Thursday, January 26, 2012

The Mountain is Eating People and the Weather Man is Dumping

Currently I am back in Washington after more than a year away. My transient habits broken for the time being as I have now officially slept in one place for more than 10 days in a row and have a house to live in instead of numerous wonderful couches.

I'm fortunate enough to have gotten a Winter internship with the National Park Service on Mt.Rainier. Work entails checking and reporting the weather, snowshoe patrol, registering back country users and climbers, search and rescue, and much much more.


My time in the park started on January 10th just over a week of the New Year's tragedy here on the mountain. One of the parks rangers was shot and killed by a violent visitor a suspect in another recent shooting in Seattle. The shooting resulted in a several day man hunt and shutdown of the park. In the end the mountain got the killer.

By the time I arrived everyone who was still here was exhausted and in some form of shock. You could feel it in the mountain its self.

During my first 10 days 7 people were subjects of SAR operations. The first a lost snowshoer we knew about, the third and fourth a pair of lost snowshoers we didn't know about until they happened upon a search team looking for the first snowshoer. The fourth through seventh subjects are now listed as missing persons after a week long search without results.

The weather has been dumping a mix of Colorado style powder instead of the usual Cascade cement, and Washington's special: rain. We had a 14" day last week which was exciting but did nothing to help the search efforts. Due to the conditions the search was only able to have aircraft (2 helicopters, 1 fixed wing) for one day.


Learning lots and excited for the weekend as it has finally calmed down around here after nonstop SAR for two weeks. Of course it is just in time for the weekend which means people and lots of them.