April 3-4, 2004, Mt Rainier - Ingraham Direct

Seeing the great weather forecast on Thursday night, we decided that we would head up to Rainier over the week-end. We skinned up the Paradise - Muir highway on Saturday afternoon with 2 friends who joined us for the day.
Up at Muir, conditions were fairly windy, some people we met in the hut told us that the forecast was for some very strong wind during the night and that they had therefore decided not to camp. We had carried the tent up to Muir and looking inside the hut, we were quite happy that we would not have to choose between sleeping on the snow in the lower level or under the dripping roof on the upper level. (Side note: why is there not a decent hut up at Muir? Coming from Europe, we have a bit a hard time understanding why the hut on one of the most climbed peaks in the country isn't even properly isolated). In any case, we retired in our tent on the other side of the col;and the night was indeed VERY windy - we ended up sleeping no more then 2 hours. I spent most of the nigh devising plans on how I would best fix the tent in the morning, so it wouldn't get blown away.
At 4 am (new time) when we woke up, winds had quieted down and the view of Rainier above the clouds low in the valley with the full moon was spectacular.
Two groups had left ahead of us and we saw one of them climbing over cathedral gap, the other climbing over Cadaver gap. As we saw that the group on Cadaver gap seemed to take much longer, we decided to go over Cathedral gap. We had an amazing sunrise and the route turned out to be much nicer then we expected. Climbing conditions were perfect with very little wind, warm temperatures, clear skies and less then ten people on the mountain! What more can you ask for? We carried the skis all the time since many sections were too steep for skinning with the hard snow.
We arrived at the summit crater at 12:30  - being admittedly very very very tired (we decided that climbing Rainier as the third backcountry ski day of the season was maybe a bit too early). After a short rest on the summit we headed back down on skis. The first section was hard/bumpy snow, so we skied carefully in the "no falling allowed" sections. After the junction with the Gibraltar ledges route, there was one more tricky (=hard+bumpy+steep+crevasse) ski section and then we enjoyed great turns on the second half of the Ingraham glacier. We ended up skiing down through Cathedral gap again where we had to take skis off for about 150 feet as we were afraid of rock fall on Cadaver gap. In hindsight, Cadaver gap would have been a great option - oh well, next time :-). As usual, we realized the great superiority of the homo skier over the homo hiker when we passed the other parties on their way down. But according to Darwinian selection, this species is almost extinct :-).
Short break at the camp, by now the sun was hitting really hard and we skied the Autobahn back down to Paradise and had great snow there too except on the last thousand feet where we had to take the 1920s Austrian ski style in order to survive.
A great week-end and I highly recommend heading up there soon before these routes become too crowded or Ingraham becomes unskiable. Given the current conditions, I expect it to be in good conditions for at least another 3 weeks, the upper sections may get icy though.

Here is a picture of Corinne just below Cadaver gap with the route we took on the Ingraham glacier.