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Outside Magazine February 2002

[The Ranger]
Mike vs. the Volcano
When his best friend died on Mount Rainier, Mike Gauthier set out to do the improbable: turn a ragtag crew of climbing bums into the mountain's guardian angels

By Bruce Barcott


	Gator Aid: Gauthier patrolling Rainier's Nisqually Glacier

"WHADDAYA THINK?" ASKS backcountry ranger Rick Kirschner. "Lost or dawdling?"

"Hard to say," says lead climbing ranger Mike "Gator" Gauthier. "The troubling part is that we don't have a record of them checking in at Camp Muir."

It's a Tuesday morning, 11:08. Mid-July. Kirschner and Gauthier, along with a third ranger, Steve Klump, are sitting around a desk at Mount Rainier's Longmire Ranger Station. Two climbers, Patrick Anderson and Christina Faine, are missing somewhere in the 34 square miles of snow and ice that encases this 14,410-foot volcano. For the past two days Rainier has been its old pre-Prozac self, sulking in a drizzle and hiding behind mist as gray as concrete and nearly as dense. Perfect conditions for getting lost, terrible for getting found.

When mountaineers disappear on the rolling snow field below Camp Muir, the well-trafficked stone bunkhouse at 10,000 feet on Rainier's southern flank, it's often because they've fallen through a slot in Nisqually Glacier or Paradise Glacier, which bracket the trail and are striped with crevasses five stories deep. In 1999, four climbers in three separate parties set out for Muir and never made it back. "Wander too far left and you're dead," says one ranger. "Wander too far right and you're dead." After getting a reading from Gauthier and Kirschner on the search-and-rescue (SAR) strengths of the on-duty rangers, Klump decides to put two teams in the field. Gauthier agrees to coordinate things from Paradise Ranger Station and will stand ready with crampons and ice ax if he and his climbing rangers are needed. "I'll call Aero and give them the alert," Klump adds, referring to the pilots at Aero-Copter, a Seattle helicopter charter service that often assists on rescues.

Gauthier gathers his gear and glances out the window. "Not much else we can do until this lifts," he says. On his way out the door he passes a government-issue poster: "No Rescue Is Worth Losing Your Life Over."

IN THE NATIONAL Park Service, mountain rescue is a maverick's game. Each of the agency's four most respected climbing SAR teams—at Denali, Grand Teton, Yosemite, and Rocky Mountain National Parks—was molded by charismatic misfits who spent their lives saving dirtbags rather than following the Park Service's ticket-punching career path. They're rangers like Daryl Miller, who brought together the dream team of volunteers (among them Conrad Anker, Scott Backes, and Alex Lowe) that patrolled the upper reaches of Mount McKinley during the 1990s; John Dill, the legendary head of Yosemite Search and Rescue; Renny Jackson, who posts new routes in the Tetons when he's not peeling gripped climbers off the Grand; and Jim Detterline, aka Mr. Longs Peak (he's climbed the Colorado fourteener 185 times), who runs the high-angle SAR at Rocky Mountain National Park. To climbers, these guys are popular legends who personify the peaks on which they work. To park superintendents, they can be a real pain in the ass.

Mike Gauthier fits the mold. A garrulous Navy brat with a wide grin, he bears an uncanny resemblance to Stifler from the American Pie movies—strong jaw, broad forehead—but without Stifler's jackass qualities. Half the climbers on Rainier know him. At Camp Schurman or Camp Muir, the high aeries where Gauthier and his squad of 12 climbing rangers eat, sleep, and hold office hours, a dozen climbers a day will knock on the hut and ask, "Gator around?"

If Gator's around a little less than usual lately, it's because success is taking him away from "the hill," as the climbing rangers call Rainier. At 32, he has emerged as a leading figure among the next generation of mountain SAR professionals. Over the past six years he's taken Rainier's moribund climbing ranger program and turned it into a model for SAR organizations nationwide. Between his duties as captain of Rainier's high-mountain SAR squad, he can be found giving crevasse-rescue classes or leading wilderness seminars at Reid Thorne's famous Ropes That Rescue school in Arizona.

