“Not much else we can do until this lifts,” he says. Gauthier gathers his gear and glances out the window. “I'll call Aero and give them the alert,” Klump adds, referring to the pilots at Aero-Copter, a Seattle helicopter charter service that often assists on rescues. Gauthier agrees to coordinate things from Paradise Ranger Station and will stand ready with crampons and ice ax if he and his climbing rangers are needed.
“Wander too far right and you're dead.” After getting a reading from Gauthier and Kirschner on the search-and-rescue (SAR) strengths of the on-duty rangers, Klump decides to put two teams in the field. “Wander too far left and you're dead,” says one ranger. In 1999, four climbers in three separate parties set out for Muir and never made it back. When mountaineers disappear on the rolling snow field below Camp Muir, the well-trafficked stone bunkhouse at 10,000 feet on Rainier's southern flank, it's often because they've fallen through a slot in Nisqually Glacier or Paradise Glacier, which bracket the trail and are striped with crevasses five stories deep. Perfect conditions for getting lost, terrible for getting found. For the past two days Rainier has been its old pre-Prozac self, sulking in a drizzle and hiding behind mist as gray as concrete and nearly as dense. Two climbers, Patrick Anderson and Christina Faine, are missing somewhere in the 34 square miles of snow and ice that encases this 14,410-foot volcano. Kirschner and Gauthier, along with a third ranger, Steve Klump, are sitting around a desk at Mount Rainier's Longmire Ranger Station. “The troubling part is that we don't have a record of them checking in at Camp Muir.”
“Hard to say,” says lead climbing ranger Mike “Gator” Gauthier. “Whaddya think?” Asks backcountry ranger Rick Kirschner. When his best friend died on Mount Rainier, Mike Gauthier set out to do the improbable: turn a ragtag crew of climbing bums into the mountain's guardian angels Strap on your helmet and jump into the knife-edged world of America's elite wilderness rescue squads: the perils they face, the risks they take, and the stories they tell. Atop stormy mountains, on monster seas, in unmapped caves, wherever adventure goes wrong, a cadre of daring emergency rescuers stands ready to step in and save your butt-even if it means risking their own lives.
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