Lots of stories swapped around, it seems that most people did not summit that day. The wind simply blew them back down the mountain. Thinking back, I wondered if we should have turned around, pressing our luck in a zero-visibility ice storm. A couple of the RMS groups did not summit, based on the unhappy expressions many folks displayed. I remember lying down in the snow, pack off, boots off and staring into the afternoon sky for 15 minutes, just absorbing what we had just done together.
Comic relief is always fun to insert into a story.
You see, the sun was out at Camp Muir the day we were slogging up Mount Rainier. Sun melts snow, and the warmth of the sun created winds that hustle down the side of the mountain and blow hard. Well, the sun melted the snow around our tent stakes, and at some glorious moment, the wind picked up our tent and blew it down the glacier, far, far away. I'm sure it was quite a sight, bouncing and turning in the wind, as it blew off the Nisqually Glacier to never-never land. No fool would ever reach it.