"Would I want him coming after me? Absolutely," says Daryl Miller, head climbing ranger at Denali. "As a climber, he's able to do anything and everything."

IT WASN'T ALWAYS this way. Twelve years ago, when Gauthier signed on as a climbing ranger at Rainier, the job involved little climbing and a lot of ticket-writing in the Paradise parking lot. Most "climbing" rangers summited a few times a season, if ever, and hard-core mountaineers viewed them as officious dilettantes. Rainier Mountaineering Inc.'s Everest-caliber guides, who traditionally ruled the mountain, didn't trust them on a rope. Park managers were fairly clueless about the upper mountain and gave the rangers little backup. Training was minimal; equipment, sparse and creaky. Gauthier even sees his own hiring as a sign of the malaise.

"I was a 20-year-old with a ponytail and a leather jacket," he recalls. "I'd done a couple peaks in the Olympics and Cascades, but I didn't have anything approaching decent climbing experience." Born and raised on the Olympic Peninsula, he picked up the nickname Gator from a football coach who couldn't pronounce Gauthier (GO-tee-ay), and as he got older he grew into it—a nice way of saying the guy's got a big mouth. At 15 he gabbed his way into a seasonal job at Olympic National Park, where he worked as a backcountry ranger for four seasons before coming to Rainier. Once on the mountain, he apprenticed with Cascade hardmen like Pat Timson, who taught him to climb light and fast, and Paul Baugher, an avalanche expert who ran Camp Schurman in the 1980s when guys like Mark Twight were hanging around, climbing ice in the crevasses.

Gauthier used his time to build his own skills, eventually becoming so comfortable on the glaciers that he could literally run down them. But the more he sharpened his own mountain acumen, the more he felt the sting of disrespect from the Rainier veterans. The weakness of the NPS climbing program was exposed in August 1995, when Gauthier's best friend and climbing partner, Sean Ryan, a 23-year-old rookie climbing ranger, and Phil Otis, a 22-year-old student volunteer, charged out of Camp Schurman to rescue a climber who'd broken his ankle just below the summit. Ill-trained, inexperienced, and poorly equipped—Otis had attached his crampons with duct tape—the two lost their balance on a windy section of glare ice on the Emmons-Winthrop Glacier and were killed in a 1,200-foot fall. Gauthier had been out of the park when the distress call came, and he took their deaths hard. But after months of soul-searching, he rededicated himself to turning the climbing program around. "I was young, passionate, and pissed," he says. "I wanted to fix what was broken, what had contributed to the death of my friend."

His boss agreed to let him hire the next year's climbing team. It was a put-up-or-shut-up move, and Gauthier put up. He recruited a crew of nonconformists who bristled at wearing a stiff uniform but could climb like madmen. No one exemplified the new guard better than David Gottlieb, a tall, rangy mountain freak from the North Cascades whose idea of personal grooming was to tug on a knit ski cap. When people asked about the "Question Authority" button on his government-issue uniform, he would smile and say, "We're the authority. Ask us questions."

TUESDAY, 2:36 P.M. Kirschner works the phone to glean data from the missing climbers' friends and families. "What about the color of their jackets?" he says into the receiver. "Mmm-hmm. Do you think she'd hunker down in a storm or keep going?"

Kirschner builds the profile: tent color, jacket color, hat color, experience, character, equipment. Klump, Gauthier, and Steve Winslow, another climbing ranger who has now joined the effort, plot possible moves on a topo map. An hour passes. Along the rocky moraine of the Nisqually Glacier, the clouds part just long enough for rangers Dave Turner and Dan Keebler to spy movement across the ice.

"Two people are around a tent at 5,900 feet," Turner crackles over the radio. "Extremely challenging to get over there."

Radio silence while the rangers downclimb the cliff onto the glacier. When they call in again, they have something.

"Looks like we got one person here," says Turner. "With snowshoes and a snowboard. In the waterfall. Code black."

A dead body. Jaws drop roomwide.

