The Ingraham Glacier Icefall
Near Ashford, Washington
On the morning of the twenty first of June, nineteen eighty one, Mount Rainier delivered the worst mountaineering disaster in American history. A group of twenty three novice climbers, led by six professional guides, had left Paradise the day before after a single day of basic instruction. They spent the night at Camp Muir and set out before dawn for the summit, roped together and crossing the Ingraham Glacier at a place called Ingraham Flats.
Shortly before six in the morning, without any warning, the icefall above them fractured. Guides watching from higher up saw a wall of ice about three hundred feet wide break loose and fall some eight hundred feet, shattering as it struck the mountain. An avalanche of ice and snow then swept down onto the climbing party.
Eleven people, ten of them clients and one guide, were killed, swept into deep crevasses. Rescuers could not recover them. Their bodies remain entombed in the glacier to this day, carried slowly downhill inside the moving ice.
A later board of inquiry found that the guides had followed accepted mountaineering practice and were not at fault. It ruled the collapse a random event that no one could have predicted, a sobering reminder that on an active glaciated volcano, the mountain itself sets the terms.
