The First Climb, August Eighteen Seventy
Near Ashford, Washington
On the seventeenth of August, eighteen seventy, two men named Hazard Stevens and Philemon Beecher Van Trump became the first people to leave a documented record of standing on the summit of Mount Rainier. Their journey began in Olympia. They picked up pack horses in Yelm from James Longmire, who guided them as far as Bear Prairie, and there they hired a Yakama hunter named Sluiskin to lead them toward the high country.
The final push nearly cost them their lives. Late in the day they reached a false summit, now called Point Success, some two hundred and fifty feet below the true top. With darkness closing in and the temperature plunging, they could not descend safely.
They survived the night huddled inside an ice cavern near the summit crater, kept from freezing by sulfur steam venting from the volcano itself. The next morning they crossed to the true high point, Columbia Crest, where Stevens left a brass plate wedged against a boulder to mark their achievement. There are older oral traditions among Native peoples of climbers who came before, but Stevens and Van Trump were the first to write it down, and their harrowing ascent opened the age of mountaineering on Rainier.
