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Cullowhee woman summits Washington’s Mt. Rainier
By Carey King
Most people would probably choose to stay far, far away from a 14,410-foot active volcano encased in more than 35 square miles of snow and ice.
It’s a logical choice – Washington state’s Mt. Rainier claims the lives of an average of three climbers a year, and already four this summer.
But after Cullowhee’s Linda Beja got her first glimpse of the mountain during a trip out West to visit her sister, she just knew she had to see it from the top.
Cullowhee’s Linda Beja raises her ice ax in victory after she reaches the 14,410-foot summit of Washington’s Mt. Rainier.
“I used to say I was going to climb it before it blows,” said Beja, 40, controller at Western Carolina University.
Once that sister announced plans to leave Washington for Canada, Beja knew it was time to fulfill her promise. This July, after nearly two days of climbing, she achieved her goal.
“It takes your breath away. There were blue, blue, blue skies forever and ever and ever. You could see Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Adams,” Beja said.
The view didn’t come without work. After joining up with a guide group, Beja spent a day in training at a mountain base camp learning to use a climbing harness, ice ax and crampons – shoe spikes she described as “claws on your feet.”
Rising to a height of 14,410 feet above sea level, Washington’s Mt. Rainier, still an active volcano, is covered with ice and snow year round. Linda Beja of Cullowhee, who climbed the mountain in July, reported that much of the climb had to be accomplished during the night because it’s too dangerous to cross the glaciers when the sun is out.
The next day, Beja and a team of 12 hiked six hours, nearly five miles and 6,300 feet up, crossing a field of permanent ice and snow to reach bunks at a site called Camp Muir. There, they hit the sack at 6:30 p.m., waking four hours later to begin their next climb at 1 a.m.
“Once you’re at 10,000 feet, it’s hard to breathe. The air is thinner,” Beja said. “Once you start up, you take a step, breathe, then take a step, breathe.”
Guides allowed the teams to take 15-minute breaks every two hours or so, time enough to take backpacks off, wrap up in extra parkas to ward off the cold, go to the bathroom, then “cram 300 to 400 calories” of trail mix or cold pizza, she said.
Carrying a 35-pound pack, Beja found herself harnessed to a length of rope, strapped four feet away from her guide and second in line in a team of four.
“They short-rope you, so other people can help you,” Beja said. “But you’re switchbacking, so that rope is sometimes slack and sometimes tight. It’s hard to settle in to a comfortable gait.”
The group was forced to hike at night to ensure safe crossing of Disappointment Cleaver, a rocky route straddled by two enormous glaciers. Unsafe by midmorning due to melting ice and rock falls, the Cleaver is the toughest part of the ascent, Beja said.
“They want you off by 10 a.m. because things start falling on people,” she said.
Thus, climbers had one and a half hours to cross the Cleaver, two hours to hike across a snowy glacier, a volcanic crater and up the mountain’s peak, then about 10 minutes to savor the view.
“It took us 5 hours and 41 minutes from Camp Muir,” Beja said. “We summitted the crater at 7:22 a.m.”
The lack of time at the top wasn’t a problem, Beja said, since she found beauty was all along the way, especially during moments when the group got to stop and absorb the experience. Once, around 2 or 3 a.m., with ice axes in hand and crampons crunching in the snow, Beja’s guide told their team to wait so that a group in front of them could get ahead.
“It was the first time I actually looked up, way up, and what I saw brought tears to my eyes,” she said. “I saw the lights from all the headlamps on the other 30 or so people heading up the mountain in a long, very steep, snaking line. I cannot even begin to describe how beautiful that was, seeing those lights, like stars against the dark silhouette of the mountain.”
Bejas savors the fact that all 12 members of her team made it to the summit, an achievement most others can’t claim.
“On the way you end up losing people,” she said. Guides left one woman at Camp Muir, two climbers in a tent along the way, and two more in a sleeping bag.
“They were strong aerobically but the altitude got them,” she said.
Though her knee is still sore from a stumble on the Cleaver, Beja was able to make the full journey after a regimen of “really big hikes” and hours on the gym stairstepper. The lady’s no newcomer to mountains – over the course of the past three summers, Beja has traversed North Carolina and Tennessee to climb 40 southern Appalachian peaks higher than 6,000 feet.
“They were good training, but they don’t have glaciers,” she said.
Dressed in long underwear and insulated jackets at Rainier’s peak, Beja found herself stripping to shorts and a T-shirt for the 90-degree temperatures that awaited her at the mountain’s base.
As snow turned to slush, “you just had to sit on your butt and slide,” she said. As a result, the trip down the mountain took the group about a third of the time it took to go up, allowing them to reach base camp by 4:30 p.m.
“We all had a beer and got our summit certificates,” said Beja, whose mother and stepfather, Colette and Joe Chambers of Cashiers, were also on hand to offer congratulations after driving cross-country in their RV.
But don’t count that finale as the final one in Beja’s mountain conquests – she’s already eyeing Alaska’s 20,320-foot Mt. McKinley and Chile’s 22,840-foot Mt. Aconcagua.
“The adventure was over way too soon,” she wrote friends as soon at the Rainier climb was done. “I already want to go back.”
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