to get one last ski trip in for the season on Rainier. We drove to Paradise Friday afternoon and the staff advised us that the ladders had fallen out on the Ingraham Direct route and no teams had made it up past 12kft recently. The DC route was unknown and potentially had complicated route finding since the guides hadn’t wanded a route yet. So we decided to go for Emmons instead, since it was very likely still in good shape.

The route

We drove around to the White River campground and got a few hours of sleep in the parking lot. We were then moving by 11:30pm. We made good time up the melted-out trail and hit continuous snow around 6600ft at the base of the Inter Glacier. We bare booted up some good steps all the way to Steamboat Prow by the first hints of sunrise around 4am. From there we cramponed down snow and some rocky scrambling to Camp Shurman.

We then roped up and started up the glacier. Interestingly, about 20 people were above us stopped around 11.5kft. We later learned someone fell in a crevasses and they were getting pulled out. Almost all the teams turned around and said they couldn’t find the route above. Indeed, the old boot track had been covered by some fresh snow, but we could certainly see multiple route options above that would work.

Hiking above Camp Shurman

We continued up, and started catching up to one three-person team that was continuing. They found an excellent route following the remnants of the old boot track. We navigated around some crevasses between 11.5kft to 12.5kft, angling up and right to the Winthrop Glacier. Above 13kft the route was straightforward and we marched directly up to the crater rim, bypassing the Curtis-Rainier col. Around 11am we topped out, and tagged both Columbia Crest and the true summit on the SW Rim.

Skiing down

After an hour of hanging out we started down. Ideally we would have skied from the rim, but it was a bit too icy and exposed to crevasse danger for my liking. So we carried skies back down to 11.5kft. From there we had a fun ski down the softening snow to Camp Shurman. We continued down and right, then booted back up to the Inter Glacier. It was then a fun ski back to snowline at 6.6kft.

Unfortunately Thomas had dropped a trail runner on the ascent, so had to hike out in a boot liner on one foot and a trail runner on the other. We made it back to the trailhead by 6pm and soon drove home.

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