ONE OF GAUTHIER'S biggest challenges on Rainier was to somehow get his NPS supervisors to sign off on his ragtag band of climbers—a process that required him to be a bit of a punk. Ushering Gottlieb and the others up to the climbing camps, Gauthier and Winslow molded them into professional rangers without squeezing the climbing juice out of them. "I knew if they could just get through the application paperwork, they'd get up and kick ass on the hill," Gauthier says.

Ass was kicked. The new climbing rangers each pushed 15 to 35 summits a season. They climbed hard routes—like the 4,000-foot, 60-degree Mowich Face—fast, on duty and off. When they talked to mountaineers at Schurman and Muir, they spoke the language, knew which equipment was bombproof, and provided reliable beta on the routes. They lived in the high huts, coming down only to resupply and bathe. NPS higher-ups soon took note that the ranger program wasn't just a federal grant for climbing bums.

On June 11, 1998, after three years of training, the new SAR crew got its test when an avalanche swept ten RMI climbers down Disappointment Cleaver, a steep section of icy rock at about 12,300 feet. Gauthier heard the radio distress call on the summit, which he'd just climbed solo on his day off. He strapped on his snowboard and 23 minutes later was the first responder to a chaotic scene: Climbers were dazed and bleeding and one team dangled off a cliff, held precariously by a badly frayed rope. Gauthier had already set up an anchor and stabilizing ropes by the time two more climbing rangers choppered in, followed closely by RMI honchos Lou and Peter Whittaker and their friend Robert Link, an Everest veteran. Together the RMI team and Rainier's climbing rangers got all but one victim down alive.

"We've seen a dramatic change in their program," says Peter Whittaker. "The quality of the climbing rangers at Rainier today is exceptional. They're no longer parking-lot rangers."

TUESDAY, 2:40 P.M. Klump hears the code-black call and picks up the microphone. But before he can say anything, Turner cuts in.

"Ah, upon closer inspection, it looks like..." Pause. "A pretty old body."

A ranger listening in on the other side of the mountain breaks radio etiquette to ask: "Did you say old body? Not a live person?"

"Affirmative," says Turner. "I see snowboarding boots and snowshoes."

Winslow says it first: "Teej."

The room goes churchly quiet.

"The doctor."

William Tres Tietjen, a 28-year-old physician from Georgia, disappeared while snowboarding the Muir Snowfield on June 20, 1999. He was last seen leaving Camp Muir in near-whiteout conditions. Searchers combed the glaciers and snowfields for a week and didn't find a trace.

For a few minutes the SAR team feels its problems compounding: a dead body and two still-missing climbers. Klump tells the rangers to note the location of the corpse and keep after the missing pair. Ten minutes later Turner and Keebler come back with news. "Search base," radios Turner. "We have the missing party—in good shape." Reaction around Paradise is muted, an indication of the rangers' stoic professionalism; the real emotions are kept in the bank for future SAR operations with bigger challenges or less-than-happy endings.

While the rangers guide Anderson and Faine off the glacier, Winslow puts together a team to recover Tietjen's remains. It will take nearly a dozen rangers more than three hours to remove his waterlogged body and gear.

On Wednesday Anderson and Faine, the rescued pair, show up for work with stories to tell. They got a late start on Saturday, and nasty weather began closing in when they reached Camp Muir. They pushed on for another half-mile before turning around; on the way down they strayed off route. Afraid of going too far left onto the Paradise Glacier, Anderson had overcorrected and led them onto the Nisqually. Trapped in a whiteout with crevasses all around, they pitched a tent to wait out the weather. By the time Turner and Keebler reached them on Tuesday afternoon, they were down to half a bagel and two Rolaids.

In a desk drawer at his office, Gauthier keeps a folder of letters from people who owe their lives to him and his crew. Sometimes after a rough op he'll pull out a couple to remind himself that a good day on the job means a father will see his son again, or in this case that two mountaineers will live to climb another day. This time there's no need to reach for the file.

"You walk home high on endorphins," he says. "And the next day you show up at work and it's business as usual."

Next Page: You're trapped underground with an inch of air to breathe? Relax. Buddy Lane is on the way.

Contributing editor Bruce Barcott lives in Seattle

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