The route was pretty direct. Patrick was following the unmistakable highway left by the weekend hordes. The route will get much trickier later in the season. As the snow melts back, snow bridges across the crevasses collapse, forcing climbers to zig-zag more in order to find a way through the maze to the top. The thing that makes it interesting is that the places one would slide to if you tripped and fell look pretty nasty.
Hard snow can be pretty unforgiving.
Stopping a fall with an ice axe in soft snow is pretty easy. There's a fair chance you can even catch and hold one or two sliding folks on your rope team on steep soft snow. On hard snow and ice . . . in the wee hours high up on Rainier . . . with crampons on, it's best not to fall. I had the bad fortune to be on a rope team in the Cascades years ago when one climber took a slide and pulled off two more before the first hit a serac, breaking a leg, and we were able to auger into a moraine to put an end to the excitement. Once you get moving on a hard icy surface, attempts to dig in sharp points such as ice axe and crampons can result in unwelcome and dangerous acrobatics.