Rating: 7.0/10.
Fairly old book about the mountaineering history of Mount Rainier. The first edition was published in 1971, and then it has been updated a few times. It starts with a brief geology of the mountain, noting that it’s a dormant volcano but with some mudflows more recently, and how its glaciers have been retreating every decade. Then it covers the early history of the mountain, where Tolmie was the first white man to visit the area in 1833 and the first to note the glaciers. Then Kautz in 1857 supposedly reached the top, but it’s unclear how close he got to the actual summit. Then Stevens and Van Trump in 1870 were the first to reach the summit, and they were guided by an Indian named Sluiskin, who had superstitions and refused to climb higher after a certain point.
Over the next few decades, there were many more ascents by different parties through multiple routes, with people sometimes getting injured or getting frostbitten along the way. Most of the book is a catalog of many different mountaineering routes that were climbed throughout the decades, described in excruciating detail and cataloged by which route they took. There is not too much of a narrative; it seems to be mostly a reference and otherwise it reads like a long procession of names and events that kind of blur together, so I got bored after about 100 pages (a quarter of the way through the book).
